I always thought Impostor Syndrome was bullshit. Then I realized I was 6 months in to running WP Dispensary full time and I had no idea what I was doing. Recently, I've been working on WPD v2.0 and have pushed myself to do things with code that I haven't before. This lead me to question my whole entire existence, as both a developer and a human being. Seriously. It's taken some getting used to, but I have come to grips with the impostor syndrome within. I've also realized what I need to do in order to make sure that I never feel this uncomfortable again.
Getting back to the basics
It's been over a dozen years since I started editing WordPress themes, learning PHP in the process. The "learning on the job " has got me here, and I'm thankful for it. But I've grown so much as a developer over the last couple of years that I feel like I'm doing myself a disservice by not going back and re-learning the basics of PHP and other languages I write in.
Slowly realizing I only learned PHP over the years because of WordPress. I'm also realizing that learning PHP "the WordPress way" allowed me to overlook a lot of PHP basics. Going to fix this, and study like a beginner 👍 #NeverNotWorking -- Robert DeVore (@deviorobert) March 21, 2018
Sure, I've learned a lot of PHP over the years, along with a handful of other languages, but the learning has been fractured at best. I've never taken a course, read any developer-related books, or done much more than Google searches, skimming blog posts and hacking together code until it worked. I really feel like I'm missing out on my full potential as a developer by not learning the basics of the languages I write in.
So, what am I gonna do about it?
For starters, I'm writing this blog post and making a public declaration that I'm actually going to do something about it ? While I continue working on the release of WP Dispensary v2.0 (which is less than a week away as I type this), I will continue " learning on the job". I will also be taking the PHP course at Codecademy. Over 900 thousand others have taken the course, and it says it's only about 4 hours from start to finish, so I feel like it'll give me a solid - and quick - overview of PHP. This video also gives a nice, brief run down of PHP, so I plan on watching this a couple of times while working on projects. Because I want to continue making WP Dispensary better, and offering full Gutenberg support when WordPress switches editors, I plan on also learning JavaScript basics. One of the first things I'll be doing is watching this video, which has over 1 million views and packs a lot of the basics of JavaScript into such a short video. I've also been looking into a couple of courses, like the JavaScript for WordPress course from Zac Gordon. This is really going to be a life long journey, but I'm really happy to be jumping off the edge at this point in my life and (hopefully) learning to fly on the way down ?