Recently I have found myself being asked to help out and participate in a multitude of new projects that all require different skill sets and knowledge on various languages and frameworks.

The most common of them being Vue. At first this was a scary and imposing new task to undertake as I have never even heard of Vue before being onboarded to that project. Now I could go into detail about the wonders of Vue and how easy it was for me to get a grasp of but there are many more individuals out there with a much more extensive understanding of it that I. Instead I am going to be talking about the benefits and challenges involved with being exposed to something new and being told to get on with it.

By being exposed to these various projects and their different languages and frameworks, I have been able to see and learn from all of them to the point where I feel I can step into any project with relative confidence in my abilities to tackle any task and formulate a solution. This by no means makes me an expert and I often still need to ask for help and sometimes even require a bit of 'hand holding' but those times are becoming fewer and fewer now (much to my colleagues relief I am sure).

This is obviously no substitute for properly learning about the framework and doing a deeper dive into it yourself but it does provide a very important component that cannot be easily picked up from studying and YouTube tutorials, and that is confidence. Confidence to just dive in and rummage through the code and make changes is something I did struggle with in the beginning as I was so scared of breaking something.

I am sure a few other people have felt the same as me before. But as the saying goes, "you need to break a  few eggs to make an omelet". So by just diving into the deep end and getting started, you will naturally start to build up confidence in yourself and actually know what you are looking at, what you are doing and in time, the solutions and fixes you put in place.

This process will repeat itself for almost every project you do but with each iteration it will get easier until you don't feel nervous about starting something new or jumping into something different to help out a colleague.