Ex LeWagon Paris #2, Numa Paris startup accelerator, Web agency prod director, IBM/Dassault.
Studying meta-ideation, beliefs, psychology, philosophy.
Also a sceptic, cocktails lover & RPGs player.
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.
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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.