So here it is, I’m starting a blog (again). The story goes as follows… When I got my very first internship as a software engineer, my mentor at the time had mentioned to me that I should do a few things:

• Read an article (that I lost the link to) and learn how to ask a question
• Read The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Start blogging.

So I did all three of these, why wouldn’t I? LISTEN TO YOUR MENTORS FOLKS, there’s a reason they signed up to be your mentor. I also have a strong opinion on mentorship vs sponsorship that’ll I’ll blog about at some point.

I learned how to ask a question. I will be writing a post about this in the future once I can get to it. In the meantime the gist of it is that if you exhaust all your resources before asking the question, no question is unwarranted.

I read the book, or at least most of it. It basically talks about principles and guidelines that you should follow and those all can be found here. Looking at the quick reference guide again makes me want to pick the book up again. Now that I have been working in the industry for a while let’s see if I have actually been following these principles or there are things that I should be doing.

And finally, yes, I started a blog. The only one that required ongoing commitment and that quickly died for reasons I can’t remember. I’m gonna guess that I was “too busy” or that I was generating “noob content”. In either case now that I am older (and not necessarily wiser) I am going to start blogging again.

What changed? Why am I starting this back up?

I strongly believe that all software engineers, computer scientists, developers or whatever you want to call us should be active on the interwebz. The career that we chose requires us to be constantly learning to solve the new problems that tomorrow brings. The way I see it, what good is all that we learn or the problems we solve if we’re not sharing those allowing others can learn? That’s what I mean when I say we should all be “active on the interwebz”. We should all be sharing things we learn, problems we solve, big and small, yes even that one-liner back to the world. We’ve all come across that perfect Stack Overflow answer that made your day, or that blog post that made everything clear after you had been banging your head on your desk for way more time than you’d admit. Well someone wrote that, so pay them back, and share that problem you solved. One day, who knows when you’re gonna help someone with what you shared. It’s the great circle of life (cue lion king music)

So a few days ago I redid my personal website to make sure that it would make a good blogging platform. I made sure that it had all the bells and whistles that hip websites are doing nowadays and there I went. Operation bring the blog back to life is now underway.

Yet… it took me a couple of days to write this post. After thinking about it for a couple days, I am confident that the bottom line is that I suffer from a pretty severe case of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is something that I never knew about until a few weeks ago and the gist of it is as follows:

Impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence. -(reference)

More specifically the feeling that the content that I generate would not be “smart” enough for the interwebz. I need to learn to trust myself, be confident with all the decisions I make, and stop second guessing everything I do. For example even while writing this post I have erased entire paragraphs multiple times as my mind keeps thinking that what I’m writing is garbage. It’s something that I am constantly working on and hopefully this blog will help me get over that gnarly, unproductive disease.

What is this blog and why should you read it?

I am creating this blog to post anything related to my career as a software developer. Posts will include (but not limited to):

• Technical finding/trick/hack that helped me solve problems (that’s what engineers do right?)
• Non-technical finding/trick/hack that helps me work well with different types of people
• Anything else that I learn as I manage my own career development.