Pretend you were working at a company with a hundred engineers. Do you understand how easy it is for every single one of them to simultaneously feel like you do? The React mavens feel like they're just knocking together JS and wonder when they'll be allowed to do real engineering. The backend specialists wonder why they don't understand networking or servers better. The DevOps folks envy folks who build things. The American office wonders why they can't speak foreign languages; the German office marvels that anyone can learn Japanese; the Japanese office worries their English isn't up to the global standard.

There's nothing wrong in specialization -- it's how we stay sane. A very workable and easy to understand formula early in your career is specialize in two things; you don't have to be better at X and better at Y than everyone you meet, you have to be "better at X than anyone who is better at Y" and "better at Y than anyone who is better at X." This is very, very achievable, regardless of how highly competent your local set of peers is.

Also, unsolicted advice as a sidenote, but life is too short to spend overly much time in negative work environments. Assuming the negativity isn't coming from you, changing environments to one of the (numerous!) places where happy people do good work might be an improvement.

"Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician."

https://twitter.com/josh_wills/status/198093512149958656

Also, do realize that not everybody is right on here all of the time either, despite some of their egos.

Despite occasionally butting heads with some of the people on here, I really do appreciate the community here for what it is; you really can't find a smarter group of people on the Internet.

At the top of the bell curve, you have people like Alan Kay, NASA engineers, cryptographers, founders of Reddit and 4chan and the like - obvious brilliant thinkers and innovators who'll pop in to a thread about something and mention how they invented or were involved in the thing being talked about.

At the edges, it's not much smarter than a tech subreddit or /g/.

(Not implying there aren't a ton of genuinely exceptional people here)

Scott Adams says something similar:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandiose_delusions

Impostor Syndrome. Have you written more about it elsewhere?

It's been crippling at times. That said, I was recently very surprised to learn of a couple folks who I consider way better than me at $FOO to also regularly deal with impostor syndrome as well. I was floored.

^This^

This is awesome advice. So true that I never realized it till I read this.

1. Programming chips in binary, machine code, and C. You need a variety of chips. Try to learn at least 5 from each manufacturer.

2. Learn at least 37 Javascript frameworks, as evenly divided between front-end and server side as you can. (Good news: angular 1 and 2 count as 2 frameworks).

3. Learn Scala, Rust, Haskell, C, C#, Java. (Python and Ruby go without saying).

4. Learn R, machine learning, statistics (prob and regressions), linear algebra and multi-variate calculus.

5. Learn growth hacking (edit:) and lean startup, human centered design, and design thinking.

6. Learn accounting, finance (go through Markowitz, to Black Scholes, Fama, CAPM, and factor models. Read the original papers only and implement everything yourself, in 2 languages).

Now you are ready to read HN.

1. An in depth understanding of Physics, History, Literature, and Philosophy. You can just make up whatever you want in Economics, Sociology, and Bitcoins as fits your political leanings.

2. Learn to resist weapons grade grammar analysis.

3. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text.

No need. This is HN. Someone's bound to have used machine learning to crack this already.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03426

If a business is solid, no funding is needed. Or, if it is needed, it's easy to get.

Forming or becoming a capitalist organization using Other People's Money is a perfectly valid approach for an entrepreneur to take, and if so whether funds should be raised from VC's or other sources is the kind of uncertian decision that entrepreneurs have to rise to, yes.

But it's also possible to be a complete entrepreneur by using only your own resources whether that is primarily funds or not. You may or may not need to choose a low-resource-requirement business to operate. You may also survive or prosper in a capitalist environment and/or compete in a capitalist market without being a capitalist at all.

At least since recorded history anyway.

IMHO the top of the list for entrepreneurial skills should be the ability to develop the best income from the most satisfied clientele.

I don't know if I can recommend "learning" to raise from VCs but you're right they should practice all aspects of launching and running a company a few times by doing it.

That's the secret answer at McKinsey.

https://github.com/orbitaljs

https://www.npmjs.com/package/conker

https://www.programmableweb.com/library/sabre-dev-studio-nod...

