[fapjacks]

Honestly, the hardest technical problem I ever ran into was teaching myself C pointers and keeping at it until I fully grokked them. Now, this was in the early 90s, and I was a loner with only a second edition copy of the K&R book. There was no Stack Overflow, and the only technical people I knew were on the other end of a BBS connected to FidoNet, which only batch-updated once per night. In hindsight -- and with today's resources and ever-shrinking distance between human beings in a community -- this problem is trivial. I've seen some pretty wild things in my decades as a programmer, but I have never since encountered a technical problem that completely fucked me up like learning C pointers did back then.