One of the companies I worked at decided to migrate a Perl system over to a Java-based environment. They looked at the skills of the existing development team and decided they needed to outsource the project to another company. This was a common trend in the early 2000s for reasons that are outside of the scope of this book. This gave me my first taste as a team leader. I know a lot of programmers migrate over into managerial roles but at the time I didn't feel I had fully explored my programming potential. I sat down on several occasions and tried to learn Java but it never clicked for me. Java web development always felt more cumbersome than Perl CGI scripts that I created. It also didn't help that we were shipping `.war` files into a Tomcat system, which seemed like they were comprised of a lot of configuration metadata and very little code. This is what I was referring to when I spoke about being OK with giving up on learning something --- sometimes what we try to learn is more of a chore. Having something that is a chore isn't going to provide a good learning experience.
-It was around this time that I began learning Python on my own using Pygame. I took the plunge by entering my first [Pyweek](http://pyweek.org) competition. Pyweek is a week-long competition where folks build an entire game from scratch in one week. It was a challenge, but was also one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in programming. I build a game called "Busy Busy Bugs" that was playable during a time when I really didn't know what I was doing. In many ways I was learning to swim by throwing myself into the proverbial deep end. I wasn't in any danger, but the desire to get something done at the end of a week drove me in ways I didn't think was possible.
+It was around this time that I began learning Python on my own using Pygame. I took the plunge by entering my first [Pyweek](http://pyweek.org) competition. Pyweek is a week-long competition where folks build an entire game from scratch in one week. It was a challenge, but was also one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in programming. I built a game called "Busy Busy Bugs" that was playable during a time when I really didn't know what I was doing. In many ways I was learning to swim by throwing myself into the proverbial deep end. I wasn't in any danger, but the desire to get something done at the end of a week drove me in ways I didn't think was possible.
As the technical lead position continued I found myself wanting to do something else. I interviewed at several places and was hired at Sourceforge as a member of the Systems Operations Group. Sourceforge was an amazing experience for me. I dreamed of working for an Open Source company, and few Open Source companies were as well-regarded as Sourceforge and Slashdot were in the Open Source community, but my insecurities and "impostor syndrome" kicked in. Would I be able to cut it? Would they hire me only to realize they'd made a mistake and I wasn't as good as I claimed to be? I was friends with and had gone to school with several of the people who worked at Sourceforge / Slashdot, so I wondered about their motivations for hiring me. Was my getting hired an elaborate prank, or was I hired because several folks in the company knew me? All of these thoughts ran through my head while I worked there. It didn't help that my position was primarily system administration at a level that I was inexperienced at. There was also a programming component to the position, but I constantly felt like I was in way over my head. I lived in constant fear that I was going to be found out and that the job that I wanted would no longer be available to me. Granted I learned a lot and had very supportive and kind management at Sourceforge but I lived in dread whenever my manager would check in on me because I feared that the conversation would only highlight that I wasn't really supposed to be there.
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / commitdiff