[TheCapn]

For personal development, it was merely shipping things. The more I published, the better I felt about myself. The more I published, the more I had learned and had to refer to. Now when I'm taking on tasks I can instantly recall how each of the pieces of the problem can be stitched together from things I did previously (or at least know where to look for foundations to build from)

For the confidence? It was working with others. The first job I had I got to sit down with one of the company's programmers as part of my on boarding and watch him work through tickets. After I saw just how flawed everyone was I felt a lot better about myself. I suppose that's a weird thing to say: Oh he was pretty shit, so I shouldn't feel bad about my poor performance...but that's not the point I want to make really. More that, it is wrong to compare your efforts to learn and grow against the final product of others. Once you sit down with the experienced devs and see how they shape and form the product and all the bumps along the way it doesn't feel so bad to struggle on your own.

Ultimately the skills that I honed that gave me the best boost in confidence were not really the direct programming parts where I put letters and numbers in files. It is the debugging. Understanding how things move and where to look for problems makes me feel like I can solve any problem with the right tools.