Today was my first day as a mentor with the Techtonica team, and I know it was a proper first day because I was feeling both excited and terrified; excited because I deeply enjoy playing around with computers and helping others learn, terrified because "what if I'm not good enough?" which leads me to the first topic of my first post here.

"...a psychological experience in which a person suffers from feelings of intellectual and/or professional fraudulence." — Wikipedia

Sometimes, when I'm trying to learn something new or I'm practicing a new skill it's easy for me to loose perspective; I tend to get lost in the weeds and as the setbacks of the learning process pile up it's easy to feel demoralized. To makes things harder, if I'm trying to do this on a deadline and in an environment where everyone else is also giving their best, an old friend tends to show up: impostor syndrome.

It is a feeling that makes me think: "maybe this is it, maybe I'm not good enough for this particular challenge". Even as I write these words I wonder "is this the right way to approach this subject? maybe let someone else bring it up, I am not a good writer".

But I continue regardless, because if you have ever feel like this I want you to know that you are not alone, and it does get easier over time. I'm sure you can look at what you have accomplished so far and conclude that you have done hard things. If you are running code, any code, you have already accomplished something that most non-technical people have no clue about, you should be proud.

As you continue on this journey, you will have more and more stories you can refer back to that show you that, far from being an impostor, you are someone who dared and who achieved, who accomplished something hard, who can tackle hard problems and maybe not always succeed right away, but always learn from it.

So yeah, this may not be the best written post, but I wrote it :). Now, onto more technical things.