Guitaret wroteI have been a software developer for 12 years, alive for 33 years, and let me tell you straight: you will never reach a serenity stage in your life where you feel that you have all the time to work on yourself (career-wise and self-development).
Some hidden force of physics is forbidding anyone from taking some time off to focus on other stuff (kidding).
Seriously, it is always on you, you are the master of your own fate and all negative feelings like stress or anxiety are of your own brain creation. You need to learn to push through, and my trick to do that is knowing that perfection does not exist.
As a dev, I get exposed every day to new situations, new tech, new frameworks, new cloud shit that popped up a few days ago, another skillset that got obsolete by newer ones. All the previous takes away the confidence I have in my career, and as a result, I don't feel good or motivated about my job anymore, I feel overwhelmed not knowing which learning I should focus on, my career looks to me like a bad wiring mess in an old Lebanese building. Sometimes I suffer from imposter syndrome.
You need to understand that this is unavoidable for all people who work in tech, we are bound to a career with a very volatile experience. A surgeon on the other hand performs the same surgery for 20 years straight, except for few updates every 10 years, but not us, we are cursed to be uncomfortable by tech companies releasing new stuff every day, just so they have a competitive edge over each other.
The way to push through this is by knowing that you cannot be perfect, or master of one thing, you want to keep learning new stuff and only specialized in something when there is a need for it. The open-source project is one of the ways to feel good about yourself, but this isn't a rule, most great devs I know don't even have a GitHub account. Stick to the 80-20 rule, you can do great stuff and impress most people by knowing only 80% about something, you don't need more than that in this rapidly evolving world.
Last tips that I can give you:
- Avoid unnecessary stress, one involving life tasks/stuff that you know will not benefit you, so learn to say No and learn to delegate.
- Do breathing exercises several times a day (the 4-7-8 exercise)
- Learn to meditate.
Keep doing the above until it becomes wired in your brain.
You don't need to prove your worth to anyone, just be yourself.
that's the best advice someone has given me in my whole life, thank you I really appreciate it.