Welcome, and thank you for visiting!
Full disclosure: I have some anxiety around keeping a blog. Or, to be more accurate, about being the kind of person who keeps a blog.
Why? Well, there's the imposter syndrome, for starters. What do I have to say about coding and tech and career development that others could possibly want to hear?
Then, of course, there's the showiness of it all. The look at me, "ick" feeling that I get whenever I post anything on social media.
But as this anxiety surfaces, I have to call bullshit on myself. I mean, I read other people's blogs, and I follow them on Twitter, and I share their posts on LinkedIn. I feel mountains of gratitude for the folks who take the time to share their thoughts, their experiences, and their wisdom with the rest of us.
And thus, I'm driven to write here with the hope that the things I have to share might reach and influence and inspire at least a few software developers and engineers out there.
Alright. Now that we've gotten that bit of vulnerability out of the way, I want to explain the blog’s subheading: coding is a communal activity.
Anybody who writes prose or poetry in any serious sense understands that we write with and for others, in the sense that we typically write for a specific audience in order to achieve some defined purpose, and we produce our best work when we collaborate with others in its composition.
Writing computer code is no different, in my experience. Collaboration and feedback cycles are a necessary and blessed component of the composition process, no matter if we’re writing in natural or computer languages. And yet, many of us are filled with dread at the thought of sharing our prose, our poetry, or our code, because we fear critical feedback.
That critical feedback is a gift, though! Through the help of our writing communities, we become better writers. At its best, writing truly is a communal activity.
And so, I want to encourage everyone who produces writing in any mode, genre and format to embrace the communal nature of it, and especially to seek the feedback that is absolutely critical for improvement.
I hope to follow my own advice with the content I write for this blog, and I welcome any and all feedback in the comments sections of these posts. Following are issues and topics that I plan to write about, though this list will likely expand over time:
Python programming language tips and tricks and tiny tutorials
The analogies between learning natural (human) languages and learning programming languages
Being a woman software engineer in a male-dominated professional space
What's trending in the tech space
Profiles of people doing great things in the tech world
Workplace and workforce issues
Managing your personal finances when hauling in a software salary
I'd like to end this inaugural post with my first piece of wisdom-come-from-personal-experience: Learn how to call bullshit on your personal doubts. Or at least find someone who will call bullshit on your personal doubts for you. I know I personally owe a whole debt of gratitude to my mentors who have called bullshit on my imposter-syndrome-fueled excuses to not take action. This first post is for you, Lilac and Bree.
Thank you, thank you for reading, and happy coding!
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