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femolacaster
femolacaster

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When last did you try something hard?

When I mean hard, I mean something outside your comfort zone. Something you think you couldn’t do. What were the lessons learned? Were you successful? Did you fail?
Share your experiences.

Top comments (8)

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seeila profile image
Seeila

For me it was :

  • going from graphic designer to front-end developer
  • moving in another continent during the pandemic
  • teaching half of my colleagues React and PWAs while being the only one without an IT degree.

It was about challenging my imposter syndrome, fighting the unknown and meeting new people between two lock downs. But now, I know I'm capable to do anything I want and have won a lot of self confidence.

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minhquanma profile image
Quan Ma • Edited

Spent 2 days of my precious holiday break to complete the assignment for my new job.
The requirement involves many techniques & libraries that I've never been familiar of, in the end I passed the test :).
Thing I realized is that when being put in under high pressure we can definitely do something beyond our current ability

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femolacaster profile image
femolacaster

True. Pressure is underrated:).

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff • Edited

Obiously there are hard tasks, but you can always breakdown complex/hard tasks into smaller ones, and takle them one by one, making a hard task a lot simpler.

But to adear to the question I'll say it's being a tech lead/manager, it can be rather hard to not let your feelings influence how you communicate with people you're in charged of, and organizing tasks and work in a efficient way. Hard but rewarding, it just takes time and effort to learn it!

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ruchiket100 profile image
Ruchiket Borse

Right, we need to solve all our life problems like programer. Solve problems by breaking it into simple tasks

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kellskamuzu profile image
Kelvin Chidothi • Edited

Like literally everyday, l find something hard. But being a developer for years now l got to the point where l don't give up on code. l realised over the years that my strength came from my resilience.

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kthurman59 profile image
Errantghost

Great question!
Learning how to color comic books. I was terrified, completely overwhelmed. But, as I started to do it piece by piece I gained both insight and experience. I began to notice ways in which I was improving. Also watching videos on the subject I began to feel 'lost' less and less.
This then allowed me to get into painting and start to express myself creatively in ways I probably never have. It really spurred me to start branching into things I was interested in, but felt I could never 'get' or 'do.'
Biggest Takeaway: No matter how large something is, you can always chop it down and take it piece by piece.

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clpsplug profile image
C. Plug

1: Creating a game with a clear intent of selling it on game publishing sites like Steam
Although I have been coding small silly games (whose host site is now unfortunately down,) I have never done something big that would require serious coding design decisions and scheduling. But somehow, I challenged myself to do it single-handedly. I guess I was out of my mind then. I did suffer a mental breakdown (maybe a burnout combined with some other nearly-PTSD-inducing event) near the release, but I managed to do it. It was not a good attempt to be honest, but at least I learned pitfalls a hard way.

2: Reading the entire code in Python 2 written by somebody else, and rewriting it in Python 3 so that I can reproduce the result.
This story needs a context. That Python 2 code is a machine learning model implementation that used the prerelease version of Tensorflow. For my research project, I had to rewrite it so that I can conduct my research.

The bad news is that Python 2 was dead at that point, so I had to write it in 3. Things went even south when I realized that the prerelease version of TF is so confusing, it required a great amount of patience, several mental breakdown, and an enormous amount of time spent to comprehend the documentation.

Eventually I pulled it off, but having done this, I decided to make my code as readable as possible even if it was for my research project.