Starting difficulties
The start is too damn hard! This article by Lea Verou mirrored, uncannily closely and down to the error messages and TypeScript-as-JavaScript mistake, a recent experience I had with JavaScript — well, TypeScript actually. I wanted to... just try some js library on node. Cue the One does not simply meme.
Over the years I've been stopped embarrassingly many times at trying out new tech just because I couldn't get over that initial setup hurdle. What's worse is that this then fills me with dread and reticence every time I want to try something new. "It shouldn't be this hard, right?"
Of course, once I do get somewhere, my mind immediately switches stances to asking "why even bother documenting this?". There must be thousands of pages treating this exact topic. But then I remember, this was the way that worked for me. I had to wade through many pages to distill it down to just this. For this reason I will try and document on my blog the meager wins I have clawed back from the uncooperative hands of software environment setups: programming languages, daemons, etc. So these are my guides. There are many like them, but these ones are mine. And maybe they can help you too.