This is absolutely fantastic! I've read a lot of articles on Imposter Syndrome, and even written a bit about it, but I think this was the single best article on the topic I've seen so far. Be sure to add this to your folder!
P.S. What an absolutely perfect cover image.
Here's one of my more recent stories...
I was recently going through a strong bout of imposter syndrome. Dealing with chronic depression and an anxiety disorder does not make it any easier, let me tell you. I'd been away from code for a few months, as I had been working on another project, so I was just getting back into technical work and feeling like a complete fraud.
Then, on a technical help chatroom I frequent, someone asked for help regarding a segmentation fault in his C code. I started helping him, and found that his professor (of all people) had been defining a two-dimensional, 1000x1000 array of integers - over 7.6 MiB - on the stack. This had triggered a catastrophic stack overflow. Two other technical friends of mine confirmed my theory right then.
Since his professor wouldn't tolerate anyone pointing out errors in his own code, I helped the student write the dynamically allocated version so he could get his own code right, and instructed him to restore the original stack-allocation before turning it in.
The student thanked me profusely, and that's when I realized I couldn't be an imposter, because...
I am a verified expert in C and C++ manual memory management, as well as in debugging undefined behavior, segmentation faults, and odd memory glitches.
I actually knew more than a college professor teaching C about some topic. (You never allocate a 1000x1000 integer array on the stack, people.)
I was good enough at reading code and explaining things that I was able to help someone with a very difficult problem in their code.
There is always more I can learn, even in terms of my areas of expertise, but it meant a lot to realize that I do know something well.
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This is absolutely fantastic! I've read a lot of articles on Imposter Syndrome, and even written a bit about it, but I think this was the single best article on the topic I've seen so far. Be sure to add this to your folder!
P.S. What an absolutely perfect cover image.
Here's one of my more recent stories...
I was recently going through a strong bout of imposter syndrome. Dealing with chronic depression and an anxiety disorder does not make it any easier, let me tell you. I'd been away from code for a few months, as I had been working on another project, so I was just getting back into technical work and feeling like a complete fraud.
Then, on a technical help chatroom I frequent, someone asked for help regarding a segmentation fault in his C code. I started helping him, and found that his professor (of all people) had been defining a two-dimensional, 1000x1000 array of integers - over 7.6 MiB - on the stack. This had triggered a catastrophic stack overflow. Two other technical friends of mine confirmed my theory right then.
Since his professor wouldn't tolerate anyone pointing out errors in his own code, I helped the student write the dynamically allocated version so he could get his own code right, and instructed him to restore the original stack-allocation before turning it in.
The student thanked me profusely, and that's when I realized I couldn't be an imposter, because...
I am a verified expert in C and C++ manual memory management, as well as in debugging undefined behavior, segmentation faults, and odd memory glitches.
I actually knew more than a college professor teaching C about some topic. (You never allocate a 1000x1000 integer array on the stack, people.)
I was good enough at reading code and explaining things that I was able to help someone with a very difficult problem in their code.
There is always more I can learn, even in terms of my areas of expertise, but it meant a lot to realize that I do know something well.