You knew how to fix it, you always know how to fix it. You’re who everyone comes to to fix it, but you were too nervous to even begin typing. If you failed, you’d be proving everyone who doubted you right. The thought made you nauseous. You’d be proving that every misogynistic a-hole teacher you had in college who said ‘software isn’t a woman’s job’ to you right. All the men at the startup would chuckle at your failure and say something rude like ‘see? that’s what we get for letting a woman do the work.’ You’d be ruining the chances of any other woman who interviewed. Most of all you were terrified of failing and letting yourself down, letting everything you worked for go to waste. Maybe everyone was right; software isn’t a woman’s job. Deep down you knew you were being irrational, but the thoughts just wouldn’t stop. 

You kept staring into the abyss of numbers and symbols, going through every letter in every line. Was it in HTML? JAVASCRIPT? Neither? Suddenly you couldn’t tell the difference. 

“Y/N?” Your boyfriend said opening the front door of your shared apartment, “What are you doing up? It’s 1 am.”

You didn’t look up at Spencer, too fixated in trying to decipher your work to acknowledge him. How was it already 1 am? You’d been sitting there for hours and had done nothing.  

Spencer waved his hand in front of your face, “Y/N?”

No response, you just stared into the code getting more and more hypnotized by it, entering some sort of strange trance. 

“Y/N!” He said more forcefully this time, causing you to blink and look up at him. 

“What?” 

“What are you so stressed about?”

You broke eye contact then and brought your lower lip in between your teeth, “Stressed? I’m not stressed!”

A lie. A very obvious lie. Which Spencer knew, because reading you like a book was high on his never-ending list of talents. 

“Really? You’re not stressed?” He sounded half amused. 

You shook your head, “Nope, never been more calm in my life.”

He chuckled, “Then maybe you should stop chewing on your lip and lower your shoulders, they’re practically at your ears.” He moved behind you and pressed his hands against your shoulders, lowering them for you. He took his thumbs and rubbed the knots that formed there, “Now, Angel, tell me, what are you so stressed about?”

Again, you didn’t answer. He thought he’d catch your attention by using your favorite term of endearment, but instead you just turned your attention back to the screen. 

Spencer didn’t understand, he never would. If you google ‘genius’ a picture of Dr. Spencer Reid is what comes up. With an IQ of 187, the ability to read 20,000 words per minute, three doctorate degrees and three bachelors degrees all by the ripe old age of 30, there is quite literally nothing he can’t do. Except maybe ten push ups, he could probably get to 9. He was a child prodigy and CalTech graduate. You went to public school and a college with a 70% acceptance rate. He was recruited to the FBI at twenty-two. When you were the same age you were a college senior getting trashed at a different bar every Thirsty Thursday. He spends his work days catching killers and saving lives, and you spend yours typing away at a computer hoping something works out. 

Being with him was simultaneously the best and worst thing for your self esteem. Sure he made you feel loved, appreciated, beautiful, important, but he also made you feel stupid. Not on purpose of course, it just seemed like he was  better than you at everything, even the things you thought you were best at. Thank god he’s a technophobe, if he knew his way around a computer better than you that would be the last straw. Oftentimes you wondered why he even wanted to be with you when you so clearly were not on his level, and when there are so many people who are. He’s smart and handsome and could have his pick of the bunch, so why did he pick you? 

“You know, 83% of workers in the US feel stressed out in their jobs, it’s totally normal. I’m stressed all the time at my job,” He said, trying to coax you out of the shell you crawled into. It didn’t work, instead you went through the lines of code again mumbling to yourself that it looked perfect, so what was wrong with it? 

“Can I help? Let me see,” He asked. He didn’t wait for a response, and reached over to turn your laptop towards him. 

“No!” You yelped, and snatched the laptop away from him. You couldn’t have him help you, you couldn’t let anyone help you. If anyone helped you then it wouldn’t be your achievement. This was one thing you had to do alone. 