I'm in this for 30+ years now. (Yikes!). My resume is somewhat nice. I've got a deep store of knowledge and experiences. A large group of people considers me somebody you ask for advice.

And yet, every day, I still learn something new.

Sometimes because it's a new paper cycling about. Sometimes an HN article. Sometimes because some other senior person shares from their wealth of experience. And quite often because a junior does something in an unexpected way - knowledge comes from every corner.

I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I'll probably feel that way for the rest of my life. All my colleagues do.

So, don't worry. There's always somebody who's better than you, and that's great, because you can learn from them.

You'd be very interested in knowing whether it's 'I just graduated from med school, I'm barely competent', or 'I've been doing this 30 years, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know'.

Those are not the same.

Insecurity is there for a reason - to let you know you should tread carefully and learn more.

The feeling of insecurity will go away when you're competent. The feeling of wonder and curiosity hopefully remains until you die - the author's problem is not the feeling of wonder that the parent is referring to :)

Fast forward ten years and every discipline of web development now goes very deep. It's still worth it to have a broad skillset, but it's no longer practical to be upper echelon across the board in web development. This generally leads to a feeling of overwhelm and regret that I can't learn all the things I possibly might want to learn, but on the bright side the playground is bigger than ever.

My advice is don't spend too much time thinking about the big picture, instead pick one practical project at a time and spend 95% of your time making it the best you can. Even if you only read HN a couple times a month, that's all you need for basic awareness of the landscape. By giving yourself heads-down time you can replace some of the overwhelm with a feeling of accomplishment, and you'll be growing your skills to boot.

To reiterate though, pick your battles, follow your interests/employment possibilities, and make peace with the fact that you can't know everything.

I'd say the OP is describing humility, a quality which is essential imho

Humility vs Hubris do seem to be opposites.

Just search around, you'll see that feeling overwhelmed puts you in great company. :)

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx (also talks about Dunning-Kruger effect, which is related)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/your-money/learning-to-de...

http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-impostor-syndrome/

Up to a short time ago, most humans never ventured farther then 5 miles from their birthplaces in their entire lives. Before printing presses, books, and finally newspapers, all news was word of mouth...a very limited bandwidth indeed.

Even newspapers really were nothing but mostly gossip and had very limited work-related information for almost everyone, so feeling totally overwhelmed by the avalanche of targeted career knowledge is not only ok but actually totally appropriate.

Usernames are de-emphasized and there is no indication of karma/reputation. A trick of perception can lead one to read this forum as if the same handful of broadly knowledgeable people are participating in every discussion.

The reality is, I believe, quite the opposite. There are hundreds of us here, and we all have depth of knowledge in vastly different areas. There are developers, DBAs, sysadmins, doctors, lawyers, writers... I think once I saw someone mention that they were a welder.

Keep that in mind when reading the comments here.

Regarding the numbers here, I'd say there are multiple thousands, possibly 5 figures. The top article about Apple refusing to publicly backdoor the iPhone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274) got 5667 points. And sometimes my comments will attract a reply chain but not get upvoted, which shows that some proportion of people doesn't upvote here.

I can't design for crap. I don't understand the thought process and don't even want to put cycles in to trying. It's not time well spent.

I'm also an enterprise founder. I don't mind wearing a suit selling to folks who have obscene requirements with 6 month to year long sales cycles. I don't understand B2C companies at all. I could never run one. The idea of catering to hundreds of millions of people with none of them paying you while relying on VC to scale blows my mind. I feel similar about small business.

I like the idea of a smaller number of big name customers with large requirements. I also understand how they work: They are for profit organizations trying to make money or cut costs. I see consumers (despite doing a ton of data) as a blob of irrational behavior I don't want to deal with.

I also can't do marketing. I can kind of write when needed but my main focus is on technical content or specialized pitches.

Being on HN is very similar to being a founder, you see everything and wonder how the people around you do what they do. Don't worry about it! You hired them for a reason.

Hope that helps!

- There will always be people who are better than you, in any field. I see it as a positive and a great learning opportunity.

- There will never be time to learn everything you want to learn.

