Tonight after we got home from the DC Littles Munch, Missy and Rachel sat down to slay some electronic demons in Diablo 3, and I got out my trusty laptop, and got to work tinkering on a web app side project of mine.
I had a very specific agenda for the night, which was to run through a tutorial article I found about installing security in a Grails application. I got about halfway through the article when my environment tossed a lung, because something about its setup just wasn't compatible with the version of the plugin that I installed.
I took a nice deep breath, backed everything out, and started over. I tossed the article aside completely, and instead found a tutorial based on the latest and greatest version of the security plugin.
20 minutes later, I had this:
Success!
The best part of the whole thing was being self-sufficient about recognizing my problem, troubleshooting it, finding a solution, and ultimately implementing it.
It feels wonderful to me that I can teach myself new things, and move steadily forward doing so. I remember years ago feeling that without a class to take, or a mentor to show me, I could never make progress learning such an immense volume of daunting new technical things. I was wrong. The truth is, I can do anything, learn anything, one step at a time.
That's a secure feeling indeed.