Everybody Struggles (especially with Docker)
December 27, 2022
Welcome to the second installment of my Outreachy internship blog posts. This week’s topic was “everybody struggles.” Actually, it was last week’s topic. I struggled so much to write this post that I’m putting it up a week late.
Maybe that’s no surprise. It’s easy to celebrate our victories. It’s much harder to acknowledge our weaknesses and failures. We want to appear competent and in control. We don’t want to look confused or lost. It makes us feel vulnerable, and it’s hard to feel vulnerable without also feeling threatened.
My life-long tendency has always been to flee from potential failure and shy away from situations where I might be vulnerable. I’d bash my head against a problem for hours rather than let anyone in on the fact that I was struggling with something, because in my mind to ask for help was to admit to weakness and I didn’t want anyone to think less of me. The irony was that by trying to win approval by maintaining an aura of supreme competence, I only drove people away. Others perceived me as cold and arrogant, when in reality I was just frightened.
Have you ever felt this way? I imagine that many people, perhaps even most, feel the same. I’ve met very few people who were open to the idea of asking for help or admitting that they didn’t know something. We’re so afraid of what other people think of us that we feel compelled to hide our struggles and our true selves, and then we agonize over the fact that no one “really” knows us. Once we start lying about who we are and what we know, it’s very difficult to stop.
Digression: are you old enough to remember Disney’s Aladdin? (The 1992 animated version; I haven’t seen the live action remake.) I was 12 when it came out, and it was one of the few films my family owned. My sister and I must have watched it a hundred times. We knew every song, every line; we could rattle the entire thing off by heart.
It’s a kid’s movie that I unashamedly love, and in my mind (and my heart) it remains the best portrayal of that essential fear that lives inside so many of us: that we who are, who we really are, fundamentally isn’t good enough. That we should be more; we should be better than we are.
But that fear leads only to frustration, self-loathing and pain. Far better that we search for a place of understanding and be at peace with who we are and with all of our flaws and limitations.
It’s hard and I’m definitely not there yet. I spent the day before Christmas trying to convert my internship project, initialized using the Vue CLI, to run using Vite. We’d only just started, so all I really needed was to reinitialize the project, pick all of the same settings, and attach our license and ReadMe – simple enough, right? The difficult part was getting the thing to run inside a Docker container. Although my mentors and I had gone over Docker several times, I didn’t really understand what I was doing or why; I was just copying commands. So when the container failed to load, I had no idea what the problem was or how to solve it.
Did I ask my mentors for help? I did not. Instead I spent the day Googling, reading documentation, checking StackOverflow and other websites. “I don’t need to bother them,” I told myself. “I’m smart enough to figure this out.” And that wasn't a bad way to start. The trouble was that once I started, I stopped being able to admit to myself that I wasn't getting anywhere.
I tried a hundred different things (an incredibly inefficient and ineffective approach) and eventually it worked! Or it seemed to, at any rate. I wasn’t sure why, but decided to take my small victory. I patted myself on the back, wrote a pull request and went off to celebrate my holidays. I tried not to think about how much time I’d wasted on the endeavor.
Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. I came back this morning to test my work, and whatever magic had made it work earlier had since ceased to function. It was throwing all the same errors as before, and I was back at square one. If only I’d asked for help last week, while my mentors were still in the office. As it is, everyone’s on holiday this week, and I face the tough decision of whether to keep at this problem or to work on something else.
I’m trying not to beat myself up, but it's a discouraging way to start the week. I console myself with the thought that sometimes the only thing that we can do is to learn from our mistakes.
So here's my lesson for you, dear reader: don't be like me. Ask for help.