When I joined my first organization, I was quickly thrown into the deep end. Our senior engineer was on vacation, and I was tasked with debugging a critical production issue. Not only was I unfamiliar with the codebase, but I also had no idea how to set up the API on my local environment to replicate the issue. Feeling the pressure, I turned to Google, documentation, and anything I could find to piece together a solution.
The internal docs weren’t much help, so I leaned on my manager for some specific configuration questions. Most of my progress, though, came from relentless Googling and trial and error. It was frustrating, but every small breakthrough felt like a big win.
In the end, I learned a powerful lesson: just do it. Tackling problems with only partial knowledge is uncomfortable, but if you keep pushing and ask for help when you need it, you’ll get there. This experience gave me confidence; the next time I faced an unfamiliar problem, I knew I could figure it out. Embracing discomfort became my way of learning, and it’s a skill I value deeply as a software engineer.