I always thought of my self as a pretty hot-shot programmer. Then a new guy, call him Aaron, was hired into our team. Aaron was obviously much better than me in most areas. He was younger than me, too. He made me realize I hadn't really improved much in the past years. I was an ad-hoc hacker, and a mediocre one at that.

This alerted me to consciously try to improve myself and especially the quality of code I write.

Aaron lead me to learn a lot of things. He taught me how most of the code I write will have to be maintained and extended for at least several years, so I should write the code with that in mind. I should write automatic tests for my code. Aaron was always talking about how I should never stop at the first working version, but refactor and refine until the code is elegant. I've discovered that the languages and tools I was using had a lot of room for improvement.

The most important thing I learned from Aaron was to never stop learning.

After a couple of years, Aaron left the company. I felt empty. The past years with him had lifted me to whole new levels of skill, and I realized I was now much better than the rest of the team. They were still writing bad code, and doing the same mistakes as before. I tried to teach them, but they had no interest to learn. In fact, they were annoyed that someone would be so arrogant to tell them what mistakes they were doing.

So, a few months later, I left the company as well. I moved to a smaller company with a very talented team. Everyone there wanted to learn more, and I loved it.

I'm glad I met Aaron. Without him, I'd probably still be working at the old company with the old gang, going nowhere, and thinking too much of myself.