## Becoming a Developer ### And Finding Your Community
## Aaron Petcoff aaronpetcoff.me @ughitsaaron hello@aaronpetcoff.me
## Goals - Beat a path for newer developers - Help experienced developers reflect
## tl;dr Own your curiosity and embrace community
## What's Great - Vibrant field - We make cool things 💅 - The **AH-HA** moment
## Challenges - "Inner critic" 👿 - Pressure to know everything
## Inner Critic *Hypothesis* Program only does what we tell it to do Errors remind us of the limitations of the human condition (Existential crisis )
## Pressure to Know Everything *Hypothesis* Necessarily interdisciplinary field We want what others have (Eat their brains; gain knowledge )
## A Messy Combination Loud inner critic + Pressure to know everything

Imposter Syndrome

## Consequences - Discouragement/Burnout 👧
## Strategies - Personal 👧 - Collective 👭
👧 - Be okay with not knowing, yet - Experiment - Give yourself **PRAISE** - ∞
👭 - Request feedback - Gain more familiarity - Teach others - ∞
👭 - Test - Write docs - Help fix bugs/triage
## Conclusions - We're awesome 🎉👏
## Articles "[Never Heard of It](http://alistapart.com/column/never-heard-of-it)", Lyza Danger Gardner, A List Apart, Nov. 14, 2013 "[Banishing Your Inner Critic](http://alistapart.com/article/banishing-your-inner-critic)", Denise Jacobs, A List Apart, Sep. 20, 2011 "[On Code and Community](http://www.sitepoint.com/on-code-and-community/)", Una Kravets, Sitepoint, Feb. 19, 2015