The question I try to answer is: Am I doing the best I can at the moment? Of course, this can also lead to complacency.

The hardest part, I find, is starting. But once I do, boy is it a lot of fun to keep that ball rolling! There's nothing so enjoyable as hacking away at something and seeing those incremental changes fall into place.

To me the hardest part is finishing. To start stuff is very easy for me but to actually grind away at something day after day until it is finally done is very hard.

I find that one of the biggest contributions towards my feelings of burnout is the fact that, when it comes to software engineering, not much is ever truly finished. A lot of us work for places where the product is never actually finished.

When we work in environments where there is always another ticket to complete, it can be hard to feel as if there is actually an end in sight to much of anything. My father is an accomplished woodworker/graphic designer/renaissance man, he's built things such as book cases, stained glass windows, picture frames for his gorgeous nature shots taken across the United States, and even (when I was younger) a cedar stripper canoe.

Sometimes I very much long for the feeling that he has when he has completed a project. One he can run his hands along. We're not afforded that luxury as software engineers. We work on some of the most complex projects ever to be known to man. Projects with millions of lines of code that are never truly secure, complete, or tangible. When we step away from the keyboards, there is nothing in meat space which exists as proof of our work.

That being said, when I have the pleasure of working on my own terms, in my own office, I find nothing more satisfying than hacking away at my own projects. I am not sure if that is true for every engineer but when I have the luxury of being able to spend a couple of hours researching Git branching strategies because that is something I think will not only make my project more maintainable but me a better engineer, I just love it.

I am consistently humbled by our profession. Every single thing I'm assigned to seems to me to be easy in my mind, and it absolutely never is. (Of course I refuse to stay comfortable and take on everything I can).

I guess at the end of the day, if you don't enjoy the journey which may never end (and is more likely than not to be endless), it may not be the field to devote your time to. But if you can enjoy being constantly overwhelmed by the myriad of options for your development environment, databases, servers, and front end frameworks, then there really is nothing so sweet as hacking away at a project you can call all your own.

Personally, I forward everything from HN's front page, every tech-relevant subreddit, major tech companies and software projects, roughly 30 blogs, Twitter, and blogs/changelogs for every project/service I depend on (for work or side projects)... all straight into my email.

Rules automatically curate emails into prioritized / categorized folders. Setting up those rules was my solution to information overload - reviewing rule relevance is the same as measuring how my attention investment tracks against long-term learning goals.

One process for managing my work, personal life, and interests :)

10 minutes a day is enough to follow every personally relevant development. I do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a week, but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-possibly-relevant information.

As a zero-inbox kind of person this is terrifying. It's already enough effort to keep up with the new journal articles every day. I use my morning commute to do that and my evening commute to unwind and read the more interesting stuff.

This folders and rules was my strategy for balancing the need to be hyper-informed, well-organized, and not-overwhelmed... only uncategorized content shows up in my inbox.

My "High Priority" folder has subfolders for friends, family, bills, and other things that have to be kept at 0. The "Low Low Priority" folder has folders for online store emails that useful a couple times a year for discounts when I need a new shirt or something, auto-deleted after 14 days. In between is everything, nicely triaged and categorized.

It's really more of a personalized private ad/tracker-free mobile and cli-compatible individual media aggregation service - perfectly managing the flow of the internet into my brain :)

After 200-400 suspended tabs open and a browser chewing molasses, I tend to export all URLs to a list for One Day In The Magical Future™, kill my session and restart.

So yeah, I'm very interested to find out what rule system you use - is this bespoke, or using standard email client features?

Also, what email client do you use? I've been trying to find a medium between "old computer becomes unusable after >10 tabs are open" and "fast, native information-presentation applications (like terminals) are text-only and don't support images" for 15+ years.

I use Gmail's basic HTML mode 99% of the time. It... I can't say I like it. I want something that doesn't use Qt and GTK+, because I perceive more lag with applications that use these toolkits than I did with lightweight WinAPI apps I ran on Win98/Win2K machines with half the hardware capability.

