Table of Contents
Knock, Knock: The First Domino
The Numbers and a Plot Twist
How Did I End Up Here?
Door #1: Let Go for Being Too Good...
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Hey Giorgi! Glad you can start kicking this off till the countdown!
On your article, I am glad you are here on DEV and the journey it took you! Hopefully they will eventually find the easter egg later on (but it's too early to tell. You have to wait later on haha).
Otherwise, looking forward to next year as Giorgi will return...
It's an honor to kick this off! :hattip:
Let's see if anyone finds the easter egg.😏
Thanks. Now im curious. 🤔🤷♀️
Spoiler alert: it's a good one.
considering the possible interpretations of easter egg, I think the readers should at least be given scope. 😂
I think I found it.
I love how you described finding DEV as “finding treasure.” ❤️ DEV has been that kind of place for me too, where people share their knowledge, encourage each other, and genuinely appreciate what others create. There's something really special about a community where people from different backgrounds and at different stages of their journeys can feel welcome, learn from one another, and have their work reach people who appreciate it. I'm glad DEV turned out to be that place for you, Giorgi. 😊
I love how you describe it. That is awesome!
Wow, I love the way you told this story! And I'm really proud of the journey you went through to get where you are now 💛
You know what's both sad and surprising? That so many of us have been in this place:
I'm happy you made it through this step.
Thank you Klaudia! I guess those struggles are the price to pay to reach your destination.
The getters-and-setters moment in the interview is so relatable. Coming from C++ where you write every accessor by hand, C# auto-properties look like the compiler is hiding something from you. And the Ted Mosby framing works perfectly: the "how I found DEV" story was really about every door before it. That call to your mom gave me chills. Great first domino for DEVengers.
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you liked it!
This was genuinely awesome. What is devengers, though?
Good question. @francistrdev I think you’re the right person to answer 😄
DEVengers is a group of individuals that are chosen and recognized for their work and impact in the DEV community. The decision comes through me and I basically invite anyone that fits the criteria (though this happens randomly lol).
I am planning on adding more info later, not sure when. Hope that answers it :)
Thanks @francistrdev and @georgekobaidze for the explanations! This helps!
The system design interview part stood out to me. There’s a big difference between solving a problem with clear requirements and figuring out which requirements actually matter. Take a service that processes payments: before choosing a queue or database, I’d want to know how retries are handled, whether duplicate requests are possible, and what happens if the payment succeeds but the response gets lost. Those details can completely change the design. Knowing when to stop coding and ask the right question is an engineering skill in its own right.
Totally true, every tiny detail can change the direction of the whole solution.
Exactly. One case that can completely change the design is a payment request that succeeds in the processor but times out before the response reaches your service. The retry now looks like a new attempt, even though the money has already moved. You need the same idempotency key to survive retries across the API, queue worker, and downstream payment call, plus a reconciliation path for cases where the final outcome is still unknown. Otherwise, you can have a perfectly scalable system that occasionally charges someone twice. That's why I’d clarify the failure semantics before picking the queue or database.
"I didn't feel worthy of registering, let alone writing a comment" is something way more people feel than will ever say out loud. Your brain had all these rules about who gets to speak here, and none of them were real. Each door you walked through showed it that the thing it was scared of wasn't actually dangerous. Getting let go for being overqualified and still walking into that interview nervous is a good reminder too. The nerves didn't mean you weren't ready. They were just your alarm going off before you acted. Writing this for your younger anxious self is going to land for a lot of people sitting where you were.
Definitely. If only I had half the mindset I have now... but sometimes it's not possible, cause it takes time, experience, failures, and so many other things that just come with showing up every single day and trying your best.
100%. You can't skip that part. The mindset you have now didn't come from someone handing it to you, it came from showing up and seeing over and over that the stuff you were scared of didn't wreck you. Every one of those days took a little more of the fear off. Honestly that's the best thing about the post, it shows the process instead of just the result.
The part about not feeling worthy enough to even register really stood out to me.
It's easy to assume you need to be an expert before you start sharing what you know, but sometimes you grow into the person you wanted to be simply by showing up consistently.
The fact that you went from being afraid to comment to building such a strong presence on DEV is a powerful reminder of that.
Thanks a lot! I hope newcomers today will learn things from me not to make the same mistake and start creating their content now.
