Developing is hard. We all began our journeys somewhere, and regardless of how smart you are, there is probably someone whose shoulders you standed upon to be able to be where you are right now.

With that said, we should always remember to help the others behind us (and sometimes those aside us or even beyond us) in this journey climb the most difficult steps, or at least the steps you know how to climb. It makes us greater as a community, and in a practical way that I will try to explain, makes us greater as developers, but better yet, makes us greater as persons.

Learning is about solving problems

Solving problems is an essential step in learning any skill. That means that the most problems you solve using a skill, the better you will become at it. And I think it's fair to say that solving problems is probably 90% of what we do daily, so we all get better as developers just by developing. Not a groundbreaking realization, I agree, but the amount of problems we encounter in our "daily struggles" is limited to our own pace. If we want to get better faster, we must find a lot more problems to solve!

Thankfully, there is an endless source of coding problems: the community!

Join a community. Or several.

Participate in them, stop being an observer in Stack Overflow and start answering questions you know, get into Facebook groups about your favorite language or framework and help the newbies get started, help the already prominent find elegant solutions to their sophisticated software requirements, join Whatsapp groups and help people with their coding difficulties, contribute on an opensource project on Github. Expose yourself to other people's problems, and the solutions will eventually help you in your own journey.

By helping them with a single problem you could change their lives forever, and that feeling will definitely change your's. Be charitable with knowledge, it always pays off; you will have grateful friends, become a better developer and feel better as a person. No cons, I promise. :)