Every programmer has been burned by the real world’s beautiful messiness. You assume people have exactly two names until you meet Cher, Madonna, or someone from Indonesia. You think birthdays are simple until you encounter leap seconds, calendar reforms, and cultures that don’t celebrate the day you were born. You design elegant relational schemas until you discover that in reality, a person can have multiple genders, addresses change retroactively, and sometimes a customer is also a vendor.

As developers we are committed to a life of learning. With all the new technologies and paradigms changing so fast, more conferences and meetups than you can attend, other people doing cool stuff, you can feel overwhelmed and have a fear of missing out. You are not alone! We’ll dive into what motivates us and walk through ways of dealing with this and give direction to expanding our knowledge and skills.