Stories of entry into a community matter because they reveal which doors are actually open. The most useful follow-on is often a concrete invitation: one beginner-sized contribution, one person or group to ask, and one artifact that makes the first step less mysterious for the next reader.
Totally true!
Can we talk business real fast
Happy to discuss if you can share the concrete topic and what you are proposing here. I keep business conversations tied to a clear technical or community context before moving them anywhere else.
What a great story, Giorgi! I especially loved the part about finding DEV but feeling like you weren't experienced enough to participate. I can relate to that so much! When I first started posting here, I was honestly pretty nervous about putting my work and thoughts out there. I worried about how people would respond and whether I really had anything worth sharing.
But I'm so glad I finally did, because this community has been one of the most welcoming and encouraging places I've found in tech. I've met some wonderful people here, and it's given me so much more confidence to keep building, learning, and sharing.
I also love how you tied everything together with the doors you've walked through. It's funny how some of the things that seem like setbacks at the time end up leading us somewhere we never expected.
And I think your 21-year-old self would be pretty damn proud of everything you've accomplished! Thanks for sharing your story. I'm glad you finally decided to walk through that last door!
What great feedback, thank you! I really appreciate it.
The impostor syndrome was very real for me back then and it's probably one of the reasons I stepped back from being active in the community. I was like: maybe sometime in 10 years, when I'm at the peak of my skills. And here we are, exactly 10 years later. I'm creating content, joining challenges, and trying to give back to this amazing community that gave me so much. So in a way, I kinda predicted it. 😄
I'm really looking forward to what's ahead. Even though I'm in a solid place career-wise, I'm nowhere near my peak and nowhere near my ultimate goals. There's SO MUCH MORE to do and accomplish and nothing motivates me more than that.
Thanks for your support, this is what the community is all about!⭐
The moment you asked to use C++ is the part I'd put in front of a nervous junior. You changed an assumption instead of spending the whole session struggling with unfamiliar syntax. I'd love a follow-up on what you clarify early now: language, time limit, expected completeness, or something else? That seems like a useful skill to practise alongside the coding.
It's been a long time since my last job interview as a candidate, and the experience and skills I have now aren't even in the same galaxy as what I had back then. These days I'm way more methodical and the questions are infinitely more complex.
I've interviewed dozens of software engineers, and during the system design round I deliberately keep my instructions vague. I want to see whether candidates know how to ask the right questions and clarify the requirements before they even start thinking about a solution. That's an absolutely critical skill.
Hi Giorgi! I'm glad I came across your article. It is so nice and interesting with a slight taste of nostalgia. Everyone was once a student who didn’t know whether they would succeed in the end. I think many people still feel this way.
But there's more ahead. Keep it up!
Thanks, yeah when things play out well, all the past struggles leave kind of a nostalgic feeling.
What a fantastic and deeply inspiring read, Giorgi! The HIMYM "Ted Mosby" storytelling style worked so well here.
That moment in Door #2—sitting in a freezing university building early and asking to switch from C# to C++ mid-interview—is something so many developers can relate to. It’s amazing to see how far you’ve come from that cold winter day to being a key part of the DEVengers community. Can't wait to see the next dominoes fall!
Thank you!🙌
Oh I’m so looking forward to the next dominoes to fall😄
The call to your mom was my favourite part. After reading about you waiting in that cold university building, that moment felt earned. Glad you kept those details in—they tell us much more than the follower count.
Yeah, she's been my biggest supporter all along, so it only made sense that she'd be the first to know.
And yes, that day was freezing cold. There's so much more to the story, but I wanted to keep it short.
The line that hit me: "Truth be told, I'm doing all this for that young fella who was almost too anxious to ask if he could solve the problems in C++ instead of C#, and too broke to sit in a McDonald's to warm up on a freezing winter day."
I'm 42 days into my own journey of learning Python and trying to break into technical writing. I've published 35+ articles, cold-pitched founders, and even had an editor at freeCodeCamp tell me my first draft read too much like AI and needed to be completely rewritten. I've had my fair share of rejections.
But your story about the C++ interview is the one that sticks with me. It takes a lot of courage to sit in a room, realize you don't know the exact syntax, and raise your hand to say, "I don't know this, but I can solve it my way." That is exactly the mindset you need to survive in this industry.
I'm glad you found DEV, and I'm glad you're writing. This post is exactly what a junior dev needs to read when they feel like they don't belong yet.