He sighed and put his hands up in defeat, “Alright alright, I know I’m not a computer whiz. I just want to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” You snapped, getting frustrated with him now. Why couldn’t he just let it go? Why did he always have to try and help? You knew the answer was because he loves you and wants to make you happy, but your judgement was too clouded to see that. You huffed out angrily, trying to suppress the hot, frustrated tears that were threatening to spill over.  

Spencer slid into the chair next to you and gripped your shoulder, “Y/N...Ang—”

You turned to him and cut him off, “What? You think I can’t do this on my own? Don’t you?”

He just took the jab in his stride. “I know you can do it on your own,” he grabbed your hands from the keyboard and held them between his, forcing you to stop for a moment and just be with him.

“Talk to me.”

You waited a moment before conceding, “Okay fine, the software is due in two days and I’ve been working on it for weeks and it still isn’t perfect. Something is wrong with it and I can’t find it and if I can’t fix it then I’m just proving to everyone that I can’t handle this job and that I’m stupid and incapable of doing anything on my own and then I’ll get fired because there’s newer, smarter kids coming into tech everyday and all the men at work will never take another girl seriously again and then after I get fired and end up homeless you’ll realize that I’m actually stupid and useless and that you can do it wayyyy better than me an—”

“Woah slow down,” He interrupted your rambling. You were staring at the floor, hands still trapped between his two much larger ones rendering you useless. He let you go, hands coming up to your cheeks and forcing you to look at him. They  were calloused but soft, and his eyes demanded your attention, darting all over your face to read your expression. He poked his tongue out of the right side of his mouth, the same way he has a hundred times. You softened a little into his touch. 

“I think you have imposter syndrome.”

You pulled back, “What? Don’t you dare try to diagnose me or profile me Spencer Reid.”

He ignored you and started into his own ramble, much like the one you had just finished, “It’s a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. 'Imposters' suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that override any feelings of success or external proof of their competence. It was first documented in the 70s by successful working women who felt like they had ‘fooled’ everyone into thinking they were intelligent.”

You looked at him even weirder now, your eyebrows scrunching together, “Oh?”

“It’s very common in the tech industry because of how fast paced it is.” He said it all so matter-of-factly. 

“I-I don’t think so. That’s not me.”

“Think about it Y/N. It makes sense!” 

It did. It made perfect sense. It explained the constant questioning and anxiety. It explained why you don’t ask for help or offer up an opinion at meetings. It explained why you had jumped from failing a project to being homeless like it was the natural progression of things. A ‘diagnosis’, if you even could call it that, should’ve made you feel better about everything, but it didn’t. 

“I just feel like I don’t deserve anything I have. I-I don’t even know how I got here Spence! Like how did I manage to convince everyone that I’m talented enough to do this on my own!”

He let the words marinate between you. Then it all clicked in your head; you sounded exactly like those women in the 70s. 

“You just proved my point, Angel.”

You glared at him, “Okay here’s another example. I don’t deserve you. You just got home from a long day of saving lives and being a genius crime fighting machine and instead of getting some damn sleep you have to console me because I’m over here crying like an idiot because some code won’t run.”

Spencer’s hand came under your chin, forcing you to look at him again, “You don’t know how much you do for me, do you?”

You just shook your head, genuinely not knowing what he meant. 

He smiled, the corner of his mouth turning up just a little, “Yes I am a life-saving crime-fighting genius, but without you I wouldn’t be able to cope.”

“Really?” You sniffled. 

“Yeah, Angel, really. I spend all day looking pure evil in the face, and without you to come home to and talk to I’d be trapped in my head all day, thinking of what I could’ve done better. You’re my safe space. Without you I’d probably go insane,” He tucked a stray piece of hair behind your ear. 

You smiled now. You believed him; Spencer isn’t one to lie, “And you’d have no social life.”

He laughed, “Hey! I’d have a social life.”

“Who? Henry and Jack?”

He laughed, “You’re right, I’d have no social life.”