* My email pulls new information into my digital sphere of awareness. * Browser tabs/history manage active context and mid-term working memory. * Bookmarks (poorly) curate resources for long-term information retrieval. * My git-backed repository of notes tracked my own thoughts and plans.

Fastmail, gmail, and my old university Outlook account all support creating rules, however I am not aware of any RFC standards around rules. My adhoc suite of scripts for pushing content to email is entirely custom.

I like Thunderbird, but it's a pig at 300MB memory consumption... however it's open source and does what I expect.

If complacency does that for you, then it's good. If not, it's not.

The issue is for many people these two seem to be opposites

   Fill your bowl to the brim
   and it will spill.
   Keep sharpening your knife
   and it will blunt.
   Chase after money and security
   and your heart will never unclench.
   Care about people's approval
   and you will be their prisoner.

   Do your work, then step back.
   The only path to serenity.

  Success is as dangerous as failure. 
  Hope is as hollow as fear.
  What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? 
  Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.
  When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance.

I need to burn it into my brain that it's acceptable to be adequate.

Of course, you, by comparison will seem lackluster. Realizing that a single person on here may be lacking in specific expertise may give you solace.

I often dream about building some project that would provide me passive income to no longer have to work a 9-to-5. It's not that I lack the skills to execute on it, but as a father and a husband, I struggle to find time to commit to such ideas while balancing time with my family. The only time I attempted to build my own product, I ended up getting fired from my daytime job because of performance reasons. It only discouraged me from attempting to pursue anything further.

I've learned that I just can't compare myself to others here, because it just makes me horribly depressed.

What may sound super bad-ass might just be a 20 year old intern riffing like a BOSS!

More money, better work environment, be better at computer science, etc etc.

These are all different things and require a different approach. The sooner you figure out which one you value more, and understand that you'll have to neglect some other things in order to succeed in that area, the better you'll feel.

For example you didn't mention any education - if you want to not feel like a fraud, you'll have to educate yourself on all the things a common 4 year program teaches you. There is no way around it.

You may score a nice paying job in something like web-dev or mobile where there's a lot of demand, but you'll be blindly stitching other people's code together for a long time if you continue down that route.

The solution is to take some time to go fill in the fundamentals.

The more solid your fundamentals, the smarter and more interesting the projects you can be involved in, but you'll have to sacrifice time and money to get there.

Clarifying your real intention is important.

As for not feeling overwhelmed - by being good at your area of expertise. If you know you're better than most people at one specific thing that's in demand, you don't need to worry that someone else is kicking ass in augmented reality, big data or whatever hype phrase of the year is :)

I can usually cure it by going to a Sharepoint developers' meetup, or something similar. Running into people who there who are doing consulting work and doing very, very well for themselves while working significantly less that 40 hours a week and using almost none of the cool stuff that gets mentioned on HN.

I suppose the lesson there might be to avoid a game of one-upmanship with alpha nerds. And I don't say 'alpha nerds' in a derogatory sense. It's just that on HN, you're going to encounter lots of people who will run circles around you in one domain or another. And some people love being the absolute expert in their particular technical domain.

That's okay. Good for them, actually! Everyone should do what makes them happy. You might find you're actually happier in a role that is more concerned with the business problems you're solving than with needing to be an expert in everything you see mentioned on HN. Your technical skills will be important, but not as important as your ability to use those skills to help a business 1) save money, 2) make more money, or 3) both.

I think this is a perspective problem. You need to stop comparing yourself to everyone in all things. That isn't what I come here for. I just come here to gratify my intellect and enrich my life. You don't need to compare to people here. You need to compare yourself to people you are in actual competition with at work or compare yourself to the work standards you are expected to meet. Don't come here and do that. It will only lead to misery.

Some of it is wrong, some of it will never be relevant to you, some of it could relevant to you but not knowing it will never hurt you. Some of it could possibly be relevant but will be obsolete or out of date by the time you get around to using it. Some of it is nonsubstantive self-promotion. Just focus on some area you want to improve on at a given time and do it. Read what you want to read and have time to read and ignore the rest.

