Learn from books or other people, but let nobody say that what’s you doing is wrong just because it’s unusual.
Great things happen when people aren’t satisfied with what they have and willing to change it by inventing something new.
Sometimes you meet open-minded people whose reaction is great, and they’re always there to help and support you.
But sometimes you don’t.
Fermat and Semmelweis
Pierre de Fermat was a mathematician who lived back in 17th century.
He was into number theory that seemed useless back then. Really, who needs prime numbers when all we need is agricultural calculations?
Nobody understood number theory back then, but after three centuries, Fermat’s research paved the way to modern cryptography. We have HTTPS and blockchain because of him.
Okay, this was actually funny, but stubbornness can lead to really tragic things, just like the story of Ignaz Semmelweis.
Semmelweis was the doctor who noticed the correlation between keeping hands clean and risk to be infected with fatal diseases.
He pretty much tried to teach doctors of that time to wash their hands.
His approach faced so much stubbornness and straight up hatred that he actually went insane and died in an asylum. Sometimes when I read things like this, I don’t really believe them, but it is so hard to argue with the facts.
My personal experience
Here are real quotes from real people I heard through my career. Those had been said to me and other developers I worked with:
Web does not need reactive programming. Nobody does that, so you shouldn’t.
Everybody use PHP now, we don’t need your fancy stuff here (about Clojure and functional programming)
You have to be a moron to write server-side code in JavaScript.
While straight-up stubborn reactions to your vision are pretty much unavoidable, you can really push things forward and change the state of the art forever.
Just like Quake developers invented the unusual way to calculate the square root unbelievably fast or Dan Abramov wasn’t satisfied with existing solutions and created Redux which later become a de-facto standard, you may be the one who the world needs.
Just carry on.