You stood up then and he followed suit. You threw your arms around his slender frame and nuzzled into the crook of his neck. Spencer’s shaggy brown hair tickled your cheek but you didn’t mind. All that mattered was his heartbeat and breathing. You were his sanctuary, and he was yours. When either one of you would dive head first into the deep end, the other would be waiting there to catch you. Tonight it was his turn. 

And catch you he did, into a loving kiss, holding you close to him. When you pulled away he planted another kiss on your forehead and mumbled into your hair, “Trust me, you keep the internet world running. Without you we’d all be lost.”

You sighed and thanked him, happily sitting in front of the laptop now. All your fears had been pushed away. You knew they would resurface eventually, but right now it felt like you were unstoppable. With two simple corrections you tried to run the code and it worked perfectly. 

“See!” He cheered, squeezing your shoulders again, “You deserve the world, Angel.”

You stood up and jumped into his arms for another hug, wrapping your legs around his waist, his arms holding you up.

“You may be a life-saving, crime-fighting genius Dr. Reid, but I am a bad-ass, intelligent, woman who codes at the top of a male dominated field.”

for starters here is his messy pinterest board that i made.. like i said... it is a mess, and still a work in progress but y’all can have it anyway!! (fun fact: was gonna make him texan but pepper called him country boy and i was triggered!!!!!!!!!!)

backstory:

 julian was the conception of two teenagers in love during the 90′s in spain; a local and a tourist. the pair were just seventeen when they became parents but it was a whole ordeal at the time because his father’s side of the family did not want anything to do with this impregnated nobody. it wasn’t his grandfather’s vision!!! his son was supposed to go into adulthood unscathed by his mistakes!!! as you can guess julian’s mom side of the family were your blue-collared society while his father’s side was more white-collared. at the time his mother was a student and helped her own mom with the family tailor shop while her father worked as a cook in a restaurant. on the other end of the spectrum, the kinney’s were in the film industry and of old money. needless to say, the two families had little in common.

the kinney’s tried to pay this girl off but her family was 100% not having it and after many arguments and empty threats they came to an agreement. said agreement was that julian would have his rightful surname and would stay in spain and the family would receive a weekly stipend for his expenses. in return no one would say a thing to the press— which, honestly was only ever a threat because the kinney’s wanted to pretend like nothing had happened. 

and so julian grew up in madrid with a single mother and the help of his grandparents. as far as he knew his father had died shortly after he had been born and had been madly in love with his mother (that part was true). the only reason he didn’t share a name with the rest of his family was because the pair had never married, which, would have been the truth regardless. everything was fine; he grew up working at the family shop, attended school, skipped school, maintained amazing grades while simultaneously spending 1/3rd of the time in detention, lost his virginity to marisol cordova in her lilac colored room, etc. he had the most basic upbringing a kid could have.

then his father died. his real father. and suddenly, on paper, he was well off. it wasn’t easy for his mother to tell him the truth when his grandfather stepped foot into the one story home like he had seventeen years ago with that sour look on his face, but she was forced to. she had no other choice. devastated as she was (and she was truly heartbroken), she told him the story of how one day during the summer of 96′ she met james kinney, and how the next year he came back. then, his grandfather informed him of his father’s will and how he’d have access to his inheritance once he turned eighteen.

it was... a lot to process, and as julian does when he feels overwhelmed, he got angry. he was very upset with his mother and even more so with this old man he was meeting for the first time who kept calling him shit like ‘his only grandson’ and ‘a kinney by blood’. it was infuriating for julian, and his mother further telling him about their weekly allowance among other expenses over the years did not help. at all.

that is how julian found out his father was a successful actor turned director, generally known for an action packed franchise released in the 2000′s. it was mind boggling— he’d turn on the tv only to see a picture of his now dead father on screen, news coverage of the deadly car accident that occurred during en route to manchester on every channel. it just didn’t make any sense and was very hard to feel sad for. besides, his mother had enough sadness for the both of them. at his funeral, the two had to stay in the back while the family tried to come up with a game plan of how things were going to move forward; james’ widow was not happy to see her husbands former lover and child at the scene. 

