**"The Pull Request I Couldn’t Merge"**
It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I’m staring at a GitHub notification that’s got me equal parts proud and terrified: “@jake-the-dev requested your review on their first PR.”
Me. The guy who, three weeks ago, would’ve rather refactored an entire codebase than admit he didn’t know how to rebase properly. Now someone’s asking to expose their messy work to my eyeballs. The irony tastes better than this over-extracted espresso.
The Mentorship Spiral
Turns out, being open about your own learning curve does something weird to people:
1. They Mirror You
That PR came from a junior dev who watched me spend 20 minutes debugging a `NullReferenceException` live last week. Their commit message: “First attempt—be gentle, I saw your stream ;)”
2. They Teach You
The “simple” feature they built used a design pattern I’d been avoiding. Now I’m the one googling things during review.
3. They Level You Up
Leaving my first comment (“Could we extract this logic?”) made my hands shake. Their reply (“Oh damn, you’re right—mind pairing on it?”) made my week.
The New Metric
Old success markers:
- Perfect commits
- Zero questions asked
- Invisible struggles
New ones:
✅ Times my public flailing helped someone else
✅ “Wait, how does this work?” moments shared
✅ Collaborations born from mutual “I don’t know”s
The Unexpected Fork
Biggest realization while reviewing that PR: I didn’t fake confidence once. Not when I had to look up a syntax, not when I suggested an approach I wasn’t 100% sure about. And somehow—miracle of miracles—the sky didn’t fall.
P.S. We’re streaming the pairing session tonight. Pre-growth-me would’ve rehearsed for hours. Current-me just set up a “Live Bug Counter” overlay and brewed more coffee.
P.P.S. That junior dev? They fixed my legacy code in the process. The universe’s sense of humor remains impeccable.
Turns out, the scariest merges aren’t the ones in Git—they’re the ones where your old self and new self try to coexist. But the conflicts? Worth every resolution.