[nostrademons]

I think that "confidence" bifurcates once you gain experience. There's confidence in your ability, and there's confidence in your accomplishments. The former tends to decline, because you realize there's so much more out there that you could be doing to but just don't have the time or mental capacity for. The latter tends to increase as you rack up projects and see people use them.

I thought I was hot shit when I entered college, and I had the test scores - but no tangible accomplishments - to prove it. And then I tried to convert those test scores into tangible accomplishments, and found that maybe I wasn't as hot shit as I thought I was. I think I'm significantly dumber now than I was as a 19-year-old hotshot fresh out of high school. I can see all the alternative ways of doing things, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes I'm still making. And looking ahead of me, I see all this complexity and all these challenges for the things I want to do, and I didn't see that when I was a wide-eyed kid, and it makes me feel pretty stupid.

But looking behind me, I've done some pretty cool stuff. FictionAlley.org. Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours. Ported Arc to JavaScript. 2 products for somebody else's startup that never went anywhere, and a startup of my own that also never went anywhere. Wonder Wheel & Search Options. The websearch visual redesign of 2010. Google's Authorship program. Google's first canvas-based homepage doodle. The [let it snow] easter egg.

And I think about how I just made tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people happy last weekend, and it feels pretty good. So even though I don't know anything, I must be doing something right.