Last weekend, I had the chance to volunteer at a GoBridge event taught by Bill Kennedy of Ardan Labs. I’m trying to make 2017 my year of learning Go, so helping out at the event felt like a natural extension and a great way to connect with more people in the Go community.

Going in with Ruby as my first language, I braced myself for static typing and wanted concurrent programming to bend my brain, but that’s not really what happened at all.

Over the past couple of years, one thing I’ve become more and more aware of is the unease and uncertainty of diving into a new project. Not matter what the new X is, I find I always go through the same set of uncomfortable feelings on my initial approach.

Now, though, I’m starting to become familiar enough with this process that – even though the discomfort doesn’t go away in the initial learning stages – I can embrace it, coexist with it, and forge ahead in learning, because of the strategies I’m going to lay out here.