The Imposter’s Handbook (Season 1, Season 2)

This industry changes so quickly – frameworks come and go as do idealogies and “best practices” for a given language or framework. How could anyone claim they knew “the best way”?

We’re all figuring this out right now was what I always believed. Turns out I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

None of it mattered anyway – I had a job to do! And I did that job and my clients were happy. I created open source libraries, helped people and I even got a job at Microsoft – all the time believing I could learn what I needed to learn to get the job done.

If only I could have understood how much more there was to know…

I go to conferences every year and I meet some incredibly talented people and one year I sat in a room with a small group of attendees and speakers and the topic of Big-O came up. I just sat and listened. I had absolutely no idea what it was they were going on about…

The discussion got animated. Someone mentioned graphs, another said something about Bin Packing and depth-first traversal of an optimization problem…

I had been doing this stuff for over 15 years – how was it possible I had absolute NO IDEA what they were talking about.

This had to change. I needed to change this for myself.

So I did.