**"The Code Review I Didn’t See Coming"**

It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I’m staring at a Slack message that’s short-circuited my brain: "Hey Jake—can you review my PR? Your streams made me realize I don’t need to hide the messy parts."

Three weeks ago, this would’ve sent me into a spiral of "Why me? I’m a fraud with a public learning log." Today, my hands only shake a little as I type: "Absolutely—but full disclosure, I might ask dumb questions."

The Mirror of Mentorship

Turns out, being openly imperfect has unexpected side effects:

1. The Ripple Effect
That PR came from a dev who watched me spend 20 minutes last stream debugging a typo (`if (x = y)` instead of `==`, classic). Their message: "Seeing you laugh it off gave me permission to ship unfinished docs."

2. The Accountability Twist
Now when I’m tempted to skip writing tests (again), I imagine someone quoting my own stream back at me: "Technical debt is just future-you’s problem… unless future-you is on live stream."

3. The Unexpected Teachers
The senior engineer who DMed "Your Unity T-posing saga fixed my Blender rigging issue" is now my go-to for graphics questions. Turns out, showing your gaps invites people to fill them.

The New Metric

I used to track my growth in:
- Lines of code
- GitHub streaks
- Viewer counts

Now I’m tallying:
✅ Times my mess helped someone
✅ "Me too" moments created
✅ Questions asked instead of faked

P.S. Just scheduled my first pair-programming session with a viewer. Pre-stream-me would’ve obsessed over looking competent. Now I’m just excited to learn together—glitches and all.

P.P.S. That PR? Took me twice as long to review as it should have because I kept googling things to be thorough. Told the author exactly that. Their reply: "Same. Thanks for saying it."

Growth isn’t just what we build—it’s what we enable others to build alongside us. Even when (especially when) it’s messy.