Dev by profession and hobby. Not a ton of time for hobbies these days though! Mom of two young kids. Also really into dog training (agility, nose-work, advanced obedience, etc) & reading fiction. 😃
I have been making websites as a hobby since I was 13.
When I was in my early 20s I studied programming in post-secondary.
I then worked as a C#/ASP.net/devops/jack of all trades for an agency that built and maintained websites for a wide variety of clients.
Then I moved to a job for a product/saas company where I have been the last 8 years, mainly writing JS and CSS as our app is a single page app
I have progressed from bottom-of-the-totem pole there to "head of engineering" (or something like that. Some title that makes me sound extremely intimidating and smart, which I don't really feel like I deserve.)
And honestly? I feel like a total DUMMY almost every day and it can be very demotivating sometimes.
Writing blog posts on dev.to is something I struggle with a lot because "It's all very basic and everyone knows this/I don't really know what I'm doing, someone else would explain it better."
Where am I going with this? I dunno. Maybe just to let you know that you're not alone and even a 30-something "very established" dev suffers the same mental agony? 🙂
Some things that have helped me:
Contributing to open source and finding people are generally happy with my work/seeing other people's work and realizing they're not as perfect and awesome as I think they are.
When I do muster up the courage to write a post on dev.to about a technical topic, getting positive feedback.
Helping others at my job. I am at my most confident when smart people look to me for my advice and actually take that advice.
I try to remind myself that there are a wide range of abilities out there and I'm just one person on the spectrum. And I'm certainly good enough. Maybe not the best, but I'm good enough.
Some things that hold me back:
Reading strongly opinionated tweets/blog posts about tech subjects. I'm always like "wow how can that person be SO confident in their point of view that they can blast it out there so aggressively". I never feel 100% confident on any subject. Are web components good or bad? I don't know. I imagine they are overall good but I have read some pretty critical articles and ugh how are these people so smart that they question the presumably very smart people who are designing the future of JavaScript?!
Any time I get a promotion at work I feel really dumb for awhile because I'm out of my element and things are new and hard and all my old insecurities come flooding back.
Fixating on all the things I don't know and berating myself for not taking more time to learn in my free time. I'm a person and I have a life! I shouldn't have to spend all my time on tech subjects! I know I have the ability to learn new programming concepts when I need to, and that can be pretty valuable all by itself.
A lot of people have commented saying "it gets better" and it does... I have had times in my career where I feel very boss-like and confident and smart. But it has its ups and downs. It's pretty easy to hit a roadblock and suddenly be questioning everything again 🙂
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I feel this way too 🙂
And honestly? I feel like a total DUMMY almost every day and it can be very demotivating sometimes.
Writing blog posts on dev.to is something I struggle with a lot because "It's all very basic and everyone knows this/I don't really know what I'm doing, someone else would explain it better."
Where am I going with this? I dunno. Maybe just to let you know that you're not alone and even a 30-something "very established" dev suffers the same mental agony? 🙂
Some things that have helped me:
Some things that hold me back:
A lot of people have commented saying "it gets better" and it does... I have had times in my career where I feel very boss-like and confident and smart. But it has its ups and downs. It's pretty easy to hit a roadblock and suddenly be questioning everything again 🙂