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Prasanna Kumar
Prasanna Kumar

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Breaking free of Impostor Syndrome

Hey fellow programmers.

I am that developer who makes a lot of side projects that never make it out of the localhost because not a lot of those projects reach even a useable version. But even those that do will not be deployed.

Why?

Impostor Syndrome. I learned this term from programming memes. If you ask me, it's just a programmer's way of saying, "I am insecure".

I've been coding since 2016 and built a bunch of apps and websites for clients. I then went on to co-found HoomanApp (flutter app), an application for pet parents. I was able to learn and build all of this because of the community.

But all this time, I've been only taking from the community. I've used a lot of open-source code in my projects and spent a lot of time on stackoverflow and github searching for solutions for my issues, like any other developer. But I never ask questions or raise new issues.

Why?

  • What if my question is so stupid?
  • What if someone downvotes my question?
  • What if my question is duplicate?

and a lot of similar questions.

I never made any (significant) contribution to the community. I don't even participate in any active conversations. I don't write blogs or document my journey on any platform. As days passed, it turned into guilt. I felt bad for taking a lot from the community and never returning anything.

At this time (Q3, 2020), I was quite strong with Flutter and firebase. So one fine day, I made up my mind to go to stackoverflow and answer flutter or firebase related questions. This was my first answer for flutter on stackoverflow. But I never continued it. It was not until November 2020, that I made it a habit every morning to open flutter tag on stackoverflow and scroll through all the questions and try to help fellow flutter developers. I got my first answer marked on 29th, November and that further helped me to break out of the bubble.


A couple of days back, I came across the DOHackathon post. Perfect timing. So I thought, why not use this as an opportunity to showcase my projects and blog about them while I build.

I am so happy to introduce Flixplore.

Flixplore helps you choose a movie to watch when you crave a particular Genre or Language. It takes in your input for the genre, language, and year of release and suggests random movies that satisfy the criteria. It will be a react SPA with a node backend. The backend will be using the TMDB API for the movie data. I am so delighted to deploy my project on the Digital Ocean App Platform.

I got the idea to build Flixplore when one of my friends asked me to suggest to him a good Hollywood thriller flix to watch. But he had already seen every movie that I suggested. That made me think of this project. I am so excited to build Flixplore and participate in my first ever Hackathon.

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