After you've completed the reading, comment below with your reflections on coding anxiety, impostor's syndrome, and how they relate to your journey. Feel free to introduce yourself and follow other participants you see below.
Congrats on challenging yourself to Start Coding! If you have any questions about the challenge overall, head to the Start Coding Help Thread. For any technical questions throughout the challenge (or in general) write a #help post and share with the community!
Top comments (72)
Hello everyone! My name is John from Nigeria. I'm super excited that I am learning on this platform.
I'll like to say that I totally agree with the points the writer had listed. Personally, I feel overwhelmed whenever I get to think of all the stuffs that's out there that I need to learn and how broad the programing path is.
But am very much happy that I can start somewhere with the tips that has been provided.
That's one of my issues is the vast amount of resources available. How do you choose one? I guess you just push off from where you are!
Wow nice to find a fellow Nigerian here, my name is Gideon.
I just joined the community.
Hey all.
As someone who is looking to change careers at almost 40 years of age, the anxiety is extremely weighty at this stage in your life. "Will someone hire me at my age?", "Will I be able to complete this?", "Will I be able to actually retrain my brain to think in a different way?" All of these are questions that I keep on asking myself - which eventually causes a mental roadblock when studying.
I plan on using these resources to try and drill it down, that with enough practice in the right environment, it can be possible.
Almost 40? Young pup! I'm turning 41 in 3 weeks time! ;-)
I share your worries though and am mighty happy that I am single and am only responsible for myself. I tend to remind myself that every little step you take is still a step further towards your goal than doing nothing at all. It also makes me feel less bad about myself on days where I don't code at all but am only reading articles or watching videos about coding.
Good luck with the challenge!
Sure it's possible
Jozi in the house. I feel you. The sheer breadth and depth of "programming" is kind of mind blowing! We can just go one day at a time and slowly start to see things click.
My goal to learn frontend web development and change my career in my mid-forties triggers feelings of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in me. Brené Brown's work on vulnerability, most importantly her book Rising Strong, is invaluable for me for learning how to lean in to the discomfort. This deeply personal work is at least as important as building the necessary technical skills for me to reach my goal to be a frontend developer.
We will all scale through.
Hello everyone! My name is Berkan and I am from Macedonia. I'm a person that started learning how to code in 2018 but i stopped. Before that I started to learn how to code back in 2014 but i stopped again, now for the third time i have to keep on learning because i want to create a startup company that i am very excited about.
Any tips on how to keep going would be welcome.
Best,
Berkan
My journey is similar. I'm still tryin to be a developer. Good luck.
Hello everyone, I am Hammad from Pakistan and my goal is to master a programming language and increase my coding knowledge so that I don't constantly feel like an imposter while working in tech. And to shed this insecurity of 'inadequacy' while applying for more 'techy' and dev-oriented jobs. I don't know if that's the right motivation because I think this feeling of 'inadequacy' is meant to stay, as there will ALWAYS be so much more to learn when it comes to CS technologies. Anyway, gotta start learning at some point. May be my perspective will change along the process. Let's hope I stick to it this time haha :)
Hello there,
I am not sure to how to start. My goal is very simple - to be a confident software developer. The article mentioned about anxiety and insecurities and those feelings are real to me. Taking this challenge is a huge step for me. I hope by taking this step, my understanding and confident in software development will grow.
Hi, fellow coders! I couldn't agree more about the mental effects of 'imposter syndrome' and, at 36 years-old, I feel the creeping doubts of obsolescence. I am also guilty of spreading myself too thin with different languages and concepts and I hope to rectify this mistake with a new, more concentrated, and specific curriculum. I am further guilty of being a terrible personal-networker, and I'm even worse at asking for help. I look forward to changing these personality traits in myself and, in the spirit of connecting, I'd like to invite any/all of you to reach out to me via LinkedIn, GitHub, or Twitter. I look forward to beginning and completing this monumental journey with all of you, and wish you all the very best in this endeavor.
-Adam
Hello! My name Daniel from the US. I'm a senior in a Computer Science program and the imposter syndrome is real! I'm hoping to learn a bit more to put my mind at ease as I get ready to start looking for developer jobs at the end of this year.
Good luck Daniel!
Hi. My name is Dawn. I love to program. I will be using the coding challenge to review some of the languages I have not used on a while and to learn some new ones. I am excited to get started. I have emailed the link for the Challenge to my students. Hopefully I will see some familiar names over the summer.
Beautiful
Hey, y'all!
imposter syndrome hit me hard when I began attending a local "Learn to Code" meetup. Most of the people attending were either in boot camps or pursuing a CS degree in college. I was the only one going the self-taught route. Everyone seemed to understand all the information the instructors were presenting and I felt lost and out of place.
Although it was hard for me at first, the mentors there were super cool and helped me out a ton and I did begin to notice progress.
Hello everyone! My name is Gabriel Ruiz and I am from Colombia. I am very passion about technology ,specially on the hardware and customer service side of it. This year I am planning to start on the software side of tech. I am surprise the main programming language the author use is Java. I was focusing more on Python, but I will now try out java and see how it goes. For now, I am open to new ideas or resources you guys can share. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/gabrieleruiz/, or shot me an email at gabrielestebanruiz21@gmail.com. Happy coding
Hi guys! My name is Diego, I'm a frustrated chemist from Brazil. I am very happy to embark on this journey with you! Feel free to talk to me if you need anything, two newbies think better than one.
