From Specialist to Generalist: an inevitable transition

Why learning a bit of everything might be your next superpower.

When I started my first working experience, I found myself working on a classic ERP project. It was an internal project designed to help company managers take control of various aspects, including customer relations, project management, and employee holidays. It was 2017, and the project stack was Spring Boot on the back-end and JSP with JQuery on the front-end, let’s say not a cutting-edge technology.

I was a junior developer still finishing my university studies but I was learning very fast, in fact, I decided not to proceed the studies after my bachelor degree because I was getting so much value from my work comparing to all the theory in the university (I regret a bit for that because I know in the master degree there are most exciting learning paths).

I was working on both sides, the front and the back, and I really like it. In parallel, I was reading some books like Design Patterns or Modern Java to help me improve my programming skills.

After a year working on that project, at a certain point, a new project was being born, and I still remember my manager with the architects of our software factory discussing which technology to use. On the backend, the decision was easy: Java. On the frontend, there were two technologies competing: Angular and React.

Eventually, they decided to go with React, and I thought it was an opportunity not to be missed to learn a new technology, so I asked my manager if I could be part of the new project even if I was working on the other one. He accepted, and I found myself in charge of the frontend part of the new project.

It was tough, I needed to learn very fast, so I was looking for documentation, courses, and even in-person meetups (I found it and now I organize it 😅, but I will tell you this story in a future blog post). That’s why I told myself, from now I only want to focus on the front-end side so I can increase my seniority faster.

I became a specialist, I narrowed my hard skills to the fundamentals of the web, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I chose only one library to work with, you guessed it: React.

Time passes, and after almost 10 years, I decided to become a freelancer, but I don’t want to stop there; I would like to become a product builder, being able to transform ideas into production software.

I recently listen an interview between Freddy Vega (from Platzi) and Guillermo Rauch (from Vercel) in Spanish since they are both from South America that it’s a thing I’m proud of, and Guillermo said specialization is for insects, I don’t know who is the author of that quote but it doesn’t matter, what matters for me is being aware of the phases in our careers.

Specialization is good when you are starting, focusing on a few things and mastering the fundamentals, but at a certain point, in my opinion is inevitable to make a transition from specialist to generalist and become a little Leonardo da Vinci. AI can play a key role in this transition since it can assist and It can help us shed light in the darkness.

In this path to freedom, since I work solo on my projects, I need to be able to understand the different parts that involves creating a SaaS, and it’s not limited to technology, now I am studying a lot of marketing and how to acquire customers, it’s not easy, I have to admit, and maybe you will not become an expert in all the areas, but it’s exciting to see how your ideas can become a reality thanks only to you.