The One where I Try to Fight my Imposter Syndrome

Hello, world!

This blog will be my way of documenting my learning path. All of it is heavily inspired by HolidayCheck’s Apprenticeship Program, but I will go into this later, maybe.

One thing that I feel like I need to learn more about is Computer Science basics. I have had very limited formal education in my university degree program and I think this contributes to the fact that I often feel like an imposter in the job that I have right now. I kind of stumbled into this whole software development thing and now I’m employed as a backend engineer. How did that happen? And how will I be able to keep this job or ever get another one if I don’t really know anything about what I’m doing? I should probably invest some more time in learning.

The book “The Imposter’s Handbook” was recommended to me as a way to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. It is written by someone who has been working as a software developer for years without any formal education, written in order to actually fill his own gaps, so it seems like it could be a good fit.

I have not made it very far into this book at this point, but I’ve read the prefaces. In his part of the preface, Rob Conery writes about how in order to advance in our careers, we must seek out challenges and failure, because failure means growth and learning. I have to admit that this makes me pretty nervous right now. I already feel like I’m imposing, do I really need to add visible failures to that? But I know that he is right and I will try to embrace it. He also states that this book is not for new programmers but for those who have been programming for a few years. Eh. That’s not me. But I have worked in software development for a few years, so maybe that counts? Or maybe if I fail to understand this book, I can just attribute it to that? I need to stop looking for an out and just dive in.

So, learning about computer sciency stuff will be my next task and the next passage on my learning path. If I ever decide to actually publish my ramblings, hi there, nice to meet you. If you want to, say hi to me on twitter, and leave me some feedback, maybe?