We're All Amateurs

I remember starting my career and obsessing over how much I didn’t know — all the programming languages, frameworks, and design paradigms. I was deep in analysis paralysis, constantly second-guessing what to learn next.

It wasn’t until my first internship that I realized something freeing:

None of us really know what we’re doing half the time — and that’s okay.

That is the job: learning, unlearning, and pushing yourself forward, one confusing bug at a time.

Getting Comfortable with Not Knowing

Every new stack or framework I’ve touched — whether for work or side projects — has brought its own curveballs.
Feeling lost when you first open a Next.js server component, set up an LLM integration, or mess around with a vector database?
Totally normal.

The secret is getting comfortable not knowing, because that discomfort is where the real growth happens.

The Myth of the Perfect Engineer

People love to imagine that the best engineers never make mistakes.
Cap.

Or that they’re the ones who move fast and build entire apps in 48 hours.
Also cap.

In my experience, the best engineers are the most open and curious ones — they constantly learn from others.
Honestly, most of my biggest jumps in skill came from seeing how someone else wrote their code and thinking,

“Wait, you can do that?”

I still remember the first time I saw routes separated from API calls into their own TypeScript file — mind blown.
It had never occurred to me before.

Learn from others. Steal like an engineer.

Learning How You Learn

Imposter syndrome? Everyone deals with it.
It’s not weakness — it’s proof that you’re stretching yourself.

The first time I integrated an app I built with an LLM, I genuinely thought it was rocket science. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
The key isn’t knowing everything; it’s knowing how you learn.

Books, videos, courses — whatever your method, make sure you’re building something.
Don’t stay stuck in tutorial hell.

Staying an “Amateur”

“Amateur” literally means “lover of.”
That’s the mindset I try to hold onto — staying curious, tinkering with new tools, chasing what excites me about tech.
And never, ever putting myself down. The world already does that enough.

For a long time, I thought being frontend-focused made me less than (shoutout to some of my Unilag lecturers 🙄).
They were wrong.
I love the frontend, but I didn’t let it box me in.
I taught myself backend, took DevOps courses, and kept expanding my range.

Stay hungry. Stay curious.
Keep being an amateur.

💡 Key Takeaway

Engineering isn’t about perfection — it’s about progress, curiosity, and resilience.
Every engineer you admire is still learning. You’re allowed to be figuring it out, too.