TL;DR: you are not alone. Every web dev feels this way. Learn what you can, and in a year you'll look back and know what you could have done better, but will st

TL;DR: you are not alone. Every web dev feels this way. Learn what you can, and in a year you'll look back and know what you could have done better, but will still have some level of the same feeling of being an imposter. As long as you kep coding and trying to learn, you ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER and will continue to progress. Sadly the industry just progresses faster and it feels like everyone EXCEPT you are progressing faster. I think we've all been here. I've been a web developer for almost 15 years (freelance, agency, in-house, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Wordpress) and I STILL feel completely useless most days and on most projects. Even when I work with Junior Devs, I feel they are faster, know more popular frameworks, produce cooler output than I do. I've had the conversation with managers about my productivity and skillset. Every single time when I've had the 'imposter syndrome' conversation, my managers would very bluntly tell me my productivity was shit, but my knowledge and code were great. The problem always seems to be myself overthinking or self-doubting, so I become a self-fulling prophecy loop of failure. Have the talk with the contractor you are working with. Listen to what they tell you. Learn from it. Know that a year from now you will probably feel the same BUT will look back on this project and clearly know what you could have done better and will have more experience to do so going forward. I think the problem with Web Devs is that we are always comparing ourselves to someone better and further along in their careers, rather than with our peers at our own level. Also, I think since our industry moves so fast and there is always something new to learn that we feel we are falling behind and that adds to an already stressful project/career. And as for "the code base doesn't look like what you were taught in uni...is this really it?", yes - yes this is really how it is. After I freelanced for a year (and was sure to follow 'best practices') I went on to work in-house for a multi-million $ e-comm company with a team of developers. After 5 years I spent the next 5 years at a branding agency on a team of 3 devs. At neither place did I ever see a 'style-guide', code tests, official processes or best practices, or docs. At the in-house position, we actually built the e-comm cart up from scratch and you'd be lucky to find a comment in the code, let alone official docs or style-guide. In the real world, at most companys and on most projects (not all, I'm sure there are exceptions at much larger places), you don't have the time, nor does anyone else have the inclination to spend the time on creating documentation or style-guides for 99% or projects. It's just not the priority most times. University is good for THEORY, but for web dev it is usually grossly outdated and not representative of the real world in Web Dev.