While in the middle of my journey of designing the front end of the website, I ran into a large, time-consuming problem.

I had a meeting with my teammates who were both working on the backend. They told me that they made a quick and easy way to deploy the site. Unfortunately, for me, it was not easy to set everything up. It took me a few nights after work to get everything working as it should. Fortunately, I accomplished everything I set out to do. However, it humbled me as a developer, as I feel it should not have taken me so long to figure it out.

I feel different from other students considering I have not done any internships. Everything I learned was either in class or through trial and error. There are good ways of coding that I never really added to my toolset.  For instance, I am not very good with Git. This has given me a feeling of impostor syndrome. I sometimes feel like contributing to a project is quite challenging. The last thing I want to do is make a mistake and delete my classmates’ entire project.

Also, as a Windows user, I run into a lot of issues frequently. Whenever a professor or classmate says to “just type sudo ____ (etc.)“, I try it, only to see an error like, “Sudo command not recognized”, leading me down a rabbit hole of trying to make things work on my system. I have run into many issues with installing things incorrectly or having path issues that have cost me dozens of hours troubleshooting. This troubleshooting has caused a lot of frustration considering it often has nothing to do with issues related to the project itself.

So, you might be wondering what the challenge was that I faced in my group project. All I tried to do was set up the command line on VS Code so I wouldn’t need to use a separate window. Once I managed to finish that, I tried cloning the GitHub project locally. This required reinstalling VS Code and following several steps to make everything work properly.

In the end, I managed to get everything set up so that I could push, build, and deploy our project to AWS very quickly. Once it started working, I made peace with the lost time and felt pride in my persistence and ability to solve a seemingly insurmountable task. It might be seen as trivial by some of my peers, but I feel very accomplished.

While studying at OSU, I learned some critical lessons. Firstly, it is important to accept that some things might take longer for some people, but being able to solve the problem on your own is important. Secondly, it is essential to give yourself enough time to finish a task, considering many things can go wrong and slow down your progress. Finally, the most important lesson I learned is to make sure you are using efficient hardware and software. If I had installed a Linux OS on my computer as well as VS Code with a built-in terminal when I started studying at OSU, I’m sure it would have saved a lot of time and prevented many hardships.