Proud of you, man. Keep writing.
This is awesome! Thank you so much! Even if this helps one junior developer, I can consider my job done!🙌
A story full of struggle! :D
This barely scratches the surface, barely.
Truly great people are genuinely great.🙌🏻
What a journey! ❤️ Sometimes the setbacks we face become the very things that push us toward better opportunities. I love how you turned your struggles into growth and kept moving forward. A great reminder that you don’t have to be an expert to start; you just have to be willing to learn and take that first step. 🚀
Thank you! You’re on point! That’s the reason I just keep moving no matter the circumstances.
Great post! My door was definitely the "pushing to main without testing" door, followed by the "spending 3 hours debugging only to realize I forgot to save the file" door. 😂
On a serious note, it's the "starting an independent project" door that is the hardest. There is no tutorial for that. You just have to build it, break it, and fix it. Thanks for sharing your journey!
Thank you! That's why you should always quadruple check what you push to main lol
Great article again @georgekobaidze! I always feel motivated when I read topics like this. Makes me feel like I'm not alone (even though I am haha). Thank you for this, I'm gonna keep grinding until I get to a door of my own.
Thank you! Sometimes you go through hundreds of doors before you reach the right room. This brief story barely scratches the surface of how many doors I had to go through. The key is resilience, stubbornness, and outworking everyone else around.
Amazing , Giorigi, Nice to connect with you for more opportunitities.. Thank you
GG bro, more wins
Thanks mate!
Great story, thanks for sharing! Really enjoyed reading it. I also really liked the “doors” concept, it’s a cool way to tell it.
Thank you!
Stumbling into tech with zero budget and figuring it out along the way is a grind. Reminds me of our early days sorting logistics and cutting stock by hand at The Printing World. Great read!
As the saying goes, "Rock bottom is the most solid foundation." I couldn't agree more.
This was great
Thank you!
Signing up in 2018 and boarding the train seven years later is the most relatable DEV story I've read. Door #4 is my favourite part. Which first comment or reply made DEV feel like a community?
I’m glad you have a similar experience, looks like I’m not the only one😄
To be honest, there have been so many great comments to my posts, I really don’t know which one to point out.
Great essay thank you for sharing!
My pleasure. Thank you!
Amazing work 💯
Thank you!
Hi everyone am happy to be here.
Am a starter
DEV is place that everyone can share an learn. Hopefully looking forward to get the scope.
Welcome!
Your story is like a movie—so much fun to read! 😄 You managed to solve the C++ questions but not the C# ones. The only difference is the language, and you already knew the answers to the questions. I’m still a beginner, so there are many things I don’t understand yet. I couldn’t understand much of your GitHub post either because I don’t know how to use GitHub. But your motivational post is really good, and I could understand it. I read different kinds of content on DEV.to, and most of it is beginner-friendly. That’s why I like DEV.to so much. ❤️
You could literally create a whole 9 season TV show based on my experiences if you dive deep into details😄
It’s OK that you don’t understand many things. Take your time, you don’t need to rush and try to learn everything at once, that’s what I wasn’t able to take into consideration and it burned me out like crazy. Don’t let that happen to you.
Thanks bro!😊🗽🙇🏻♀️✨💥🥰🦚😃
Navigating platform hops usually exposes the same underlying operational bottleneck: treating developer distribution as an afterthought while wrestling with bloated runtimes and fragmented syndication pipelines. Transitioning across modern technical publishing ecosystems often incurs a brutal overhead penalty—pushing Time-To-First-Byte (TTFB) well past 850ms, consuming upwards of 180MB of client-side browser RAM just for static script hydration, and driving up edge compute and egress costs by 35% through redundant sync polling and unoptimized API webhook cascades.
The battle-tested alternative is treating your content strictly as an immutable build artifact: author raw Markdown in git, validate via pre-commit hooks, and broadcast downstream to the DEV API via lightweight, event-driven CI jobs in sub-40MB Alpine containers with execution latencies under 20ms. When you finalized your migration path through these doors, what trade-off did you actually accept—relinquishing raw control over edge telemetry and cache invalidation, or absorbing the maintenance tax of managing your own decoupled distribution pipelines? — Bohdan Hordii // bohdanhordii.dev
Thanks!
✝️🧿🪬🔥
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