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The company I work at recently has begun to implement a logging architecture into the service backend of our web application. Being a small startup in Taiwan, we do not have many (or any) Devops Engineers to implement this system. Due to this, the task was given to me, a budding NodeJS developer, and a unique condition was added onto the top: the entire project was to be written in Golang.

Now I have previously not had much experience with Golang or strong-typed languages in general. That combined with the infantile status of Google’s logging api (it was still in Alpha at the time) proved a unique challenge to me that I wasn’t sure I was able to do. To be honest, as a fairly Junior developer (I’ve been programming for 2 to 3 years), I felt terrified that I was going to be unable to get it done in the time allotted to the task. This fear mixed with a strict deadline threatened to hurt my sleep quality and bleed over into my work life.

However, long ago I read an article about development from one of the cardinal programming blogs from the dawning of the age of the Internet (I forgot which one) that mentioned how creating Software is about constantly pushing your limits. I decided to try and assuage my fears with consistent effort on the project, managing my mood, energy, and creativity daily. After pushing forth and seeking to break my Imposter’s Syndrome everyday I made a breakthrough. By the 5th day I was writing logs onto the Google cloud service, which, although not written in a modular form, broke my task up into small enough chunks for me to digest.

I guess through all of this rambling the moral of my story is to never give up. No matter what the discipline is, never EVER give up. Especially on a problem. Our brains learn through failure, not success, so it is important to keep pushing through failure and trying to overcome.

Only then can our tech dreams come true.

Leave a story about how you have succeeded in the comments below.

Have a great weekend!

-T