Gods and demons live in Mt. Everest. So it is believed. Plenty of climbers die every year trying to reach its peak. Since I don’t enjoy walking in the snow, I find those climbers hard to understand. I’m sure it's pretty up there, but is it really worth risking your life? Sorry, but it just seems so f***ing "loco." That’s what I always thought. But I came to empathize more with them last week. That’s when I realized that I, too, was doing my own version of climbing Mt. Everest for the past two months.

‍

I’m writing this out of my thin-air memory… If you are a complete beginner at mountain climbing, there is a guided tour that takes about two months to hike up those highest peaks on the planet earth. No, not all the way top. It would only take you to its Base Camp which is located at an altitude of 5500m (18000ft). That’s still pretty high up. Higher than Machu Pichu and Tibet. But that’s only the entrance gate of the majestic mountain.

‍

I know it sounds uninspiring right off the bat, but I’m ready to turn back having reached the Base Camp.

‍

To me, the journey of climbing the mountain was learning a programming language called Liquid. The templating language they call themselves is based on Ruby. It was supposed to be one of those easier languages to master. You can use that to manipulate how you display merchandise on your Shopify site. Since I was a total beginner in programming, I “signed up” for a guided tour to go up the mountain. That is, I used a tool that lets you convert a website made outside of Shopify (with Webflow, in my case) to a Shopify-compatible template.

‍

After some trials and errors, and some accidental bug fixes of the converter tool, I achieved a small win: A customizable homepage in Shopify. A client can edit the products (text changes and image swaps) from Shopify’s dashboard without any coding. But unfortunately, I could not get my Shopify site to have filtering and sorting functions based on item colors and prices. For that, I need much more knowledge of the programming language.

‍

Should I keep climbing? I’ve already invested two months of my time trying to learn this. It would be a complete waste if I give up now. So keep going. Don’t stop now. The view. The sense of achievement. It’s worth it. It’s incredible. That’s what the mountaineers tell themselves during their death march. You can’t really think in the subzero temperature with low oxygen level nearing outer space. Turning around would ruin all your previous efforts. Don’t turn around. Keep going.

‍

But you must turn around. Sometimes it’s a weather condition. Sometimes it’s the other climbers causing traffic. Or it could just be the plain bad luck of you not feeling well. You could keep going, of course, but that’s the sure way to become one of the newest frozen bodies on the trail. You can at least become a permanent part of the realm that lets you define who you are.

‍

When you are climbing a mountain, it’s really easy to lose your location. Just when you thought you reached a summit, you discover that there are other mountains to climb. There is always a higher mountain to aim for. Just like that, there are always new programming languages to learn. I don’t want to go down that developer path. Some people feel at home in the low temperature and low oxygen conditions. It’s truly amazing to see how some people can “breath” the languages of technology. If I keep going from the Base Camp, that would mean I have to keep my pace with those tech Yetis.

‍

Enough. For me, the base camp was good enough. I’m satisfied with my achievement. I now know my limit and thus I know from where and when to collaborate with developers. It’s time to turn around and come back to the ground level because I have my own summit to climb.