Feedback - The Most Important Thing, Man

If I should mention one thing, about which I often think about these days, it is feedback. The more I code, the more I am convinced that receiving feedback from an experienced individual is a necessary part of this learning process. I’ve never thought about this much before, and that was a mistake.

When you are learning to code, feedback is crucial for you since you want to write a good code and only an experienced programmer can tell you, if you’re on a right track or if your code looks like spaghetti.

When I look back at my legal university studies, I realize that I had a lack of feedback at that time. If you don’t have enough of it, you might get cocky and think that you have a complete knowledge of a particular field since there is no one who would tell you that you see only a tip of the iceberg.

If I think about that today, I end up realizing that the most important thing I was missing at that time was a constructive feedback. If you want to be really good at something, you need a help from the experienced 'one' who is willing to tell you not only that the result of your work is great but what is wrong with your work as well.

In the perfect world, feedback should be a part of every learning process.

The more I code I am writing, the more I am realizing that feedback is the single most invaluable thing that is helping me to move forward. This is true especially in the programming field, where you don’t know what you don’t know.

You can write dozens of apps in your favorite programming language, but does it mean you’re an expert in that particular language? I doubt so. You can write your versions of Facebook in jQuery and you might feel that you’re the jQuery ninja. However, no professional would really write such a complex app in jQuery. There is Angular, Backbone or React for this kind of app and also a lot of other JS frameworks and libraries for other stuff.

I know that this short post might seem too trivial for many of you. But for me, undergoing this process of thinking about the importance of feedback helped me to move forward and to look at my progress from a new perspective. Thanks to this awareness, I was able to critically evaluate the past and future of my coding journey and learn new lessons from my wrong decisions.