Learning on the fly, impostor syndrome, and Vim dumbassery
One of the things I love about working in IT is that you can often learn on the go. It’s possible to learn something so quickly during the job, that you can come in with no experience at all, and become productive enough to add value to a project in a small timeframe.
This is actually how I got into programming in the first place: for my Law master’s graduation project I joined an official law evaluation. My wife was learning to program for her study, and I became fascinated by code. I don’t know what got into me, but at the next meeting for the law evaluation I said I could create a script to do my task for me. That task was to check if government agencies were acting in compliance with the law when gathering biometric data from foreigners, and at that moment I had written 0 lines of code in my life. So I quickly learned the basics of Python online, started coding, and it actually worked out. In fact, I liked it so much that instead of applying for a job at a law firm, I applied at IBM and got hired.
This was my first project. With zero front-end development experience, I said yes, worked 12 hour days, learned on the fly, and delivered the application on time. The customer was happy, and I had my first real work experience. Needless to say, I was terrified the entire time, because of what I’d gotten myself into. That didn’t stop me from saying yes to every opportunity, though:
