What does it mean to be an expert?

As a software engineer, I've noticed that the act of coding often falls into two categories:

Another thing I've noticed is that, on a good day, 80% of the requirements are met just by doing “easy stuff”. It's the last 20% that ends up consuming the majority of my time.

That's on a good day.

On a bad day, every step takes a long time and I'm getting stuck frequently. Generally, this is due to working in a new framework or working with new concepts. Sometimes it's due to tech debt and bad architectural decisions that make the code confusing. In many cases, it's simply because I haven't yet had enough Red Bull that day.

Back to the original question – what does it mean to be an expert in something? In my view, being an expert means having mostly “good days” (with regard to the specific thing that you're trying to be an expert in). So, if you consider yourself an expert backend developer, you should be able to get the first 80-90% of a backend API written fairly quickly. If you consider yourself an expert music producer, you should be able to quickly turn a musical idea into a first draft, so that you spend most of your time on the 10-20% that's more challenging.

As I think about the best ways to spend my creative retreat, I've been asking myself what it is that I want to improve on. And I think that, in general, I want to be an expert in more of the things that interest me. Despite being skilled in software engineering and music production, I'm not nearly as fast as I want to be with these things. There's a reason that the tech motto is “move fast, break things”— not only is it fun and satisfying to immediately turn your ideas into execution, but it also makes us productive by giving us a quick feedback loop. I don't want to find out that my song or website sucks after I've already poured months into it— I want to immediately know what it sounds/looks like so that I can keep iterating.

Simply put, being an expert means being able to move fast. It means that you won't get stuck in the same places where beginners get stuck. But it doesn't mean you won't get stuck at all. You'll still face challenges, but the challenges should become more advanced over time.

As I work on personal projects throughout the month of March, I foresee making a tremendous amount of progress towards expertise in many areas. To follow my progress, you can bookmark this blog and follow me on the social media accounts at the bottom of this page.

Here's a book that's been inspiring me lately (this is an affiliate link, so I get a small kickback): Atomic Habits