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Robert Tamayo

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Git Gud

The "Git Gud" meme is used in video games as an insult to inexperienced players who complain about the game's difficulty. The best thing about the meme is that it applies everywhere, to anything. A lot of things are hard to do. And a lot of people would rather the standards by which they are measured be changed than be burdened with the task of gitting guder.

Think about grammar. How many people just aren't good at grammar, or misspell words often? It's not that hard to learn grammar; compared to learning an entire language, learning the rules of grammar for a language you already speak is quite simple. There are only so many rules to learn, and yet people seem unable or unwilling to achieve this basic skill.

Now consider complaints about not getting a raise, or not making progress in the gym, or not doing well on an exam, or other such grievances. If you aren't getting a raise, maybe just git gud. If you aren't gaining muscle mass or losing fat, git gud.

One of Sherlock Holmes' secrets to solving crimes was that he had read the entire catalogue of crimes committed in England in the past two centuries. He's a fictional character, so maybe that wouldn't even help solve crimes in real life. But for me, when it comes to debugging code, my knowledge of everything I've ever done before and every aspect of our stack helps a lot. For almost ten years, I've been writing code and solving bugs for a wide variety of programming languages and technology stacks. This helps tremendously when a problem comes up. Often, an obscure bug will remind me of something else that happened a long time ago, and after a few minutes of investigating, I'm on the right track.

Taking the time to learn and understand something is what makes you better. And when you are better, you get more enjoyment from even tougher challenges. No one starts at level 100, and once you are there, it's still a challenge. That's why the best in every field never stop getting better. No matter what level they are playing at, there is a simple phrase that keeps repeating in their heads whenever they feel overwhelmed: "git gud".
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