Turn your weakness into strength

At the beginning of this year, we had kind of funny situation in a company where I worked before. We were developing a portal and there needed to be done some Javascript development. And somehow, we had managed to get all people into team without good Javascript skill - even the front-end guy 😂
So we had to develop a Javascript app and we decided that I'm going to do this.

I must say, that at this point I didn't know much about Javascript.
My skill was almost nothing - I knew how to import Jquery to project, write some selectors and do console.log() for debugging.
That was basically all my skill.
I think the reason why I was weak in Javascript is that I'm quite new in this industry and mostly I worked as a back-end developer.

But yeah, when I got that project I knew that it's going to be really tough times. In my personal development, I had this thinking that I wanna be a good back-end developer. At this time I didn't want to waste my time on front-end languages (at this point I didn't know, that Javascript is used even in the back-end).

I feel that I was at the cross road on this point. I had to think do I finish somehow this project and forget all about Javascript or do I really start learning Javascript and get good at this.
So I decided that I'm going to learn Javascript and it wasn't easy. I worked and learned at the same time.
I spent all my free time watching videos about Javascript, reading and writing code - on the train to work and to home, at work and after work at home.

Could you imagine, you accept the project in a language you don't know almost anything and you must get this project ready by the deadline. I had to be really stupid or confident.
But yea with 5 weeks I managed to ship this project and it did the job that it supposed to do.
Of course, there were no tests.
Of course, the structure wasn't right.
Of course, there were misuses of promises and callback, but it worked.
When I think back on this situation and someone asks me, do you wanna do this again and how much time it would take you now?

I would answer yes I wanna do this again and the time would be same. Only this time I would ship better code with better architecture and with tests.

Now I'm still learning Javascript and will not stop learning and practice it. My Javascript skill is pretty good now, I feel confident with this language and I will use this in my future project.

So you may ask, Aaron what's the point of this story? This story got me thinking about how I managed to take one of my weakness and turn it into one of my strongest skills. I think anyone can do this if they just want to. It doesn't have to be a programming language, think about anything. Think what is the one thing that you could learn so that it would make your life easier and start working on it.