004: Impostor Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which people doubt their skills, talents, and accomplishments. Most of us have felt something like this in our careers, whether it's a fleeting moment or a persistent fear that we're going to be discovered as frauds. These feelings can be overwhelming, even debilitating; but, they can also drive us towards self-improvement.

This week, the crew talks about their own mistakes, feelings of fraud, insecurities, and how Impostor Syndrome manifests in their own careers.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Failure - Adam accidentally destroyed a database by running a migration script on the wrong database! Thankfully it was a QA (Quality Assurance) database which could be restored - no critical client-data was lost.
• Ben's Triumph - He's deleted 200K lines of unused vendor code. That means shipping less code to production with every deployment. He also merged one of his unnecessary microservices back into the monolith.
• Carol's Triumph - She's not dying! Woot woot! She had gotten COVID-19 right on the heels of a kidney infection; but it is currently feeling much better (and is nursing her sons back to health as well).
• Tim's Triumph - He's been playing around with Redis as a means to make his applications more resilient. One thing he wants to do is centralize his Session management such that he can pushed new code to production without having to reset user-session data.

Notes & Links

• Breaking Bad - critically acclaimed TV drama.
• Adam Sandler's Click - comedy about appreciating your life.
• Redis - blazing fast in-memory database and data-structure storage.
• PM2 - a production-grade process manager for Node.js.
• Amazon ECR - Elastic Container Registry.
• Amazon Fargate - serverless compute for containers.
• GitHub Actions - automation tools for your GitHub workflows.
• The Push Train - Dan McKinley's presentation on managing the human side of continuous delivery.
• Lagom Framework - an opinionated microservices framework for moving away from the monolith.
• Little Bobby Tables - classic XKCD comic.
• Multi-Stage Builds in Docker
• Mike Cannon-Brookes: TED Talk on How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit
• WTFs per minute - Coding Horror comic on code quality.
• 1 Corinthians 10:12 - "Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he does not fall."
• GoTime podcast - one of the ChangeLog podcasts.
• Mythical Man Month - iconic essays on software engineering.
• 99 Bugs in the code - grumpy cat's take on the 99 Bottles song.
• Perfect is the enemy of the good - trap that many product companies fall into.
• Neil Gaiman's address to the University of the Arts Class of 2012 - "Make good art".
• The 10x programmer - toxic programming myth about unicorn developers.
• Ruby Rogues EP 220 with Laurent Bossavit - discusses the book, "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering", which covers among other things the myth of the 10x programmer.
• Radio Lab: Lying to Ourselves
• The "Peter Principle" - people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence".
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect - a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.

Episode source