What am I doing here?

Posted by Alice F. on October 31, 2019

To be honest, I find myself asking that question a lot. Maybe I’m running a meeting at work, or giving a presentation or at a job interview. Maybe I’m at a protest feeling very small, or a rap show feeling very old. Why am I here? To listen? Lead? Give? Take? What am I contributing? Should I even be here?

It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing, I’m probably overthinking it.

Signing up for a coding bootcamp isn’t the easiest thing to do for someone who already struggles with imposter syndrome, but that’s also a big part of why I wanted to do it. I hope that for all the challenges I’ll face learning to code, there’ll be as many moments where I recognize that my experience has helped me navigate them. That actually, I’ve got this, and maybe even know what I’m doing, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve been working in the tech realm for nearly a decade, mostly working on websites with open source CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress. By now I know a little bit about most things related to running a website. But like with anything else, the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. I want to take what I do know and expand upon it so I can do a lot more. So I figured why not start from the beginning and get some foundational software engineering training? 

I want to work on my own projects, and help other people with theirs. I want to problem solve and help develop systems that might improve something for someone, somewhere. I want to make a decision and be confident that while it might not be the absolute best of all possible options, it’s right for now.