It's not just you. Some things are always a pain.

Sometimes, especially when you're at the beginning of your career, it can seem that you're following the instructions and getting nowhere - while everyone else seems to find it terribly easy.

So if you're ever feeling like your last technical test was abord the Kobayashi Maru, I get it.

Sometimes it's something you haven't been taught yet. Sometimes you've been shown it, but it hasn't clicked. Sometimes you do everything right, and you grok the problem, but the documentation is missing a vital step.

And you fail anyway.

And it can be pretty disheartening.

And you're still probably not an impostor.

Do you remember a while back, some people started posting (tweeting, when that was still a thing) confessions like, "I've been a dev 20 years and I don't know how dependency injection works". Or like, "I took down production in my first week at my new job"? They were strangely comforting. It was nice to see how other people screwed up.

I want to describe some of the times I experience exactly the same thing even after, well, decades. So here I am, trying something new. A series¹ of posts.

1. Series: n. A number of objects or events arranged or coming one after the other in succession. I know there's only one post so far. One is a number! ↩