Code Academy: Week 11

Until this week, I haven't felt comfortable saying this:

I'm a software developer.

Despite being a part of Code Academy and learning the skills of a developer, to call myself one always felt wrong, like I was a poser faking it in a field I knew very little about. And though I'm no where close to where I want to be in terms of my ability as a developer, a couple of things happened this past week that gave me enough confidence where it finally feels natural to call myself what I've become over the last 11 weeks: a developer.

• On Wednesday I went to a Chicago meetup put on by a company called Heroku. I've been using Heroku to deploy the applications I'm building and they organized an evening session to talk more about their product and to show off some demonstrations on how to use it. About 30 developers were in attendance (maybe half of them Rubyists) and there wasn't any moment that I felt out of place or in over my head. In fact, they had a live coding demonstration of an email/signup app that they deployed to Heroku and as a few of the audience members watched in amazement at the speed with which he was able to code and deploy, my thoughts were generally something like - "that's easy." I could have gotten up in front of a room full of Chicago developers and offered some of them new skills related to the software craft. A poser developer couldn't do that.

• A fellow Code Academy student sent me an email this week about stripe.com, a payment processing service similar to Paypal. He had just implemented it on his site, found it to be very easy and seamless, and knew I had been struggling with Paypal. He recommended I check it out. If you go to the homepage the first thing you'll see is "Payments for Developers." 11 weeks ago this service wouldn't have been for me, I wasn't a developer, but I'm happy to report that after spending about 2 hours this week working on implementation, I got Stripe hooked up to my site without too much trouble. I was able to follow along with their code tutorials, make a few customizations needed for my site, and perhaps most tellingly, appreciate their product from a developer's point of view. Their homepage headline made sense...because I'm a developer.