At the start of the apprenticeship, I was filled with a lot of anxiety—about starting, about my team, the tech stack, the project, being productive, work-life balance... basically everything. Since this is my first dev role, I had no idea what to expect, and there were a lot of unanswered questions that could only be resolved through experience.

I’ve grown a lot in the last few weeks. One big area of growth has been learning to accept the discomfort. We're constantly learning, and coding isn’t easy, especially when you’re dealing with a new language, framework, and a bunch of developer tools just to contribute to the team’s codebase. I’ve also gotten better at speaking up about my issues and getting comfortable with technical language so I can explain my problems, solutions, or theories clearly. I can't just say, "I need this to make this work" anymore. Now I break it down, like: "My issue is I need this data type to be passed as the payload, but I'm currently receiving an error referencing a mismatch between payloads and headers" (yay, Java & Spring!).

I've also grown more patient with myself, realizing that I’m still very new to this environment. I’m learning to be okay with the fact that it takes time to feel comfortable and fluent enough to be self-sufficient.

I’ve learned a lot in these few weeks, but the main lesson is this: anything is possible, and everything has a solution—you just have to find it! If it doesn’t work, refactor, ask questions, and advocate for yourself!