Just because someone puts up a nice-looking blog post with some information doesn't mean they're right, or better than you. Not that it matters if they're better than you. You could be in the top 10% and that still leaves hundreds of thousands who are better than you.

That's assuming there's some pure linear scale of developer quality anyway, which there isn't. People are fingerprints, not points on a linear scale.

It's a fantastic book by a now tenured CS professor that provides a good framework for how to think about your career / career satisfaction. He encourages working backwards from the lifestyle you want to the skills you need to master to where you are right now. His framework provides a lot of clarity and helps you ignore the roller coaster of announcements, updates, and new "things" you FEEL like you need to stay on top of.

You can also just read some of his blog posts - calnewport.com/blog - if you don't feel like buying the book. Or check out some of his interviews, etc.

And calm down: HN users are really heterogeneous. Trying to be like everyone here is impossible. Even you find someone with the same profile as you, it is a nice thing to know that there is something new to learn. A bigger problem is when you don't have anything new to learn.

[1]http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

Edit: And answering your question: I feel overwhelmed when I learn somenthing new here, and there is already another article telling me that what I learned is obsolete.

No, or at least not much. Most people have a specialization or two, whether it be front-end, back-end, mobile, application, embedded, games, etc., which limits the scope of what you really need to care deeply about.

Beyond that, it's a matter of your own personal curiosity and desire to expand your abilities; my reaction to most articles is "hmm, that's interesting; I'll remember that in case I ever need it" with just a scant few meriting a "I need to dive into that because I also want to have that knowledge / skill."

Then I remember the following.

1). I'm employed, my manager is happy with the work I do, and I make enough money to pay my bills, have savings, and live in a decent place in a safe neighborhood.

2). I don't have to be better than everybody else at my workplace. I just need to find an area where I can contribute.

3). When I apply to other jobs I get some positive responses. I know people who would be happy to recommend and hire me if they can.

4). I've met more than a few people who can talk about data science like they can solve any business problem under the sun, but cannot actually do much of anything except talk.

5). There is plenty of stuff I read on HN that is clearly wrong or exaggerated.

I think the key is to focus on what you need today to stay employed and have a realistic assessment of your weaknesses and where you want to go. Then figure out what you need to get there and slowly work towards that that. I don't need to know Rust, Go, and Vue.js because they have nothing to do with my job or where I want my work direction to go. If they day comes when I do need to learn that stuff, I'll learn it.

I've found that it's not often that I need to be as intimately acquainted with a subject as those who are feature on HN appear to be. In fact, just knowing about something has been enough for me to intelligently answer an interview questions, converse with a senior engineer, or make the right decision on a project. And usually that's because what's most important is being curious and asking questions - e.g. admitting to myself that I'm not an expert.

Now, instead of being a testament to my ignorance and personal failings, HN is portal that let's me feed my curiosity.

You may want to do some research on the impostor syndrome. It's been my experience that anyone who's any good at anything is convinced they'll never "catch up."

Yes, there's so much to learn that you'll never have time for it, even if specializing in a small area. It reminds me of a Chomsky interview. He said that he has so many books left to read in his office alone that a lifetime wouldn't be enough. You're in good company.

It may sound obvious but don't forget that HN isn't one person. The guy that knows about particle physics is usually not the one that tell you about the latest type theory research. Don't compare yourself with a collective mind.

Besides, I'm sure there are people less bright than you in all positions you can imagine. Retrospectively, I realize that there are a lot of things I didn't even try for fear of failing or because I thought I wasn't smart enough. It's only a few years later that I realized I missed so many opportunities.

Honestly I think the total absence of avatars can make it quite easy to forget that HN isn't one person. "That person with their name in little grey letters is a frickin' genius, jack of all trades"

Eventually I just forced myself to choose one thing and focus on it. When I get to the point where I feel competent in it, whether that's a day or 3 months, then I allow myself to move onto something else.

Don't get stuck in your head. Just choose something and commit, no one knows everything, the posts are by hundreds of people, each with skills in different areas. Know one knows it all.

   The irony is the more i know the lesser confident i get and i reflect it in meetings. I dont know how to avoid it. I am really looking for a mental framework on how to not look like a complete idiot in meetings although what i say is totally factual.

