The internet makes comparison very easy. There are people everywhere who are better at specific things than you are, have more experience, have shipped more projects, know more languages, contribute to bigger repos. If you spend time measuring yourself against that you will always come up short because you're comparing yourself to a composite of everyone's highlights.
Why comparison is a bad metric
When you compare yourself to another developer you're usually comparing your full reality — including the bad days, the stuck periods, the things you don't know yet — against their visible output, which is curated and context-free. You don't know how long they've been doing it, what resources they had, what they're not showing you. The comparison is between an unfiltered version of you and a filtered version of them. It's not a fair measure of anything.
What I compare instead
I think about what I've built and whether it works. it runs. The panel is being built. This blog exists and has posts on it. The infrastructure I manage is functional. Those are concrete things that are either working or not — they don't require anyone else to be doing worse for them to count.
The context difference
I'm self-taught, home educated, haven't had the same starting conditions as someone who went through formal education or had mentors or worked on a team. Comparing output without accounting for context is meaningless. A developer who's been doing this for ten years with formal training and team experience should be producing more than me. That's not an indictment of where I am — it's just arithmetic.
What other developers are actually for
Other developers are useful as sources of learning, not sources of comparison. Reading their code, seeing how they structure things, understanding their approaches — that's valuable. Using them as a yardstick for whether I'm good enough is not. The useful relationship is one of learning from, not measuring against.
The developers I respect most aren't the ones who make me feel behind. They're the ones who share knowledge generously, who show their process including the mistakes, who treat the community as collaborative rather than competitive. That's the kind of developer I want to be and the kind I try to learn from.