anyways in spite the fact that julian wanted nothing to do with the kinney’s, his grandfather had other plans. a vision of his own for the only grandchild his son had brought into the world, and that started with schooling. julian graduated and had no plans for college until his grandfather threatened to contest the will if he chose to stray from the path, and they needed the money; so college it was. a college of his grandfather’s choice of course, and what better place than somewhere closed off enough to distance julian from the outer world but elite in its own right? 

his grandfather’s plan basically is to make him successful, and being that julian has no interest in their world, he’s had to compromise and just live with the fact that julian is just going to be your regular everyday man. he’s only really doing all of this because he feels guilt over the years but not guilty enough to tell the world that there’s an extra kinney lying around (last names are so common right!?!??!) . however, he still wants him to be in the family. as in everyone in the direct family knows of him and he gets to be involved in all family affairs, etc, but julian just does not give a fuck about them fksdhjfs specially because of how they fucked over his mom and how james’ widow is so fucking bitter about the will.

ANYWAYS he’s been at the school for four years now, gets his schooling paid by his grandfather but still has a job because pride or whatever, and will hack into your shit!

personality/hc’s

i love him, he’s sweet but also not annoyingly sweet. as in yeah he’s nice and polite but has no problem squaring up due to his short temper. kind of blunt sometimes though, and either is dumb or acts dumb if he says something that might hurt someones feelings. like oh.. sorry you feel that way ksjfsdkln

super smart???? has amazing grades and constantly does his work; knows how to multitask and balance his life out (for the most part... at least until he burns himself out). an intellectual™ . not an eboy but i guess u could say a little bit of a gamer,, has tik tok downloaded on his phone, the dad friend i guess

is either in one end of the spectrum or the other when it comes to socializing. most of the time though he finds it exhausting,, talking is hard but once he does start talking it’s like shut up dude no one cares about javascript 

has a small pill problem,, he’s got to be successful somehow right !! also drinks lots of coffee and is a fan of coffee creamer, does not like the strawberry shortcake creamer though because ew. only tea he will drink is matcha green tea, anything else can suck it. 

has also developed some ~anxious~ feelings , why ? idk, light trauma i guess. his pill usage sure doesn’t help though! loser! ... tbh maybe his anxiousness has grown over the years because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do after school like he has money (that he tries not to use if i’m being honest, would rather use the money he gains from his job which i haven’t decided what should be. leave me alone), and will have a degree, but he’s still just questioning everything?? things have just been weird

sometime during middle school years (idk whats the equivalent of this in spain, shut up) he got into computers and... i’m not proud of this but his first hack was into this girls account that he liked and bro all he wanted to do was see some titties man thats it i promise. that crush did not work out, obvs.

anyways yes he continued down this computer path and made an app during high school!!! it wasn’t successful at all and he eventually deleted it but good for him coding and shit!!! 

would hack into school systems to help out his buds and their grades. yeah they could have just copied off of him but... where is the fun in that lads 

sometime he be just looking up ‘james kinney interviews’ on youtube just to see who this dude was dshjkg poor lad

can speak english and spanish ,, has that lisp thingy spaniards have i hate it but i guess whatever 

kind of messy honestly, can someone clean his desk 

connections

Online Resources

https://www.w3schools.com/

Starting out, W3 schools will probably be pretty omnipresent for help. They have tutorials for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, and many other web technologies. They pride themselves in being the largest web developer site, and unfortunately that has a downside. They don’t always update all of their articles to the most current specifications. This is a wonderful resource, as they do a good job of explaining a lot of these concepts in a beginner friendly way, but when you’re ready for nitty-gritty details, it’s almost always best to go with a more specialized developer resource.

https://css-tricks.com/

CSS is a powerful and flexible tool. Every day I see projects where developers have pushed it to new heights, but sometimes it’s a little arcane too. Well the wizards over at CSS-Tricks have collected a large number of articles and tutorials that explain everything from how z-index works to how to use newer layout-centric rules like Flexbox or Grid. If a CSS rule is misbehaving, 9 times out of 10, I can find a clear and concise reason on this site, and more importantly, I find many recommendations on how I can achieve the same effect differently.

