Today I spent five to six hours wrestling an automated deployment setup for software I'm writing. 

Up to now, I’ve been pushing everything manually.
Today was the day I decided, “Alright… time to automate this.”

And it suuuuuckked..

Somewhere between 30 and 40 failures in a row..
error after error
bug after bug
fix one thing, another is revealed..
I felt like I was crawling through a dark cave with no idea how long it would go on.

Every new error dragged up that old fear:
“What if I'm actually not awesome at this?”
“What if I don't get it figured out in a "regular" amount of time?”

My mind was doing the whole doom-spiral routine.
I hate failing.. especially when I can’t see the end.
It felt endless.
Heavy.
Like suffering for no reason.

But I kept going.
One fix at a time.
One attempt at a time.
No breaks long enough to lose momentum, but enough to breathe.

That’s really all you can do in these moments..
Keep moving.
Keep trying.
Keep testing.
Keep chipping away at the darkness.

Not perfectly.
Not necessarily calmly.
Or heroically.
Just.. consistently.

And then.. eventually.. it clicked.
Things started passing.
The errors stopped fighting.
The lights came back on.

That’s how it always goes.
You never know which attempt is “the one,”
but one of them always is..
if you don’t quit.

Whatever dark cave you’re in right now..
keep going.

Come back tomorrow if you have to,
just don’t quit before the breakthrough.

🚀

​- James