Impostor Syndrome is real and if you have never heard of it you can easily google the concept to find an infinite amount of articles about the theme.
Here is a simple definition of Impostor Syndrome given by Wikipedia to save you the trouble of opening another tab:
"Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck or interpret it as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be. While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally."
Last week I saw a tweet about a bug on Spotify, the major app when you think about a "music app" these days, even though they have big competitors like Apple Music and YouTube Music.
When you look for "coffe", the search results worked fine:
But when you look for "coffee", the results didn’t show:
This is not a big issue, of course, maybe some metadata missing or something else more punctual.
And this not to bash Spotify as a company, their app is great and, as a developer, I’m a heavy user of their services.
But this is a good example of how even an established company with a net worth of billions of dollars can make silly mistakes like this.
After seeing this I tweeted about this random idea of a site called "defeat your impostor syndrome", where people would post a collection of gifs and videos of bugs on apps like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
The tag line is "If the big companies making billions have their share of problems, why do you have to be perfect?".
Since I don’t have the time to work on this, I shared with the world, maybe someone will pick it up and build it.
The tech space is getting wider every day, no matter what you do.
It’s easy to feel behind when you are a Java developer and see everybody talking about JavaScript, or if you are a Web Developer and keep reading about Machine Learning and Python and you know zero about both, not to mention the mobile apps development space and many other areas.
Becoming a good software developer is way more about how you adapt to a given situation than how you are fully prepared for it.
You will never know everything there is to know and this is ok!
There are an incredible amount of developers who have lived good lives and made good careers out of a single platform or framework like Ruby on Rails.
Master the basics well, learn algorithms and data structures, learn object-oriented programming, how to design a database properly, get your fundamentals of vanilla JavaScript rock-solid so you can switch from React to Vue or Angular way more easily.
If you are a newbie, pick a language and become proficient in it, stop looking for the next shiny thing every week, when you get really god in one, most of the knowledge is transferable.
Get past the "intro" level in something and move on to the next level, you can read Machine Learning for Humans: how to learn better and faster? to see why this is important and why you should focus.