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Posted on Tuesday July 20, 2021
There have been a handful of instances during the last month or so where I've caught myself being pleasantly surprised at something working exactly as I expected it to. This led me to the realization today that over the years I've been working with tech, I've developed a fundamental distrust of the tools I use, and by extension of my own ability.
I think a major part of the reason for this distrust is that, for the majority of my career, I've been maintaining highly-unpredictable, poorly-built legacy software. I expect that, when I make a change to a piece of code, it's going to break in ways I cannot possibly have expected (because it usually does). I had learned to be come highly defensive in terms of how I approach problems; to be skeptical of everything and to not trust my own eyes. Couple this with a heaping dollop of imposter syndrome and it's no wonder I have felt so incapable. I'd internalized the fear and frustration I'd felt in my professional life.
One interesting effect of this has been a universal distrust of complexity, to the point that I've wound up developing many of my personal projects in plain C; its spartan simplicity reassuring me that, for once, I can actually expect logic to behave the way it visually appears that it should, that there's nothing going on behind the scenes for me to catastrophize about.
Recently I have had the chance to work with current-generation tools for the first time in my professional life. Docker, for example, has been pleasantly consistent and predictable in ways that have made its use genuinely enjoyable. The software itself isn't so much what I'm enjoying, but moreover it's the feeling of having my anxiety subverted in novel, intriguing ways.
I feel like for the first time in my professional career I'm starting to trust in my own abilities, as I doubt myself and my workflow less and less frequently. It's a very nice feeling.
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