Preparing to Launch…

Why I decided to go back to (developer) school

I’ve been working in the tech industry for a few years now. During that time I’ve undertaken various different roles from project management to design and front-end development, taking in a few bits and pieces of server-side scripting and database admin along the way. I’ve performed those roles at various different companies from large multi-nationals to small & medium size businesses and have also spent some time free-lancing.

Whichever role I’ve been in, and at whichever organisation, I’ve always been prone to the occasional bout of impostor syndrome. I think this is pretty common in the tech industry — a search for impostor syndrome on medium turns up a whole bunch of posts with tags like ‘tech’, ‘programming’, ‘women in tech’. I can particularly relate to this post by Ingrid Avendaño; like her my background isn’t in tech — I graduated in English Literature (probably about as far away from tech as you can get!) and at the time had no desire or plans to work in the tech industry.

I pretty much fell into tech by accident — I was working on a customer service desk and we had a bunch of process documents printed on paper and in binders and I suggested to my manager that it would be great if we had all these resources on an intranet site; her response was basically “well, build one then”. I knew literally nothing about building a website but read a couple of books on HTML & CSS and just started putting this thing together. Looking back on it the site was awful (it was laid out using tables!) but I was kind of proud of it at the time and was also pretty much hooked on this ‘web’ thing.

I’ve come a long way and learnt a lot since that first site but my ‘developer schooling’ could probably best be characterised as ‘ad hoc’. I read some books, took a short course, worked through a bunch of online tutorials, worked on my own and friends’ projects and finally got some paid gigs. I think partly because of this autodidactic method of learning, and partly due to the pace of change in our industry, as much as I’ve learnt since those early days I’ve always had this nagging ‘impostor syndrome’ feeling that I’m not a proper developer.

No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned…

An opportunity recently came up at work to get some developer training. We contract out a lot of our development work and wanted to look at possibly doing some more in-house. My boss asked me to find a suitable course — so I did a lot of research, narrowed it down to a few different options and eventually ended up with Launch School.

I did their free prep course and am now a few weeks into the ‘Programming and Back-end Development’ course. One of the things that attracted me to Launch School in the first place, and that I’ve enjoyed most about these first few weeks, is the focus on fundamentals. The course isn’t about quickly learning a framework or just getting a few projects for your portfolio but goes really deep and focuses on core concepts like how to approach a programming problem, different ways to debug a piece of code and so on.

Starting with the basics (albeit in a programming language — Ruby — which I’m not familiar with) does kind of feel like going back to school, but I can already tell that there will be a pay-off at the end with taking this approach. I know it’s going to be a long and hard road (the course covers a lot of ground) but I also know that at the end of it I will emerge a better and more well-rounded developer and it might even help me start to get rid of that that occasional impostor syndrome feeling.