Tonight impostor syndrome really took over. I have been going to a lot of meetups to learn more about technology and to meet interesting people in tech.
Usually I really like these events but tonight it was quite different. Tonights meetup was on iOS, something I have dabbled with by making Weather Many. I was hoping to learn something that might inspire me to do more with iOS.
Instead there was a deep dive into Single Store, UI Bindings, UICoordinator, and IBInspectable all using the Objective C runtime. The goal of all this was to teach us how to get a project into a MVVM/C design pattern. It made me feel out of place, like an impostor.
Impostor is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
The diagram below depicts what is really going on. You assume everyone around you has tons of knowledge in everything, but the reality is they have a similar sized sphere of understanding but in a different area. You perceive your deficient because your sphere of understanding only crosses in small area of shared understanding.
I don’t have a large amount of knowledge in Objective C or Objective C Runtime. I thought that is why Apple created the more modern IDE, Swift, to encourage more developers to program in iOS. I felt like a total impostor. Do I really know what I need to know to be successful in iOS? Maybe flutter is the only way to go anyway. It is like java and much easier to do things in. I was able to pickup flutter in about two weeks.
The question still remains do I still want to refactor Weather Many to use URL session and replace Alamo Fire or just port it to flutter? That is a decision I will need to make soon.
Native iOS development was a diversion anyway. I will build mobile apps but they need to be done in a cross platform IDE like flutter. My focus has been full stack web products with mobile counter parts. If I did these natively in android and swift it would take me twice as long. Plus I would have to become proficient in another two tech stacks. That’s just silly when I can do this all in flutter.
Lately my focus has been on the MERN stack. React also feels crude just like some of the iOS tools. Hopefully as I learn it more I will dodge this imposter syndrome that keeps rearing its ugly head.
As I was leaving the meetup I took this picture of Christmas stars which encouraged me to keep plugging along. I need to make this passion to profession happen.
