Impostors, Phonies and Charlatans - Rejoice!

When I first started programming, the concept of Impostor Syndrome really hit home.

You start off feeling like an impostor at everything and slowly the number of topics you feel like a phony participating in recede, but the pool never drains completely. There are always some things you think you should be a lot better at and that you just know everyone ELSE is great at. Everyone but YOU of course…
And indeed that will be true for some things - for everyone. And that’s the important point. Just about everybody feels this way (citation needed), and realizing the truth of that fact is all that is necessary to chase away any significant aspects of the Impostor Syndrome feeling. Briefly,

If everyone is an impostor, then no one is.

Step up and admit your shortcomings here:

Today I’m finally launching The Impostor Roster.

I started (and basically finished) this little app in the first few months of my programming career - which is why it sorta sucks. Like lots of other projects of mine, I have a backlog of things I want to do before “it’s ready” to go live. Ocassionally I chip a few things off that backlog, but more often than not every time I open up the site again I add more items to fix or improve before “it’s ready” rather than advance the needle any closer to production.

This time I’m just sending it out there. It’s terrifically embarrassing in a number of ways but I’m doing my best to ignore it and hope to fix those things down the line a piece. Now is an especially important moment because of a tweet from DHH and a bunch of industry excitement and articles resulting from it. This atmosphere of “admit all your professional sins” is precisely the reason I started to build the Impostor Roster. It galls me a bit that I missed the wave on this one, but I’m hoping to catch some of the run off by getting this out there today.

An ugly deployment

The site was sitting in a free Heroku app that needed to be upgraded to a modern Cedar stack and I found a bunch of app-breaking bugs in the last hour or so (amazing that there could be bugs in what’s basically a Rails scaffold, eh?).
I realize that this application is just begging for defacement and abuse given that there is no moderation or accounts or flagging of any kind. There is also no pagination, no nice autocomplete for the category field, a weird system of ‘number of months of experience’ that doesn’t convert to years, no way to say ‘Me Too!’ to someone else’s post - forcing you to add you own identical item, etc. etc. etc. But hey - I’m deploying it anyway.

I hope you like it and use it. Get in touch somewhere or other if you have thoughts.