Almost done

I finished my final project in the C# course at school today, now the only remaining thing before graduation is the live project, where I get to work on a real coding project that the public will see and with a team, and the job placement course, which lasts from the end of the live project until I get a job or they stop wanting to see my face around campus.

Four months or so back when I first announced this, my friend Ben reached out to me to chat about my goals, he said that one of my challenges will likely be Imposter Syndrome, and he wasn't lying. I mean, I know myself and knew then that it would probably be an issue, but as the "real world" approaches again it's at the forefront of my mind.

For those who don't know and can't infer from the name, Impostor Syndrome(which can be spelled with an "o" or an "e" at the end, for you sharp eyed readers) is a name for a phenomenon where someone feels like they don't actually deserve to be where they are, they got hired for a job and don't believe they actually deserve it, they are an imposter, in other words, this is triggered by real or perceived flaws in work or gaps in knowledge and is very often one of the many ways your brain lies to you and makes you feel bad.

Every Friday at school there is a "Tech Talk" the school brings in a speaker who talks for an hour or so on a topic, there is pizza, which believe me I have mixed feelings about, anyway, today's Tech Talk featured a developer by the name of Dan Linn, who runs a coding shop literally two floors above the Tech Academy, seems like a nice fellow, his topic, as you may have guessed from the tortuously long lead in was on Imposter Syndrome and ways to deal with it. I don't know that I came away from it with any advice for dealing with my own issues, but it was nice to see that other people, even successful ones, have the same struggles.

Because believe you me, if I get hired tomorrow, I am gonna have a hell of a time with that shit, even with simple coding languages there is a ton to know, and it really isn't feasible to memorize everything, and while I realize that the vast majority of people are in the same boat as me, it is embarrassing to admit you don't know something and would have to look it up, even if that is what coders more or less do for a living anyway, as I am told constantly by my instructors and people in the industry.

I have learned enough to be dangerous in a few languages now, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and C# being the major ones, and I am somewhat familiar with various tools and frameworks to help use and expand them, but put me on the spot and need a detailed answer on even something relatively simple and I don't know how much help I will be. I am confident that if given a project and goal, and then being left alone for a while, I can figure most things out, but is that enough? I have to hope so.

In addition to the live project, I have to keep learning things beyond what the classes teach, so I have to look into resources for learning other languages and tools, I think I have settled on Python, which everyone tells me is fairly cool, as my next project, and I have to rework my website so it is something to not be ashamed of, I will probably attempt to combine those two things and with any luck in the next week or two have a tangible result to point at.

I think that will help a bit.