I am an imposter

Why can I work on projects but never without exterior help? 

And when I decide not to use any resources, I can not do anything. 

This feeling makes me feel hopeless. Without all these exterior factors, I am a failure.

Couple of days ago, I did a hackerRank for a company I really liked. I passed the first two problems with ease.

And the third one was to simply create a python class with 3 methods that will do something. It doesn’t look complicated. I create them no problem but only one test case passed. 

 I spent the 6 remaining minutes looking at that code and I could not see the mistake.

I am confused to this day and It pains me to have missed such an opportunity purely because I couldn’t think fast enough and solve problems on my own. 

Came to find out. I am not alone, a lot of really good programmers feel the same way. They are just a bunch of clueless coders that try to make sense of things as they go. One of them made a joke: a senior dev is basically the best copy-paster and it’s the one that knows what to use and what to leave behind. Hearing that gave me the permission to make mistakes and live with the fact that I am a “failure” and be patient with it. 

I went on a spiral of thought, "why should I pressure myself to work alone and without help". I am not one to blame but I think that I carried this type of thinking from my academic pursuits. For a huge chunk of my life, I studied in schools. And individual, honest work has always been the metrics of success. Does excelling in such environment condition us to undermine the importance of collaboration?

I know that the main reason why we are tasked individually would be for us to learn and if everyone is really good, then the collaborative work will by default yield better results.

But at the same time, I question argument, me going to the gym and isolating muscles for years does not mean that when the time comes I would know how to be a fantastic calisthenic's athlete.

In any case, my goal now is to get to work. It will take time and a lot of muscle work to get to the point where I can make hundreds of lines of code without ever leaving Cursor. 

For now, I will try to go back to the basics of python and C. Hopefully with a better stronger foundation I will make less mistakes, understand my logics a bit better and create more elegant code. In the meantime, I will keep shipping things. Who knows, maybe one of them will be helpful to others as well.