Programming can sometimes be painful. Things don’t go right, constraints come early and often, scope is expanded right after your final code review, tests don’t pass, prod goes down, alerts wake you up, or goodness gracious, your boss. Few pull requests survive contact with the real world unscathed. In your moment of urgency, there are many who will tell you there is an easy path, a linter config, a limit to your function length, a number of components per file, a max line length, a simple new testing strategy that doesn’t involve mocking your server, or maybe avoiding some kind of global variable declaration. William Goldman might have said it best in his classic, The Princess Bride: “programming is pain, highness, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something”. I will walk through the hard, sometimes obvious, sometimes not steps that through diligent practice will help you level up your programming confidence and ability and remember the joy that being a programmer can be.