Week 9. Post 3.

 What have you done that you didn’t ever think you would be able to do?

My internship is two weeks from coming to an end and I am fascinated by the amount of work that I and my co-worker have done. During this internship, we were able to implement a whole lot of new features into our search and harvester applications. One of the biggest improvements that we have made is that we have developed a validation feature that would allow displaying only valid scientific data into our search application; in addition to that, we have developed a faceting feature that would allow us to filter scientific data based on its resource type; in addition to this, we have implemented sitemap so that our metadata would be indexable by Google Scholars and many other features. 

Before coming to this internship without much prior experience in web application development, I always thought that it will be enormously hard and impossible for me to develop big features. I always felt the imposter syndrome and that I won't be able to contribute anyhow to the development of the search application. I always felt that I lack the knowledge and expertise to do even minor changes in the source code. Especially I never learned Java and I thought I won't be able to code much. 

However, after starting to get used to the source code, designing, and problem-solving, I was finally able to work on some bigger problems and start implementing these relatively hard features. I realized that you should never be underestimating your abilities and just always trying to push yourself out of your boundaries. It is good to know your weaknesses, but never let your imposter syndrome block you from learning and putting yourself out there. At the end, I felt really nice and accomplished that I did not just give up but tried to solve it even if it was hard and continue learning. 

Next time, whenever I feel like I cannot accomplish something because of my current skill set, I will just try to break the problem down into smaller chunks and see if I can achieve at least them and what should I do for that. Instead of just giving up and getting overwhelmed with the thoughts of "I can't", I will try to ask myself: "What can I do to accomplish this task? Will I have to watch some tutorials? Will I have to ask mentors for more technical explanation" etc.