My imposter syndrome took another hit this week, in a good way!
I "joined" exercism back in May 2016. But I did not submit a JavaScript kata till July 2018 (yes, it took me over two years to get the guts to submit). I did have a productive day back on July 13, 2018 when I submitted five katas. Then my confidence took a nosedive, nothing until this November (2020). I would love to say that work or family life got busy but I just think it was imposter syndrome lurking again.
Where I started
Time for a little background, I have been doing web coding for 15 years. I have mastered HTML, CSS, Drupal, and WordPress to build sites. What has been missing is a command of JavaScript. I have done freeCodeCamp, tutorials on Udemy, workshops, conferences, etc. I've got a strong foundation of the JS basics but stumbled on breaking a problem down into little pieces and programming them all together.
What helped
Nicole Archambault's Problem Solving course gave me some concrete ways to break down a programming problem into smaller pieces and using natural language for better understanding. Code comments here I come!
My compatriot, Mike Rogers, at Virtual Coffee started a VC team on Exercism. He started a channel on our Slack and offered to answer any questions and to pair-program if needed. Thanks, Mike!
And this week it all fell into place and clicked! Now I'm back at doing exercism katas! Just this week, I have submitted three individual JavaScript track katas, three extra individual katas, and three team katas.
Wow, typing this all up feels so monumental. Thank you everyone!
Shout Outs
@antoniosaric on exercism, a great mentor who provides great refactoring ideas that help me take my code up to the next level.
Nicole Archambault (@lavie_encode ).
Virtual Coffee for prompting me to write about my coding journey.
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