Survival Story #1: My Baptism of Fire in Node.js (And Why I’d Still Recommend It)

Here’s a Backstory

What comes to mind when you think of a struggling tech student?

A little bit of everything. New tech stack in the market? Check. I’m on it.
DSA? The supposed holy grail of cracking interviews — and I’m still so far behind!
It takes me a week to grasp the concept, another to actually apply it and in the third I’ve already diagnosed myself with something chronically wrong for being so slow.
Live Projects? Do not even ask. I can barely keep myself running, let alone a codebase.

This chaos outlines a voluntary ritual every tech student undergoes.
I hit that wall a lot. You juggle ten things, lose track of nine and realize the last one was only in your head.

What I failed to realize was that I never tried piecing two and two together.

My primary backend environment was never Node.js.
It was good ol’ Java, the go-to of every self starter, the harbinger of verbosity. And like every self proclaimed student developer, I made neat little schedules and stuck to them diligently. Memorized syntax, hopped frameworks like I changed tabs and even got the Eclipse cogwheel turning.
I was curious, sure — and I did pick up a lot of things.
But looking back, it was also very transient. I was never etching anything onto memory long term.

The Big Bad Break (?)

Nope, I did not attain magical enlightenment shortly thereafter.

It was far from it. Between bouts of intense focus and losing my mind, I did one thing I’m grateful for. I deliberately reached out to startups, highlighting my curiosity to learn and offering a low maintenance sponge of an intern. While the marketing strategy was questionable, it was born out of a genuine interest to gather direction. I wanted to make sense of things, and I needed an anchor.

A couple of months went by, with little to no fruitful results. That was okay, I thought—I probably did come across a little sketchy. But try I did, nevertheless. I was determined to gain traction.

And then it happened! I got a callback, one of them said they were ready to accommodate me. It aligned with my interests, sure — but what was required of me also scared me a little.

Enter Node.js and the beautiful mess that followed.
I was tossed into an ecosystem I had zero experience with, and — that’s right — no programming familiarity to fall back on. JavaScript was almost alien to me, I’d steered clear of it as much as I could to avoid stretching myself too thin.
And now it was staring back at me with a wide grin.

Flailing, Failing, and Figuring It Out

“JavaScript has its quirks” is a phrase I’ve heard more times than I could count. You think you’ve got the hang of it, until you absolutely don’t . Coming from the rigid, no surprise world of Java, asynchronous programming felt like a history lesson I never signed up for.
The only async-await I knew was with my unreliable internet connection.

Thankfully, it did not take long to start connecting the dots. I already understood how flow control works— thanks to my tryst with Java — so all I had to do was uproot those learnings and replant them here. That might sound poetic, but it was anything but easy. I was juggling full time classes, an exhausting commute I won’t even try to justify and now I had committed to my promise of being a resourceful intern. What made it manageable was the team I was working with, they were supportive, patient, and never made me feel rushed.

When Promises Finally Made Sense

Once the haze lifted, I started dedicating time to understand what was expected of me and broke my tasks down into manageable chunks. This is where my internet-scouring skills finally paid off.

Soon, I began rolling out functional features. They were not perfect, they never are.

But my mentors had one golden rule: “Get it working first, optimize later.” I stuck to it like the Bible of backend development. Funnily enough, I started learning more by diving into unfamiliar concepts than I ever had by overthinking.

Before I knew it, I had internalized Marie Kondo’s less clutter policy and set up an end to end authentication service - think Google OAuth, optional 2-factor, tidy session cookies, and a weekly cron job that sweeps away stale tokens.
Don’t worry if that sounded like jargon, it was safe to say I was past the “stare-at-a-screen-and-cry” stage.

Learning: The Sequel (Because There’s Always More)

Despite the mental gymnastics it took to get here, I still wouldn’t want it any other way.

Does this imply I’m anywhere close to having it figured out? Not even close. What I do know is that I’m far from the finish line. Every bug, and every “wait—it actually works?” reminds me how far I’ve come from from second-guessing every step to diving headfirst into challenges I once tried to sidestep.
I’m hoping to share more about how I navigate this — the wins, the fails, and all the weird little bugs in between. So if you’re curious about how I build (or break) things, stick around!