A story of being humble with confidence

I just read a post over at SKORKS, a blog I read every now and then. He writes a bit about The Art Of Unix Programming, which got me reminded of when I first heard of that book. I then remembered reading The Art of Humble Confidence and I felt that I really had to write something along those lines. Here goes.

It was 2006 and I was working with a handful experienced colleagues on a project trying to radically increase the usefulness two large applications by making them work together. This was an extremely interesting time for me and they taught me a lot that I today value very highly.

One day one of my colleagues who was sitting next door to my office knocked gently on my open door to get my attention. He said, "Sorry, am I interrupting you? Do you have a moment?" He was humble as always, speaking slowly and silently to make sure that I wouldn't be anxious about what he'd say next.

"Do you remember what we talked about before?" Even though I wasn't really sure to what he was referring I replied "sure", thinking that I'd get what he means when he starts to talk about it.

While he slowly pulled up a chair and sat down next to me he said, "did you consider what we said about the MessageReceiver class?" I now realized that he was referring to our discussion over a coffee they day before. I nodded, remembering that he didn't really liked how I designed some part of the system we were working on.

Though I couldn't really understand his argument from yesterday I had redesigned it anyway to be more in line with his suggestions. Making a poor design made me feel a bit bad and not understanding why it was bad made me feel worse. But I didn't want to ask him explaining it (again) because I didn't want to look (more) stupid. That would be even worse. Or so I thought.

I guess he realized my anxiety about not properly understanding his design, because he next said "I did a pretty crappy job explaining why that class needed to be changed, right?" He smiling and chuckled, "I was always better at instructing computers than people." We laughed.

"Anyway", he said, "I read this book a bit yesterday and I think chapter 10 explains what I mean much better than I ever can." He handed me the book and said "you can borrow it if you like." He laughed again and added "but not for too long. I need to read it soon again since you ask so incredibly interesting and hard questions." He got up from the chair and said "let's go and get some coffee." He smiled and added "I'm 'starving'".

I grabbed my cup and we walked over to our colleagues offices and asked them to joined us. As we walked to the coffee machine I felt like I was in the greatest group of developers there was. Everyone was working for our mutual goal while having fun, learning, and teaching at the same time.

My colleague had basically just asked me questions, yet managed to tell me something. Yes, he evened managed to tell me what to do. But more importantly, he taught me that you will never know everything and that working in software is a constant process of learning.