https://flexboxfroggy.com/

Speaking of Flexbox, Flexbox Froggy is a one-note kind of resource, but it teaches all of the core concepts behind flexbox, and it can also teach CSS savvy managers why moving to a new layout methodology would benefit your work flow.

https://cssgridgarden.com/

Created by the same developer as Flexbox Froggy, and it does the same thing with Grid concepts.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

Mozilla’s developers have been at this game a long time, and their resources are next to none. In my opinion, this collection does not do much help a beginner understand, but the trade-off is that once you’re over that initial hurdle, the information you’re looking for is almost always only a few clicks away. This is the first, and often the last, place I go whenever I’m looking to solve a weird JavaScript bug that the rest of the internet is too clever to have encountered, (or to explain why only IE9 is seeing it).

http://php.net/manual/en/index.php

I know PHP isn’t a popular language right now, but it’s powerful, it’s flexible, and it’s still the primary language of the largest and most popular CMS on the planet, for better or worse, WordPress. Especially if you’re going to work freelance, you owe it to yourself to at least be familiar with PHP, and this will be your best friend. It’s no nonsense, and not beginner friendly, but it’s clear, and the comments on the articles are often as helpful as the articles themselves.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation

Speaking of working in freelance (or even for a firm like I do), I have my own opinions about the way WordPress works, but you’re going to be doing projects in WordPress, and you aren’t going to be able to accomplish them without this. I have a small problem with the way functions and parameters are explained (it isn’t always easy to differentiate how one calls a function manually, or if it is called by filters, or how it is different from they three other functions named roughly the same thing), but I do know that the WordPress core developers work very hard, so there is always a method to the madness, even if you don’t have the key to see it.

https://stackoverflow.com/

When you get to the debugging stage, you’re going to become familiar with Stack Overflow pretty fast, as it almost always dominates the first few google results for a problem. Now, I’ve had developers try to scare me away from using Stack Overflow because it is open for beginners and experts, and sometimes it’s hard to tell quality of answers, but I strongly disagree with that. While it’s true you should always look cautiously at using someone else’s code right out of the box, there are a lot of members of the community that go out of their way to explain what the code is doing, and those are the answers you should be looking for. You don’t have to use their code, but if you can understand why you had the problem in the first place, you grow as a developer, and now have the tools to solve the problem. Stack Overflow is a big part of the Open Source community, so it’s always nice to give back at least as much as you take, so if you see a question you have the answer to, feel free to share.

https://github.com/

Eventually, you’re going to run into a project where you need a plugin developed by someone else, either because you don’t yet have the knowledge or you don’t have the time, but the client needs the functionality. 9 times out of 10 you’ll find what you need on GitHub, and honestly, you should be getting together your own GitHub with plugins and projects of your own. No matter how single purpose they may be, you’d be surprised how useful things can be in very specific situations. GitHub, like Stack Overflow, is a big part of the Open Source community, so it’s always nice to give back when you can. Make suggestions or report problems you have with any projects you pull, and in doing so you’ll make the community a better place.

Applications for Windows Based Developers

Now, for the next section let’s get into some tools. I love gaming, so I have a Windows computer at home. I don’t really know why we’re wasting money on a Windows license at work, but we are so I can mirror the full stack in both locations. Here’s what I use.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

When I first started, my boss insisted I use Dreamweaver for everything. I have nothing against Adobe, and their products are quality, but Dreamweaver was way more trouble than it was worth. Everything I cared about from Dreamweaver I can do in this free and Open Source program, with some extra functionality I find it extremely hard to mimic in Dreamweaver. Notepad++ is fast, stable, and hugely extendable. If you’re doing this as a full time job, I strongly recommend switching to a dark theme for the sake of your eyes. Blackboard is among my favorites (unless you’re trying to write Python). I also really love its macro functionality, I have a couple of re-used DOM structures programmed in there right now as well as my multi-line comment format.

