Lately, I've been copying over posts from my old blog. And when I say old, I mean they are really old posts. It's funny to look back at the kinds of questions I had. Some of these posts are years old. They're almost not worth keeping. I think the only reason I really want to keep them is because they might be helpful to someone else. I remember how it felt when I was a "young" programmer. I needed extra help with even basic things, and sometimes rudimentary information like that was hard to find. I'm sure I still have questions like that every now and then.

When I was driving home from work today, I was thinking about how much I've grown as a programmer in just a year. I attribute a lot of this growth to "getting my hands dirty" in the code; being forced to figure out how to do something I don't know how to do. My job gives me more responsibility than I have ever had before. I write code on a daily basis that has an impact on the business. I know I've had to earn this trust, but I also know I could not have grown so much, so fast, if I did not have this kind of responsibility.

It's a catch 22, really. How can you get better without real world experience? How can you get real world experience unless you are a good enough programmer? I guess I caught a lucky break.