The past few months have been humbling for me, programming-wise. I’ve struggled a lot with Google Cloud Platform, without much success. It’s been frustrating. It has also forced me to re-evaluate my progress as a programmer.

The real issue has been that I failed at being a self-reliant problem solver. It’s one of the hallmarks of a good technologist to be able to break down and solve technical problems, and I haven’t been able to do that with Google Cloud Platform. Not for lack of trying. I’ll spare you the details, but to sum up, I failed to build the thing I wanted to using GCP.

This isn’t the end of the world, but the failure has irked me. So for now, I’ve retreated from ‘ops’ to just work in Python, which is safe and familiar.*

Anyhow, all of this has sparked some self-reflection, and made me think a lot about why I want to program in the first place. Ultimately, my reason is that programming can provide us with opportunities to do all kinds of things we couldn’t do previously. And the experience of the expansive possibilities of programming usually comes early on in the coding journey.

So I’m going to focus on beginnings, and the power of learning. Hopefully, it can help me tap into the sense of potential that comes with learning; and to try to share it.

* maybe I’ll try again with GCP at some point.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.