Looking back at all tweets I have posted in the past, now I'm asking where's the old me. I couldn't possibly tweet like that again but I do miss my old self
I remember a junior engineer I worked with who genuinely thought he was a bad software engineer.
Not average. But Actually bad.
Why?
Because every ticket took him too long. He could not debug production issues fast. He got confused in code reviews. And whenever senior engineers spoke about caching, queues, indexing, retries, race conditions, he would just go silent.
So naturally he made the worst conclusion possible:
"Maybe I am just not smart enough for backend work."
But that was not the real problem.
The real problem was much simpler.
He was missing a few boring prerequisite skills that nobody had properly taught him:
1. How HTTP actually works
2. How databases really read and write data
3. How logs are used to trace a bug
4. How to read an unfamiliar codebase without panicking
5. How to break a big problem into smaller checks
6. How async code fails in real systems
That is it.
Not talent or IQ.
Just missing foundations.
So instead of telling him to "work harder" or "be more confident", we fixed the inputs.
For a few months he did very basic things:
- wrote simple SQL queries by hand
- debugged small bugs slowly and documented the path
- learned API flow end to end
- traced requests from load balancer to service to database
- read old incident reports
- picked one concept every week and went deep on it
Nothing fancy. No 10x engineer nonsense. No fake motivation.
Simply repetition on the right prerequisites.
And things changed!
The same guy who used to freeze during debugging started finding issues before others. The same guy who thought he was "bad at coding" started writing cleaner code reviews. He used to get stuck on every production issue and now became the person people tagged for backend bugs.
A year later, new joiners thought he was naturally talented.
He was not.
He was finally practiced.
This is something a lot of people in software do not understand:
A weak foundation feels like low intelligence. A strong foundation feels like talent.
Many people are failing because they are trying to do senior-level work without junior-level repetitions.
And the opposite is also true.
Some people think they are geniuses when really they just got early exposure: better college better peers better internship better manager better starting point
That lead disappears very fast if they stop practicing.
Software engineering is like that.
Prerequisite knowledge is intellectual capital.
It can take a person from: "Maybe I am not cut out for this" to "I can probably build this"
And it can also take someone from: "I am the smartest guy here" to "why is everyone catching up to me so fast?"
Do not judge yourself too early.
Sometimes you do not need more confidence. You need more reps on the fundamentals.
Alhamdulillah saya bersama mshaffuan dan Nicholas chin diberikan kepercayaan dari Astro Shaw untuk menghasilkan sebuah short teaser untuk Astro Shaw Cinematic Universe : The Beginning.
Selamat menonton semua
I told my boss maybe we do not need this event since I dont feel much barriers or gender stereotypes when working but little did I know the way men mansplaining and how they look down to this sis. I think we need to bring this event over hahah just to make these men say yes to us