If you're not Surprised by how Good you are it could be a Sign you're not Improving

About a year ago I made the jump from PHP to Ruby and I haven't looked back. Ruby and more specifically the Ruby community and ecosystem are a joy to work with compared to PHP.

Ruby isn't a huge jump from PHP, and most PHP frameworks are inspired by Rails in someway so it didn't take me long to make the initial change. Pair that with the quality and diversity of open source Ruby gems available and it wasn't very long before I was churning out decent code faster than I used to with PHP.

However its only now that I really feel like I'm mastering it, and my key indicator for this is how surprised I am when I go to do something and its an order of magnitude easier than I was expecting.

My ability is often ahead of where I expect it to be. I take that as a pretty good sign that I'm improving and improving quickly.

If you're trying to be better at something, and you don't surprise yourself by how good you are at it from time to time, maybe you need to rethink how you're learning it.