DEV Community

Prasanna Kumar
Prasanna Kumar

Posted on

3 1

Breaking free of Impostor Syndrome

Hey fellow programmers.

I am that developer who makes a lot of side projects that never make it out of the localhost because not a lot of those projects reach even a useable version. But even those that do will not be deployed.

Why?

Impostor Syndrome. I learned this term from programming memes. If you ask me, it's just a programmer's way of saying, "I am insecure".

I've been coding since 2016 and built a bunch of apps and websites for clients. I then went on to co-found HoomanApp (flutter app), an application for pet parents. I was able to learn and build all of this because of the community.

But all this time, I've been only taking from the community. I've used a lot of open-source code in my projects and spent a lot of time on stackoverflow and github searching for solutions for my issues, like any other developer. But I never ask questions or raise new issues.

Why?

  • What if my question is so stupid?
  • What if someone downvotes my question?
  • What if my question is duplicate?

and a lot of similar questions.

I never made any (significant) contribution to the community. I don't even participate in any active conversations. I don't write blogs or document my journey on any platform. As days passed, it turned into guilt. I felt bad for taking a lot from the community and never returning anything.

At this time (Q3, 2020), I was quite strong with Flutter and firebase. So one fine day, I made up my mind to go to stackoverflow and answer flutter or firebase related questions. This was my first answer for flutter on stackoverflow. But I never continued it. It was not until November 2020, that I made it a habit every morning to open flutter tag on stackoverflow and scroll through all the questions and try to help fellow flutter developers. I got my first answer marked on 29th, November and that further helped me to break out of the bubble.


A couple of days back, I came across the DOHackathon post. Perfect timing. So I thought, why not use this as an opportunity to showcase my projects and blog about them while I build.

I am so happy to introduce Flixplore.

Flixplore helps you choose a movie to watch when you crave a particular Genre or Language. It takes in your input for the genre, language, and year of release and suggests random movies that satisfy the criteria. It will be a react SPA with a node backend. The backend will be using the TMDB API for the movie data. I am so delighted to deploy my project on the Digital Ocean App Platform.

I got the idea to build Flixplore when one of my friends asked me to suggest to him a good Hollywood thriller flix to watch. But he had already seen every movie that I suggested. That made me think of this project. I am so excited to build Flixplore and participate in my first ever Hackathon.

Top comments (0)

Sentry image

See why 4M developers consider Sentry, “not bad.”

Fixing code doesn’t have to be the worst part of your day. Learn how Sentry can help.

Learn more