Wondering If You’re A Real Developer Yet? Try Making A Bucket List

One of the biggest obstacles I’ve encountered in becoming a developer is proving to myself that I am one.

Imposter syndrome — the ever-present fear of being a fraud — plagues beginners of all kinds. I’ve felt it before: After running a marathon I couldn’t consider myself a runner (I’d been running five times a week for years!). And though I’ve spent over 60 cumulative days backpacking, some of them as a certified wilderness trip leader, I still hesitate before declaring myself an “outdoorsy person.”

With coding, the imposter syndrome was even worse. I had quit my job and spent my savings on bootcamp, staking my career to learn this new skill. I was starting from square 1 (or, I later learned, square 0!). And as I coded, day after day, it became more and more evident just how much I didn’t know.

I felt pretty hopeless. And as my list of “Programming Concepts to Learn” grew longer, I decided to start a second list: a list of things real developers do. I imagined the realest developer I could, and made a list of things she would have done in the past. Then I started working through the list, one task at a time.

Now, exactly 8 months later, I’ve completed every item. I have definitive proof that I’m a developer! And I’m more confident identifying as such.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive — being a developer means different things to different people, and the list below is merely one example. But without further ado…

Things Real Developers Do: My Bucket List

• Open the computer’s terminal
• Use a text editor (bonus points if you have a specific reason for choosing it)
• Use some keyboard shortcuts
• Write tests for your code
• Help another engineer with something they’re having trouble with
• Attend an event about engineering
• Follow developers you admire on social media
• Read a book about coding
• Open your browser console
• Get data from an API
• Hide API keys from the public
• Post a question on Stack Overflow
• Push code to GitHub or GitLab or BitBucket
• Speak about something engineering-related at an event
• Complete a technical interview
• Participate in a hackathon
• Deploy a project
• Ship your project to a store (App Store, Play Store, Chrome Store, Alexa Skills Store, so many stores!)
• Contribute to open source
• Get paid to code
• When people ask what you do, respond saying you’re a developer :)