I'm quite self conscious about my programming ability. I think I'm sub-par and I always find myself out of the loop when my peers start talking about projects. What should I do to improve?

Observe what you think they're doing right and try to do that. Strengthen your technical skills by reading and experimenting. Also, do you love what you do? If not it'll be hard to reach success.

@isarant I quite love what I do. I mainly do the OOP languages like Java and C both on the mobile app development and also just normal dev. Been learning web development as well and I really enjoy it.

@mpotratz, where I work there is even a spot on our time tracker where it says "Today I learned..." and you can share with everyone else what you found out. You can check other people's discoveries when you have a little time or just wait for the newsletter :)

@mpotratz, it's not my idea, I just hope my bosses don't mind :)

The best way I have found to gain good experience is to fix bugs. Rake on as many as u can and fix them. You will learn the codebase and gain vital experience on how the system really works. Plus you will make your customers happy...

@Tggmbi fuck that shit. If your code base is a steaming pile of outdated trash, this will only make you feel dumb and waste your time.

My employer tried to sell me on this. I've never felt worse about writing software.

Learn the basic structure of your code base, write in it, and look into bugs every week or so unless otherwise directed. Any more than that could, depending on the size of your project, totally overwhelm you.

Try pair programming and pay extra attention during code reviews.

Just be optimistic! 😎