When I started my career at Instabug 7 years ago, I was not yet sure what career to pursue as a software developer, should I learn Frontend development or Backend development? should I learn Python or Ruby?

3 months before I have started as full time iOS developer at Instabug, I was a BE intern at another company. At the time, I wouldn’t even think of applying to Instabug as an iOS developer, if it wasn’t for the recruiter that contacted me on LinkedIn (Thanks Donia 🙌).

My Life as an iOS Developer

When I want to start an iOS app, I open Xcode, I have many templates to choose from, and when I choose one:

The app is runnable already. There’s unit tests and UI tests setup available. I can release it with a couple of clicks ✅.

Programming as a Hobby

In the last 6 weeks, I picked up coding as a hobby, I just love it and I miss it so much since I became an Engineering Manager.

And as a hobby, I tried to build a web application BE and FE. In the first 2 days, I was already overwhelemed with the choices to make:

  1. Which language to use
  2. Which framework to use
  3. How should I setup my project?
  4. Which build system I should choose?
  5. Which package manager to use?
  6. Which testing framework to use?
  7. I need to read .env file? Install a package for that
  8. I need to route to multiple pages in my react app? Which framework to use?
  9. I’m done, how to “release”?
  10. Just upload it somewhere and run it?
  11. How can I make sure only I can upload it?
  12. Want to persist data? What DB to use? How to accces it from my application?
  13. How to handle DB migrations?

And I’m not done yet.

Learning Paralysis

Looking back to when I was in college, these choices paralyzed me. I spent a lot of time trying to decide what to learn, instead of learning it.

The iOS development setup was so simple I spent a lot of time actually doing it, that I have accidently gained enough experience to land a very sweet job at a company that I considered too prestigious to `even apply.

If I can speak to my younger self, whenever facing a choice, just pick the most popular solution at the time, and start building.