Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

My first programming language is JavaScript back when it only lived in the browser. The compile target of the browser is, and always has been, the DOM. The DOM is a tree model. When I learned to appreciate that in my first year of programming everything became simple. Even before JavaScript became fast you could do most things with relatively high performance easily cross browser once you achieved that solid foundation. No frameworks, no unnecessary abstraction libraries for vanity, no bullshit.

Where did you learn to see it like that?

The confidence really came when I deployed my first few medium-to-large features to production. Positive user feedback, few errors in production and good measured performance made me proud of my work, that’s when I realized that I’m going to be just fine!

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them.

At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular people wrote.

A programmer's confidence can come from a few different directions.

The chief one, I think, comes from simply having achieved enough challenging problems to the point where one knows that, even if their solution isn't perfect, they can figure out basically anything. The overwhelming majority of programmers can get to this point eventually.

Confidence also comes from the eventual realization that, with few exceptions, the majority of programmers you think are "better" than you are really aren't objectively better. They may have a fancier title, a bunch of GitHub stars, have given presentations, or maybe they've written a book, but this doesn't mean they are a better programmer than you. It might be hard to understand as a novice, because virtually every novice is going to feel inferior for lack of experience. After having gained sufficient experience, to the point where there's seemingly no problem one can't solve, it may become obvious that these programmers one once viewed as elites actually just broadcast their craft in a way that gives them higher authority; I stopped viewing most programmers as being better or worse than each other because I've witnessed enough problems caused by the clever solutions of senior and staff developers. It's just much easier to blame a junior engineer's solution when it doesn't work out. This isn't to say that more seasoned programmers aren't worth their salt, but there's almost never something they have that you can't have, and every programmer out there writes bugs all the time!

And finally, seeing the tech hype come and go over a long enough period of time can eventually bring one to the point where they look back on methodologies, frameworks, and design patterns they were once introduced to and come up with the original thought of "You know, I think that X was kinda bullshit to begin with." I think it's really unlikely that a programmer can have a 20+ year career (or even a 10+ one for that matter) and not come to some conclusions like that. Though it's easy for a novice to get caught up in the churn thinking they've got to learn all the things and feel inferior for not knowing it all, experience may someday teach the programmer that most of the churn was hype and that their own ideas on how to program effectively probably would have worked just fine.

I would say that I gained my confidence by just trying enough times and gaining experience.