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Comment by div | Hacker News Reader

I often feel this way.

I try to reason to myself that it's normal to feel this way as a programmer / techie simply because there is such a vast amount of stuff to know, that no one really knows even half of it.

What with the multitude of programming paradigms, languages frameworks, mobile dev, webdev, front-end, back-end, sql, no-sql,... I could go on.

In the past 1-2 years I've picked up Android and iPhone development, and am now doing a deep dive into ruby and rails so I definitely feel like a phony at the moment.

On the flip-side, just being able to pick up those skills and do a few successful projects with them gives at least some counterbalance to the phony feeling.

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I actually feel really lucky RE: all the technology that's out there now. When I learned to program, the only option available was 'BASIC', then years later, C++. When I went to university (1997) I was surprised at how many other languages there were, but it still was relatively simple compared to today.

I remarked to my partner who's also in IT that I feel sorry for people trying to get into IT nowadays, because the number of languages, frameworks, platforms etc. is so huge. It's awesome in some ways but it must be overload for a newcomer trying to figure out where to get started.

I suppose to any newcomer my advice would be to go depth first into something like RoR or Django.

Learn the framework and learn the language really well, then once you're comfortable building things well (after a year or 2) experiment with something else on the side.

The hard part is figuring out what is worth learning, and for this a mentor can be priceless.

I feel for people getting into programming today. While GPLed software and better dev environments than I ever had are easily available, there's less of an emphasis on computers being programmable for users - less useful manuals, etc

Sure you can get Ruby if you know where/how/of it, but your computer likely doesn't even come with BASIC installed by default.

I often feel this way as well. I tell myself that I'll learn faster if I can get over this feeling, or learn an effective way to cope with it.

Looking back at difficult things I've learned helps. That is, knowing I felt this way about some other topic or domain, whether it was real analysis, fourier analysis, cooking, or more recently, RoR. Having a community to ask questions to also helps. Stackoverflow boosts my confidence a little whenever I see one of my questions or answers upvoted.

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