About this reading, I identified myself completely, and put the tips into practice. I am very motivated.
Hello everyone !
My name is Rod, and I am currently living in the south of France, after having moved from Paris about 3 years ago.
Being 43 years old, the point in the article "Keep calm" about fearing to enter this domain at a later stage is a valid one, echoing to me.
But... It also kinda makes me feel better to see that quite a few people here are also in their mid-thirties to mid-forties... ;-)
In the article, they say that it is important to join a community. Well, asides from possible mutual help, I guess this is exactly what it's about : feeling better about overcoming our own weaknesses, finding emulation to progress, and knowing that we are not alone with our various fears and challenges.
My career has always more or less been related to IT, but not so much to myself programming. Though, in my twenties, while living in Ireland, I did work a bit as a freelance on PHP (v3 if I recall correctly), but I may have been an self-oversold fraud ;)
The other time when i felt the most as an imposter, was a few years back, when i was doing project management in a web-agency.
Though I loved this job, I was facing developers everyday, and they can sometimes be a bit of a difficult population to manage ;)
To my dismay, these were people with whom i felt I had not enough credibility nor legitimacy. Lacking technical coding skills, there were times when I could not understand all that they were on about.
I then figured out other project managers often feel the same way, but that was not enough to comfort me ;-)
Later on, after working in a startup accelerator, I joined-up a 3-months very intensive coding bootcamp (not online, physical attendance and full-time days).
Supposedly one of the world best coding bootcamps now, at the time, I was from the 2nd batch of students only and the program was still in its infancy, not as well defined and organized as it now is.
Even though I finished it, I consider myself as one of the "drop outs" from it.
At first, I had prior (but limited) coding knowledge compared to others, so things were easy to me, and I did not require many efforts from me.
My attendance dropped slightly, and upon returning after only 3 days leave, I hit a wall.
I had been greatly overtaken by other students of the class, even laggards.
My ego thus hurt, I lost all motivation.
It is a little frustrating to me to see how far most other students from this bootcamp have gone (senior developers, founders and heads of thriving startups, etc.) while I haven't.
Since then, I am still trying to get back to coding, from time to time, as I have many ideas that I would like to implement.
But on your own, it's not so easy to guide, discipline and structure yourself. It can even be quite discouraging.
My most fundamental problems are that I spread my grey matter onto too many resources to learn and too many personal projects at the same time.
Another big problem I have, is that on these side-projects, I anticipate way too much all the features and code problems to come. I end up conceptualizing these huge engines that will never see the day, crash and burn making too many knots with my brains, then get into analytic paralysis and give up for a while.
Because of this, my startup or side-projects never see past their early stages, - which I often keep re-doing, project after project (besides, at these early stages, this means pretty much always the same extended boilerplate). Time passes ; I forget how do things, until I decide to try again, and so on.
Another source of frustration.
I suppose I'm too eager to get to the heart of things, jumping straight to coding, not thinking and constraining the scope enough. It seems I forget all my project/product management teachings while doing so ;)
Generally, I give up too easily, too soon. Most likely because of all of the above reasons.
I had already subscribed to the CNC in 2018 but for lack of time, did not follow through after the first email.
The CNC2021 announcement email came at the right time this year. When I self-reflected on my short-comings, and have decided to do things differently.
I have lost a bit of confidence in being able to finish something. Yet this time, I am feeling determined to follow through to the end of the 5 weeks, not giving up before it.
My main aim is merely to keep having the discipline to be organized, structured, do things on time as emails drop, not procrastinate and not give up.
If I manage to finish the 5 weeks challenge, on time, I'll consider it as a win.
Currently my focus are (re-)learning Ruby (+Rails, apis, gems, etc.), vanilla Javascript & JQuery and CSS processors. Later on, I'd like to throw a glance at NodeJS, graph databases and React.
Indeed, it is important to connect and support each other. So I'll be happy to discuss any of these topics, exchange, share tips, and help you if I can - with my meager knowledge.
So feel free to follow me, here on CN ; I'll follow you back - as it seems mutual follow is required to converse.
More generally, i'm also interested in studying meta-innovation (how ideas come to be), history of innovation and sciences, psychology of beliefs and social psychology, philosophy, mixology (cocktails) and many more things. Always happy to talk about these topics too.
Finally, and most importantly, I wish good luck to all of you in this challenge ! :)
Take care.
Hello I´m Ricardo from Mexico. Im Agree with the 4 tips specially when you try to learn and have no idea where start and not follow a path to learn, instead trying in a messed way.
Hello Everyone! My name is Aaron. I've been studying code on and off for about 2 years now, still trying to wrap my head around concepts and break into the tech world. I participated in an online bootcamp in 2019 and learned a lot from that. I would like to work on holding myself more accountable, getting better at networking, and building a community of support in the tech space.
Excited to be here and paticipating in the challenge!