Hey, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, I wanna talk about becoming an app expert!
Ok, so today I wanna answer a question that came in on video number 348 from TrueDreams,
who said "Hey Eric, I have a question - When can you call yourself an app developer expert?
By the way you have a big app.
Don't you think you are an app developer expert?
By the way I am not?
Waiting for the answer!"
You know what?
I don't consider myself an expert on app development, or anything really, because there's so many
different facets of it, it's one of these things where I don't trust anyone who calls
themselves an expert!
If I'm ever looking at CV's and stuff like that and I see "I'm a mobile expert", I totally
don't agree with that.
An expert stops learning new things.
This is my whole thing - if you get really good at app development or app marketing or
whatever, there's so many different facets to it just to begin with!
So you could be really good as an android developer, or an iOS developer, Kotlin or
Swift or any of the other languages are out there, right?
But you might not know a lot about the marketing side, or how to deploy it live and all this
kind of stuff.
So there's all these different facets and it's always changing and it's always moving,
and if you get really good at something, what you start to realise is how much more you
don't know.
And this is the same with everything I've ever done in technology.
It's very difficult to call yourself an expert.
I've had other people call me experts, not as an app developer but in other things.
I can remember working in an investment bank, they'd say 'Eric is our access database expert'
or 'Eric's our sharepoint expert' or whatever, and I'm like, stop calling me expert because
there's so much there that I don't know!
But it's kind of in the eye of the beholder.
I will never consider myself an expert, because you know what?
An expert stops learning new things, an expert stops reading all the books and trying to
pick up on all the stuff, trying to improve what they do.
I can remember once when I talked about this before, where I would work at this investment
bank and I'd carry these big books in with me.
So I was reading this book on professional asp.net 2.0 by Wrox - this was a while ago
- and I was carrying this into work and i was reading this because we were still using
classic asp, and someone said to me "aren't you afraid that people will think you don't
know what you're doing because you're reading the book?"
And I said "you know what?
I don't know what I'm doing!"
You always have to improve and you always learn something new from these kind of things.
It's difficult to go back through and read the beginners because you don't wanna read
beginners android if you've already been through all those steps, you know, the history of
android, where we are from here, they all start the same way!
But you always wanna be improving and getting better at it.
I will never call myself an app developer expert because as soon as I do, there's gonna
be somebody out there who says 'oh yeah, well how do you do an interface?!'
They'll talk about something that's really specific and we're all really good at different
areas of what we do!
And that's just my thinking.
I don't trust people who call themselves experts, because that means that they stopped learning,
they stopped seeing themselves as students, and they start seeing themselves as the expert.
Maybe that's just my opinion.
What do you guys think?
Do you have any problems calling yourself an expert at anything?
So anyway, those are my thoughts for today, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys
tomorrow!