How can I lose my insecurity about not being as good as programmers who started in their...

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Jason Zopf

Your drive to get better is awesome! Keep in mind a couple things:

1) EVERYONE writes bad code - it's how you learn. Spend some time over the next year looking at code you wrote the month before. You'll be amazed how fast you're getting better.

2) You're still young! Be glad you found something you can be passionate about at this age. I only discovered web dev in grad school (you have 10 years on me).

3) Set some goals and stick to them. For September, maybe you blog about what your learning or deploy an app. You'll be able to look back in 6 months and see your progress.

4) Get your code out in the wild. Nothing like the confidence boost you get watching others use your code. If you have users and functioning code it must be good, right? "Fake it till you make it"

5) At the end of your career that 10,000 hour deficit will look relatively tiny.

Keep working hard!

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Shawn P Neuman

So many great answers I fear mine might be superfluous and yet I feel compelled to throw my two cents in.
I came back to school in my forties (about to graduate with a CS degree) and can completely identify with the feeling that everyone around me knows more. But interestingly enough, 80% of the people in our major at Virginia Tech reported feeling the same way. Most feel like everyone around them knows more.
As many of the other posts have suggested, keep asking questions, keep working hard, and keep enjoying the journey. If this old guy can come from a construction background, with 0 computer programming experience, and graduate, then you can too.

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Adam Powell

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying "Creativity is more important than intelligence." That's not much help if you aren't creative but I think it is a point worth considering.

At this point, maybe what you should be really good at is driving more experienced people crazy with questions; insatiable curiosity is a critical skill which cannot be taught.

I do a fair amount of front-end development--and even some back-end work--even though it isn't my job title (nor my primary interest). No one that works in web development is foolish enough to think that everyone has mastered all of it and sometimes a fresh perspective goes a long way.

I can give you a very recent example:
The agency where I work was building a website where we incorporated Twitter Bootstrap. Some of the mobile functionality wasn't working right and the junior developer who was working on it the most showed me that was a well known problem with that version of Bootstrap (she taught me something).

She and our senior developer were working on the JS trying to get it to work (and had spent at least a few hours). I suggested that since this particular bug was well-known in Bootstrap 2.x.x it had likely been fixed in 3.x.x which had recently been released, and perhaps they should just update.

I'm struggling to learn JS and yet based on what someone significantly my junior had taught me (that this problem was well-documented) I came up with the solution that worked in approximately 15 minutes, when two other developers had already spent hours trying to make it work.

And it goes the other way, too. Sometimes, I am doggedly trying to get something to work and someone else comes in and glances at it and says 'why don't you just do such and such.'

Also, I think you'll find this helpful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0...

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