Good day fellow reader, it's Halloween! 🎃 And what a better way to commemorate it than bringing up all those fears that haunt us all over the year. Are you ready? Beware, it is gonna get spooky!
Deploying 📤
Whenever it comes to deploying, the bigger the project, the bigger the fear. Even if you are the author of every line of the code, tested it, reviewed it, there will be at some point fear of "what if x breaks", especially if people are dependant on your product.
Responsable for a project 📊
No matter if you work solo, in a startup, or a big team. Being responsible for a project gives great opportunities, but also raises some questions: What happens if this fails? If someone else screws this, I'm the one who will be taking the blame. Chills.
Bad bosses 🧛
If you never had a bad boss, lucky you! Having a boss that doesn't know the area, or that is excessively self-centered, is an instant card for losing motivation, doing stuff that you don't like, and having to answer and lose time to what his highness thinks is the best.
Impostor syndrome 👽
Well, this one has been over-debated here. Not being able to deliver, having lots of thoughts about your real capabilities, thinking you are a fraud and others deserve more than you. I'm pretty positive every one of you, in small or big amounts, have experienced this.
Hackathons 👩💻
Hackathons are fun! For the organizers, maybe. This kind of event puts a lot of stress on you, and even if you won't get killed for losing, you probably will be sleeping little, eating too much, and counting minutes to finally deliver a poorly customized fork that wins the first prize.
Poor management of time 📅
Kind of related to the above, but dealing with deadlines is the closest thing to having a zombie chasing you. Slow, but steady, it's gonna get you. Oooooh, it is.
Coding challenges 🧮
I'm talking about the ones that recruiters and companies owners seem to like most. Inversion of binary trees, fizzbuzz stuff, working with date and time with no libraries, converting an array of dictionary arrays to another structure, you name it. This kind of challenge has nothing to do with the final work you are going (and are qualified) to do. Yet, you will be struggling with these algorithms and having the fear it keeps you out of your real ideal job. Unless you are applying for a coding challenges site developer. Never thought of that.
Writing documentation 📄
This is really odd, because if you work on your own, probably you deal with this fear by postponing it. Be aware that by doing that you are only increasing the problem by having to deal with a big amount of documentation later on. Good luck with that.
Social interactions 🤼
Oh, well, from having to speak to an audience, to talking to a colleague to let him/her know they did something wrong, social interactions fears may vary, but they are of the same kind and affect relations equally. If you are in the dev industry, you probably got a "socially awkward" tattoo on your forehead. Let's gradually change that, please.
Fear to change 🎢
Guilty! to be honest. It's in human nature, the need to stick to what comforts us, makes us feel in a safe place, reducing the uncertainty and the bad surprises. Stop! Sometimes you need to start from scratch, redo all previous month's work, or refactor everything into a library that better suits your needs. Overcome that instinct and it will be like a superhero power, I promise.
Being forced to work with tech you don't like 📠
Related to the above, having to change, learn a new tech or framework, even another language, makes us feel insecure. Sometimes we are forced to work with something we are good at, but that we don't like. Admit it, you experienced those feelings at least once.
Getting asked to fix computers 👨🔧
If you have never been asked to fix a computer raise your hand. No one? Really? Well, I guess you all had nice moments when you get asked what do you do for a living. There is nothing less than horror in our faces when your mother's neighbor wants to bring you his 2GB Atom PC for fixing because is too slow. Or after everything stopped working after the latest Windows 10 update. I use arch btw.
Losing an entire project 🗑️
I will always remember when my web partner at the University accidentally rm -rf on the project a week before the deadline. That should be scarier than any Halloween costume, come on! I've seen posts offering impressive rewards to get back that stolen laptop/PC, just for the information inside. Luckily we all have to the cloud now, but there is always a chance you relax for your personal stuff.
Hope I scared you enough! Happy Hallodev!
See you around!
