Understand the mechanisms behind how we see ourselves (and others) in communities that focus on building competence.

I’m going to explore some of the mechanisms that might lead us to feeling like an impostor.

This talk is not meant to be a cheap “just believe in yourself” self-help guide, but rather an investigation of how social dynamics interact with engineering processes (e.g. evaluating our code against someone else’s) and in fact I will spend a good chunk of the talk on the analysis of situations where the same mechanisms lead to completely different outcomes.

I’m a software engineer, not a trained psychologist, so caveat emptor, but in my role of VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation I’ve had the pleasure of observing these dynamics from multiple angles and hopefully will be able to bring you some insight that would otherwise be hard to procure on your own.