What software concepts or domains have you been intimidated by?

I was ridiculously intimidated by the command line when I was studying computer science. I literally think I missed the first day of that particular class and was completely behind the rest of the way. (I wound up dropping the class and stopped studying CS).

In hindsight everything I was doing in that class was super basic, but I was literally frozen with anxiety at the time. I felt like a gigantic imposter.

In college, one of the most notorious classes was C++ programming. For whatever reason, I had a hard time wrapping my head around pointers. It wasn't until an OS class the following year when they finally clicked for me.

I think when you first learn something that's completely foreign to you it's hard to really understand it until you actually see why it's needed in the real world.

I have overcome that feeling for things like C++, but still get intimidated by things that are totally new to me. Also, regular expressions. I still hate using those today.

Docker or maybe DevOps as a whole, up to now it has been the hardest thing to go and learn by myself.

The reason for that is that these concepts make a lot of sense on big cloud infrastructures, places where I don't really permission to try stuff and I'm a very empirical person.

Outside that, personal projects for example it just doesn't make sense, like why should I care about setting up sonar or a dockerfile for my glorified todo list?

The result is that I've been working around docker for around three years now, and remain oblivious to anything outside of setting up local databases with docker compose.

Networking, and I'm still a handicap when it comes to basics, ports, ips, LAN vs VPN vs the Internet ...
This is to advocate for anyone studying, when you first don't like a technology let it aside at first, take it easy, eaaaasy, like don't look at it, and with time, that frustration could go away,
Because for me, I had that frustration steady, because I didn't revise myself !

lately, looking for a back-end positions, and through interviews I always insisted on: I hope there would be no networking or cloud decisions to take, otherwise, I need a pair and assistance in that etc. They really don't comprehend that maybe it is more of a feeling than competence.. because at least they see I can code in different contexts already.

I was intimidated by emacs-lisp; so very different from my experiences...or so I thought. I just started writing simple functions to automate things and built up from there. Now, I have "connected" this language to my personal "knowledge" and see similarities and patterns emerge.

1) Definitely, JavaScript and all around it: principally weak typing with all the side effects like []+{} == '[object Object]'. Later on, TypeScript and analogs started fixing it, but the basis remains a piece of alien matter.
Remedy: avoid frontend as much as possible:) Luckily I can do it without harm to career.
2) Any development site (corporation, etc.) which races for apparent features without care on quality, lacking proper testing... There are much more of them than visible from external.
One can avoid work for them, but it's too hard even to get known the concrete product have lacked a basic development culture.
3) IBM (especially Z) and Microsoft words. They both contrive own worlds with loads of peculiar, but, while for IBM it could be justified at least partially, for Microsoft, this is univocal NIH.
Fortunately I develop for Unix world nearly whole my career:)

Oh my goodness. So much. In my case it's not language or concept specific, really.

Sometimes I open up a load of code and I'm just boggled by what looks like huge complexity. Sometimes it makes me shut down and distract myself with something much easier.

Eventually after I give myself a good kick, I manage to feel my way through and finally I start to get a feel for the structure, and the big scary thing becomes a bunch of smaller doable things...

Docker, I know the basics but I'm intimidated about the more complex parts of it. Like creating complex networks.

I should tackle it someday, but haven't needed it for now...

The GIT commands.

I was terrified of making any mistakes using GIT commands, especially if you are currently working on a master branch and didn't work at other branch. I didn't know how to use rebase, one time I've used rebase and my current work is gone replaced by the other branch.

As time goes by, I understand the concept of GIT while working on a real product (I've never understood the concept if I just reading the documentation).

So if there is any of you still terrified using GIT, don't worry, keep learning. You'll be there!

Microservices

On school was terrified of C++

Strict types.

Not gonna lie, I love them now. Even though I only scratched the surface of what they do.

Learning C for my uni assignments and till this day I won't want to be near C or C++