When I started my career as a web developer, I had no formal training. I didn't go to college for it, I didn't go to a bootcamp, I didn't take any online courses. I just had a copy of Microsoft Frontpage and a knack for figuring things out. Eventually I bought a book on programming: PHP & MySQL for Dummies. And so began my path as a developer.

I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't have any friends that were programmers. I had no support group for when I had questions about how to do things. I just searched online for answers to my questions. I would eventually find answers. I learned and I grew, but it was oh... so... slow...

Eventually I found out that there were conferences for programmers. I figured out a way to get there and I went. I honestly didn't get much out of the conference. They were using terms I had never heard of before (what is a router? Why do URLs need to be friendly?) and tossing around concepts and three-lettered abbreviations like candy ( OOP, MVC, ORM?! What in the world is a controller? Dependency injection?).

Needless to say, I was mostly lost. I learned a little bit, but not much. But there was one thing I took from that conference that was going to change my life. Every speaker had a Twitter Profile on their slide deck. I left that conference with a new Twitter account and I was excited to be following 12 leaders in the PHP community.

It wasn't Twitter, or those people that really had any impact on my career. It was community. As I checked my hoppin' Twitter feed each day, I noticed the people I followed interacting with other people. They discussed the technologies they used, the ways they used them, the processes they followed. They debated each other over better ways to do things. They posted about interesting things they discovered. My world had exploded. I had no idea all this stuff existed.

Programming became fun all over again for me

Programming completely changed for me. No longer was I writing procedural PHP application entirely on one PHP document. I discovered frameworks, and package managers, and auto-loading, and so many awesome packages. I found out that all that stuff I was doing in Flash could be done in Javascript. I no longer had to write my own session handling or user authentication. I discovered why passwords should be hashed and not encrypted and what the difference was. Programming became fun all over again for me.

I'm certainly no one special. I don't own a business or have a huge number of gawking followers. But I do have a great job, a good salary, good friends I get to work with, and a satisfaction in the work that I do. It's fun and it's rewarding. I get to meet awesome people and learn new things all the time. And it started when I discovered twitter community at a conference.

It doesn't have to be Twitter for you. There are many forms of community. There are local user groups, Slack or Discord groups, subreddits, online meetups, blogs, forums, etc. And you don't have to contribute to the conversation if you don't want to. Just watching and listening provides so much value. Find what works for you

Without community, you end up stuck in a knowledge silo. All you know is all you know. You don't discover new things, or better ways to get things done. You don't learn or grow, at least not at the speed and scale you could if you were exposed to others working on different things, at different places, in different ways.

There is a proverb in the Bible that goes "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." If you want to be sharp, you have to expose yourself to more iron.