<story><title>How to Worry Less About Being a Bad Programmer</title><url>http://www.stilldrinking.org/how-to-worry-less-about-being-a-bad-programmer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zippergz</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found my career to be a continuous ebb and flow of feeling incompetent.&lt;p&gt;Very early on, I started out by learning Perl programming on the job, writing CGI scripts for basic interactive websites. I had no clue what I was doing when I started, but after a while I was pretty good at it (and felt relatively competent). Then I got a job where most of the code was C, which I had done only a little of. After a few years of that, I think I was pretty solid, but then it was time to start learning about Java and its ecosystem. Later, I wanted to do some iOS work, so I had to dive head first into Objective-C and Cocoa - I was pretty lost to begin with, but eventually I got the hang of it. Somewhere along the lines I picked up Python. I struggled for a while (and it took me longer than I&amp;#x27;d like to admit to get comfortable with significant whitespace), but I got there.&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;m working on updating my web dev skills by learning about React and all of the surrounding technologies. Once again, nearly 20 years into my career, I&amp;#x27;m feeling pretty lost and incompetent. I&amp;#x27;ve been through this enough times to know that I&amp;#x27;ll figure it out, but it can still be pretty frustrating and demoralizing to struggle to even get something basic working.&lt;p&gt;I think this is just a fundamental part of software development, and of continuing to learn and expand your skillset. It&amp;#x27;s good to remind ourselves that no one out there knows everything, everyone struggles from time to time, and if we&amp;#x27;re hitting speedbumps it means we&amp;#x27;re learning and improving.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Worry Less About Being a Bad Programmer</title><url>http://www.stilldrinking.org/how-to-worry-less-about-being-a-bad-programmer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>somethingsimple</author><text>Currently what&amp;#x27;s making me worry about being a bad programmer is a coworker. I have no idea what I did to him but the guy clearly has some kind of grudge against me. He questions my competence (sometimes subtly, sometimes outright) and doesn&amp;#x27;t want me changing the code even if I submit a 1-line code review removing an unused variable. He&amp;#x27;s a lot more lenient with other people and sometimes it&amp;#x27;s me who catches errors in code changes he&amp;#x27;s already put a &amp;quot;lgtm&amp;quot; on.&lt;p&gt;Going to work and having to sit next to someone like that every day is quickly making me think of jumping ship.</text></comment>