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'sProblem 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, atVirtual 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.