How To Break The Impostor Syndrome - A Guide For Freelance Programmers
Tech evolves fast, especially in web development. First it was jquery and backbone, then came angular and react, tomorrow it could be something else. Not just that, but each project that lands on your freelancing desk could have a varying degree of complexity.
There could be some arcane third party API or JWT authentication involved, there could be hard-core and mind-numbing regular expressions or statistical analyses, it could be anything. All of this results in more learning, more watching youtube videos, reading articles and official docs, etc. You're stuck in a learning paralysis and you still feel that you don't know enough! Part of the problem could be blamed on Impostor Syndrome. Many of us are so afraid of acknowledging that we know something or possess a skill that we go the point of feeling fraudulent of ourselves if we did that.
The truth is that most developers are skilled enough to handle a programming project though they may sometimes have confidence issues while answering quizzes, exams or even interviews through rote memory. But what you are forgetting is that you don't need to be the master of everything all the time. Learn and practice those skills one at a time as you get to work on them and you'll be good. This is what I like to call JIT learning or Just-in-time learning (its similar to how some contemporary programming languages like Java and .NET work).
Of course, you must have some core skills like HTML/CSS/Bootstrap (for front-end engineers) or Python/PHP/Flask/Django (for back-end engineers) and you should keep brushing them up from time to time. But as far as rest of the "side skills" are concerned (like regex, statistical libraries, third-party APIs & libraries, etc), they can be learned and handled as and when they come up.
In fact, the most important and prominent part in programming is the practical aspect. Even if you did manage to turn yourself into a programming encyclopedia (by watching youtube or whatever), there is no guarantee that you'll be able to apply those skills without any problems. Ask any adept programmer and they'll tell you that about 90% of time, they are actually writing code, not learning a skill or watching a video.
So in order to break the impostor syndrome pattern, you must stop "thinking" about programming and simply start doing it! The more you write code and make it work, the more confidence you'll gain which will automatically motivate you to write even more code and do whatever is required for that (like reading official docs for that particular programming language or framework).
There could be some arcane third party API or JWT authentication involved, there could be hard-core and mind-numbing regular expressions or statistical analyses, it could be anything. All of this results in more learning, more watching youtube videos, reading articles and official docs, etc. You're stuck in a learning paralysis and you still feel that you don't know enough! Part of the problem could be blamed on Impostor Syndrome. Many of us are so afraid of acknowledging that we know something or possess a skill that we go the point of feeling fraudulent of ourselves if we did that.
The truth is that most developers are skilled enough to handle a programming project though they may sometimes have confidence issues while answering quizzes, exams or even interviews through rote memory. But what you are forgetting is that you don't need to be the master of everything all the time. Learn and practice those skills one at a time as you get to work on them and you'll be good. This is what I like to call JIT learning or Just-in-time learning (its similar to how some contemporary programming languages like Java and .NET work).
Of course, you must have some core skills like HTML/CSS/Bootstrap (for front-end engineers) or Python/PHP/Flask/Django (for back-end engineers) and you should keep brushing them up from time to time. But as far as rest of the "side skills" are concerned (like regex, statistical libraries, third-party APIs & libraries, etc), they can be learned and handled as and when they come up.
In fact, the most important and prominent part in programming is the practical aspect. Even if you did manage to turn yourself into a programming encyclopedia (by watching youtube or whatever), there is no guarantee that you'll be able to apply those skills without any problems. Ask any adept programmer and they'll tell you that about 90% of time, they are actually writing code, not learning a skill or watching a video.
So in order to break the impostor syndrome pattern, you must stop "thinking" about programming and simply start doing it! The more you write code and make it work, the more confidence you'll gain which will automatically motivate you to write even more code and do whatever is required for that (like reading official docs for that particular programming language or framework).
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