[rcaught]

I remember a defining struggle in the late 90's, while I was in high school and teaching myself how to make webpages.

My problem was a lack of javascript logic firing and the answer was to wait for document load. Simple, I know, but I had nobody around me (physically) that could help me and explaining the problem to people in forums seemed impossibly abstract, primarily because I did not understand what the problem was. It was the context around my code that I had to fix, but I kept looking in the code itself.

That was probably one of my first big "ah ha!" moments and these moments are one of the reasons I still love programming. Tenacity, luck and skill became irrevocably connected that day.

I've solved many other problems over the years, far tougher than this one, but maybe never tougher for me in a relative scale. If I had never solved that problem, I sometimes believe my life path would have been totally different.

[c22]

Limited access to informational resources can greatly hinder solution time. Some of my hardest challenges were implementing content for a MUD with a sparsely documented custom scripting language. Even with input from other devs there was a lot of trial and error and hacky workarounds.

Nowadays most of the problems I face have been solved by someone else in a slightly different context and searching for/implementing existing solutions is almost trivial.