I am an expert in writing and working with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But today I was in a fortunate position to realise something: By now, I am language-agnostic. With one of my current clients, I am working with Node.js and Angular. There’s even some PHP in there. My client knew that I haven’t worked with any of these technologies before. Yet they wanted to have me anyway. Even for a price that was above their initial budget.

I am proud of that.

They wanted me because the language I work with, is almost irrelevant by now. The fundamentals are the same everywhere. When I see an Angular service class (I don’t even know for sure if that’s the right term for that…) that’s 300 lines of code long—I know there is something wrong and that is has too much responsibility. When a constructor for another class calls a different class to set itself up, without that class being injected, then something is wrong!

When a pull request is merged, without answering the questions in its description, and without having a real review, then something is wrong!

I can help my clients in so many ways right now, that I am just really proud and happy about that. Forgive me for boasting about that so much.

So let’s turn to you. I couldn’t have told you all the things I am capable of, three weeks ago. I jumped into cold water and just looked how I could contribute to my client’s success. Turns out, there are lots of ways. Don’t you think you could do the same?

If you work in this industry for a while, you can share amazing amounts of expertise and experience with your peers. If you just entered the field and are still learning the fundamentals, you probably already have experience in a (totally unrelated?) field of work. Let us know about that, and how we could translate concepts from there into our field. Even if that’s not obvious right away.

People are amazing. And if you and your team are able to step away from the stressful work that you have to deal with every day, just for a few moments or hours—I bet you have a lot to share with each other. It happened (again) today for me. And tomorrow it might happen for you.

Yours, Holger