In the beginning

Since this is my first post, I should say hi! I'm Kayley, I'm a junior developer out of Ontario, Canada. I have about three years in the industry (99% writing HTML and CSS), with a degree from Georgian College's Interactive Web Design and Development program. I also attended Lighthouse Labs Web Development Bootcamp this past April. If you'd like to know more about me and or my journey, feel free to reach out on twitter - It also doesn’t have to be about anything in particular, I love making new friends!

February marks my fifth month at my new job as a junior developer. When I took this job there were a lot of promises of the code base moving from ColdFusion to React. While that's still a possibility down the road, it currently doesn’t look promising. This was a decision that was made about 3 months into my start, and even though I hadn’t had a chance to work on that project, I was excited to get the chance to work with a modern language in a production setting. So when we were told the project was being put on hold indefinitely I was (still am) pretty bummed.

Firstly, let me say that I love this job. It's a small team and everyone is amazing. It's collaborative, and supportive. Most of the more senior devs seem to really want to see me grow and that’s a pretty good environment to walk into every day.

For better or worse, our stack is 98% ColdFusion (which I will refer to as CF from now on) and I need to learn and understand all its intricacies. Right now, five months into this job, I feel like I'm not where I should be.

There are times where I’m getting help from a more senior dev, and they ask me a simple programming question and I just freeze, my mind goes blank and it’s like I can’t even remember my own name. Throw that anxiety into a language and code base that I’m still learning, and impostor syndrome is so prevalent, that I end up being my own worst enemy

If you're not familiar with CF here is the Adobe definition of the language.

ColdFusion is an application server. ColdFusion is also a web programming language that allows a web application to communicate with various back end systems. Using ColdFusion, you can create dynamic web pages that offer user input, database lookups, time of day, or any other criteria you require. ColdFusion pages consist of standard HTML, together with its proprietary ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML).

I tweeted about my struggles with CF, and ultimately I know that as a junior developer I still have a ton to learn about programming in general. I want to try and document my journey as I navigate through a CF code base, learning, growing and even failing along the way.

I want to be better, and I wish I knew the definition of this - right now it’s just so broad, I can’t define that goal as much as I’d like to. And maybe that’s something I’m able to accomplish through writing these blog posts. I want to help other people who may be in a similar situation as me understand that they are not alone and maybe even take inspiration from my journey and blogging adventure. At the very least, I hope that you’re able to see my progress as I come into my own as a developer, because I don't think anyone really cares about CF anymore (sorry if you do). I'm excited to take this step forward and hope that it plays an instrumental part in my growth as a developer.