I don’t know how to do it because I haven’t learned how to do it

Writing APIs with Laravel and Lumen has always been a breeze for me, so imagine the confidence I had reading through the Project Requirement Document for the Andela Fellowship Cycle 40. I will be pushing out a post about my Andela journey sometime soon.

Everything was fine until i got to carefully read the description for Task 2 — Node/Express JS to build my APIs for the application, my mind kicked back hard immediately as i thought about not being able to submit my task because, in my mind, this meant having to learn a new language.

I knew I had no choice as I had pre-determined to go through with the bootcamp and get into the Andela Fellowship. But then, I thought about how hard as a “backend guy”, it was for me to complete task 1, i remembered the cold, lonely, sleepless nights in my room writing HTML and CSS for days until i had something to submit and what it might take for me to learn Node/Express to be able to setup APIs in a few days.

Incidentally, during the Christmas break, I had a discussion with my siblings on avoiding challenges — interestingly, i spoke extensively about how mental laziness makes one take the path of least resistance in life and how it becomes a pattern in decision-making including how I see it in the way people drive on Nigerian roads.

I finally came to the realization that laziness was the only thing stopping me from picking up a new — well, not so new language, considering the fact that I am familiar with Javascript already. I knew if I could put in the shift required, I could get it done. It hit me that I was trying to take the path of least resistance so I just kicked it off, I pored through a good number of Medium posts, Scotch.io posts, Github repos and dug into the codes.

Few days into the challenge, my two PC batteries stopped holding power, i.e. they became Desktops same day. So, this meant I had to deal with a lot of outages. Every time, I would angrily curse under my breath and just curl on my bed, waiting for the next time power would be restored. I had to also cut my holiday short and depart my family so, I could have few days of total concentration to finish my tasks — needless to say, i missed out on some really good food and drinks. A day before turning in my codes, a windows update crashed my pc and i lost some good number of hours of work, I stayed up for over 36 hours, taking few minutes breaks in-between.

Every step provided an opportunity for me to give up but i just kept chipping away at it. Now, I have it settled in my mind that the only things I don’t know how to do are things I have not taken time to learn and if I don’t give up on any challenge, I could scale that hurdle and learn something new.

Well, I have Node JS/Express added to my stack now.