One conversation with a senior dev made me delete my entire GitHub history

I was at a meetup in Portland last month, and this guy in his 50s just sat down next to me. He asked what I was working on, and I showed him this project I'd been polishing for months. He looked at it for maybe 30 seconds and said 'You're scared to ship because you think it has to be perfect.' He told me he'd wasted 3 years of his career on a project that never launched because of that same mindset. I went home that night and deleted 2 years of private repos that I'd been hoarding. Has anyone else had a mentor call them out on something that stung way more than expected?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade2261mo ago

Right down to the delete key with you guys lol. I had a senior dev once tell me my code was "too pretty to work" in front of a whole team. Felt like getting roasted with a compliment. Now I just push broken garbage and call it "iteration one." Honestly the worst part is they're always right. My most popular repo is literally a script that formats dates wrong but people love it.

gonzalez.wesley1mo ago

Started deleting repos after my old boss told me my code was "perfectly useless." He meant it was clean but nobody could actually use it for anything real. That stung because I spent years polishing stuff nobody needed. Still think about that conversation every time I catch myself overthinking a commit.