Hey, Imposter

You, too, can be here.

I think the most overwhelming part of a developer’s journey is reconciling the little thing called the bottom line. What exactly are you doing with all this? How can you possibly learn it all? Do you ever feel Imposter Syndrome? Perhaps in our younger years, we were avid gamers and dreamt of designing the next first person adventure. Certainly I was one of those. Perhaps this was in 2D in those days. Perhaps even in an arcade with a stand-up display and 24 inch screen. And, then out of the blue, along comes XBOX and PlayStations and smart phones (either IOS or Android) or 3D or virtual reality or augmented reality or unreal engine or blah, blah, blah… This is a lot to learn is it not? I mean? But? No problem… Social Media has arrived! Don’t need the plan from the arcade anymore. Now, just after I got my head around the fact that Instagram was Python, Django, and Flask. I’m not gonna lie… I expect they may play around with a little REACT and possibly Ruby and Go. And how much time to master each again? There are classes and tutorials and user manuals not to mention hours upon hours of trial and error and what next? Well, for starters there is IOS, Python (with Pygame), C++, C, assembly, Unity, Unreal, and plenty of others to explore. How can you possibly master them all? And let’s say you do. Well, congratulations. Facebook has changed the name to Meta and the buzz is that we are going next level into virtual reality now in a meta verse. It could mean mastering concepts around eye gear (Does this mean smart phones are out?) Ok, let’s say you master it. Congratulations. Except employers aren’t interested in your gaming skills anymore. Instead, you are only getting callbacks from security firms seeking cybersecurity professionals who must have skills in cryptography, bloom filters, OTP, cipher skills, Q tables… Well? If you aren’t getting it? Perhaps it’s time you started learning it, dummy. Oh, wait… I’m sorry. Those employers have passed. No problem. Instead NVIDIA is calling and they would like you to perform parallel programming against multi-core processors to speed up efficiency. Perhaps you could diagram this in matplotlib? Let’s say C language? Oh, wait, NVIDIA has also passed. Hmmm, well there’s always aerospace, healthcare, e-commerce, education, defense contractors, social media giants, ride share, delivery services, …. The list goes on…Plenty to learn… LeetCode can help (2500 problems to work through)…Miles to go before I sleep…