https://winscp.net/eng/download.php

Arguably, the best part of Dreamweaver is the built in FTP client that lets you push changes directly to the server, but set Notepad++ as your primary editor in this, and suddenly you even have that feature, as this will sync temp folders back to the server. This is probably the best FTP client I’ve seen on Windows, with full support for SFTP and SSH (built on PuTTY) with all sorts of encryption and authentication options. It’s also hugely configurable and fairly dependable. If you’re working on a remote server using a Windows machine, this is probably how you should be accessing the file system.

https://www.putty.org/

I hope that as a web developer you don’t have to learn to be a server administrator, but as a web developer I am telling you you’ll probably have to learn at least a little bit about Unix/Linux server administration, as they are by far the most popular web server stacks out there, and you’ll be controlling them with an SSH client at some points, even if a web interface is available. This is a great one, with all sorts of authentication options, so if (like us) you know you need root access to a server remotely, but you don’t like the idea of protecting that with just a simple password, you can set up Public/Private key pairs with encryption passphrases.

http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Let me be clear on this: WAMP, which stands for Windows Apache, PHP, MySQL, is great to have. It’s good for training, it’s good for prototyping tools without having to wait for a virtualized server to start up, but the differences in environments between running Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Windows versus Linux will bite you eventually. Don’t expect to be able to push anything you worked on in WAMP directly to your Linux based server without having to fix a few problems here and there. That said, I have a number of things I run in my WAMP server all the time (linting, IP geolocation, domain DIGs, and a few others). It’s a great tool, but it isn’t a replacement for a staging server.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

You should be using a virtual machine for your staging server. That way you can simulate things like network communications and how your code will actually be run on Linux. Virtual Box is free and powerful. You’ll need to get ISOs for whatever operating system you intend to run, and you should be aware that at least some versions of Windows have it written into their License agreement that you can’t run them virtualized.

https://www.gimp.org/

Gimp is powerful. I don’t really know how to use it well. It’s always been one of those things where I know I need to sit down and teach myself, but since I’ve fallen far into the trenches of server backend work, I haven’t ever had the motivation. Mostly, I use this to resize images when I notice that a website is loading a 14MB PNG on the homepage for some unknown reason. Please designers, think of the mobile phones, keep total page loads (Including all resources, pictures, scripts, and DOM structure) as close to or below 1MB as you can, especially if your site is supported by ad revenue, as there’s no telling how much the ads will need to load on top of that.

https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

GrepWin is an implementation of Grep functionality on Windows. For those of you who aren’t aware, Grep is a terminal tool on Linux/Unix that uses a very efficient algorithm to search through large amounts of text for whatever you define, be it flat text, or something represented by a regular expression. It’s super useful for renaming an included document or global variable, and can really save your bacon if your error reporting is being vague. I like this particular implementation because it has context menu integration, so it’s as easy to use as right clicking in the directory you want to search in and telling it to search. It also supports text replacement with backups, so this simple tool is extremely useful more often than I’d like to admit.

https://gitforwindows.org/

The last tool is an implementation of Git for windows that also includes a Bash terminal. This is important because a lot of developers work in Linux, and so installation directions might only be available as Bash code, this makes it easy to move past that step without being bogged down translating that into Windows CMD code. This is a full implementation of Git, so it comes with all of the version control features and easy project building that Git provides. If you end up working with Electron or Node.JS in general, you’ll end up leaning on this pretty hard.

And that’s it. I’m hoping that later this week I can get into more interesting stuff, but I wanted to have a foundational post of the resources I might reference and the tools I’m using for people to fall back on. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had to reference when I was starting out, especially since all of the tools I’m using now are free and Open Source, and making that change has sped up my workflow significantly, as the only application I’ve listed here with any noticeable boot time is Gimp, something I hated about Dreamweaver every time I had to shut the computer down for whatever reason.

I plan on coming back to this post periodically and updating it as my opinions change, or I become aware of other resources that should be on here. Eventually I’ll also be lining out a software for Linux section, but I’m still shopping around for an affordable and stable Linux development machine.