One of my favorite events to attend are the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. Even though, I’m not a developer or a software engineer, these events are always exciting because you get to learn about how people use technology to solve problems and network with other women in tech. One of the best parts about attending is you get a sneak peek at the culture in the companies that host these dinners. Every time, I leave one of these gatherings, I have a feeling of inspiration coupled with a tinge of imposter syndrome.
Feeling Imposter Syndrome
Being in a room full of smart, women engineers/developers is inspiring, intimidating and sometimes disheartening when their reaction when you don’t have an engineering or developer title is “oh…”. I’m curious to learn about their journey, what were their biggest problems, how they solved them and what tools they used. I can appreciate how they attacked a problem because I can use those approaches to solve issues I’m having in one of my passion projects. Even without a developer title, I could build a website by hacking together a WordPress theme with the right framework and combination of plugins with some customizations to create the features my clients need. While some people’s passion is to “be a developer”, my goal is to be a creator, and what I lack in technical skills, I make up for in resourcefulness.
Don’t Let Titles Hold You Back
As a creator and future entrepreneur, I will continue to attend these gatherings to learn from more technical counterparts to figure out how to make what I want using the tools and resources created by developers and software engineers. When I started writing this post, it was because I thought I should stop attending the girl geek dinners because I wasn’t “technical” enough. By the time I finished, I realized the reason to go is to keep up with technology because that is what excites me. Labels and titles shouldn’t be a reason avoid going to events you are passionate about and you should never let imposter syndrome hold you back from learning.