Try cutting the cord for a few days. It's refreshing.

Pause.

Take a walk.

Do what you can.

It is ok.

I think a sense of resignation is actually useful here. Just resign yourself to the fact that you'll never be as good as them and that it will take you 10 years to be able to just follow instructions under a Google or Facebook AI scientist (, say). And continue to trod on like the tortoise in the tortoise vs. hare story :-)

Second, think about what kind of site HN is. This is a site whose DAU are mostly highly educated (either formal or otherwise) from very diverse backgrounds in tech, machine learning, etc., etc.. It should come as no surprise that for any given topic there will be a ton of high quality and interesting points of view.

As for the statement 2): "will basically feel the same as I do now." To be completely honest, you probably will. Every new opportunity in life presents you with a chance to learn and while learning most people often realize how little they actually know. But that is why you are learning in the first place!

I think this is one of the (probably many) reasons feed readers failed and chat came to beat email: the feeling of something incomplete. I had to force myself to ignore unread counts to stop myself from going crazy, but Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. did away with outward signs that there were things unread, and that's a good start.

I appreciate more the insightful conversations than view a link to the latest JavaScript framework.

Yes that I realize I have a lot to learn and I should keep removing distractions/bad habits and toxic people/situations out of my life. Yes that I realize there are Ivy Leaguers in here and also people who work at the world's largest companies.

No also because there is also a fair amount of hubris here. There are also a lot of people who miss the forest for the trees. There is still a lot of room for innovation in certain markets and the means of fulfilling human needs are ever evolving even if the needs themselves are still the same.

I take breaks from time to time. Also I've recently deactivated my facebook and unfollowed a lot of people on Twitter/Quora/Instagram. Feels great.

Sounds like you need to change jobs, if you're at the point of acknowledging that your work environment is negative.

I don't worry too much about it, as long as what I'm building works and can be maintained I'm happy.

The good news about tech changing all the time is if you wait there will be some new language or framework so you didn't waste your time learning something obsolete !

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less till they know everything about nothing" - from a Murphy's laws on technology poster..

- Most solutions posted here probably won't just work for your problem, you have to work it into your needs - concentrate on what works for you not necessarily whats new.

- Many really cool things took someone years to develop, you are just reading a lot of different people's long-term accomplishments not a small group. And most of those people were sticking to things that worked instead of chasing the shiniest technology.

- Theres more than one way to do anything, just because they may be currently more successful doesn't mean you can't find new solutions, don't forget to try your own thing.

Nobody explores all of them.

Figure out what's interesting to you and then go deep on that. Keep an eye on the stuff that's not interesting to you just to develop contextual knowledge, then when/if your interests/responsibilities change and you do need to go deeper on stuff you didn't need before, you can get started more easily.

(1) HN covers a lot of areas of software development; more than any one person can really be expected to know. But each reader is ignorant regarding how big a fraction of the covered technologies are well-understood by the other readers.

(2) HN stories often involve technologies related to web-development, containers, or virtualization. Those technology areas spawn inordinate numbers of tools, frameworks, etc. This exacerbates issue (1).

The thing that helped me the most was to realize that you _have_ to specialize, at least to some extent. It's impossible to know and do everything, no matter how much you would like to.

Pick "your thing", and worry about staying up-to-date on it. Everything else skim through just to understand what's going on. How broad "your thing" should be depends on how much time you're willing to spend.

Don't try to master everything all at once. Just learn what you need, or what interests you and then on to the next thing. There is no "done".

Your work situation can be remedied. Lots of companies require good engineers who're willing to learn stuff rather than pre-know stuff.

:)

You'll never master everything. No one does. Take it easy. You say you've become an integral part of your team and that you're constantly learning. You seem to be on the right path.

Strive to be a helpful, open, honest team member, with a thorough understanding of core patterns and practices. (e.g. SOLID principles)

HN starts to fall in pattern as a lot of stuff you do. There are those new cool hip stuff, papers, a few deep inside blogposts and it repeats itself.

Enjoy HN as long as it holds :)