At some point, creating something stops being the challenge.
It’s deciding to share it, to actually put it out there, knowing other people will see it. That’s a whole different level.
When I started my YouTube channel, I wasn’t expecting to become a millionaire, but I did secretly hope it would all feel a bit more… natural. Record a video, upload, done. Instead, it came with a learning curve I definitely hadn’t signed up for.
There were scripts I carefully wrote and then completely ignored. There was a lot of improvisation, somewhere between “this will be fine” and “let’s just see what happens.”
And then came the hardest part: watching myself back.
I had tried before, watching recordings of my sessions, and I couldn’t get past 20 seconds. My voice sounded like an angry goose. The pauses were painful. The whole thing felt deeply cringe.
So naturally… I avoided it.
But becoming my own YouTube editor changed that. If I wanted videos, I had to watch my recordings. No escape. And after a couple of edits I stopped watching to judge and started watching to improve. What once felt unbearable became part of the process. Editing became less painful. Even manageable.
Let’s not say enjoyable, let’s stay grounded, but definitely no longer something I avoided nor feared.
YouTube is brilliant for demos. It’s great for showing how things work and walking people through ideas. But sometimes, a video isn’t enough. Sometimes you need something more practical. Something reusable. Something people can actually implement.
And that’s where this story takes a turn.
I decided to build my own colour contrast checker in Power BI. I started simple, using calculated columns, and it worked perfectly well. That could have been the end of it. But curiosity got the better of me.
I wanted to experiment with User Defined Functions, a fairly new feature in Power BI. After some trial and error, I managed to get it working. I had built my own contrast checker.
So I shared it. And something quite unexpected happened, people were interested.
If you work in accessibility, you’ll know that it isn’t always seen as exciting. It’s important, yes, but not necessarily something people engage with enthusiastically. So I leaned into making it more technical, more visual, more engaging. And suddenly… it was.
Then a colleague suggested an enhancement that completely changed things. What if, instead of simply flagging when a colour combination failed, the tool could suggest the nearest colour that would actually pass the contrast ratio?
For some reason, it reminded me of something I’d done ages ago with the Haversine formula, basically using it to figure out which geographic point was closest to a set of coordinates. Completely different context, but the same kind of thinking
At that point, I considered asking someone else for help but than I decided to give it a go myself. With a mix of persistence, experimentation, and a bit of help from Copilot, I slowly worked my way through it. And eventually… I got there.
Now I had something I didn’t just want to show in a video. I wanted to share it properly, something others could use, adapt, and build on. So I went back to GitHub.
Not for the first time. I had tried before, and each time I walked away feeling more confused than when I started. It always felt intimidating, like everything was written in a completely different language.
This time was no different at the start. Creating an account was straightforward enough, but the moment I tried to create a repository, the confusion kicked in again. The terminology, the layout, the process, none of it felt intuitive. It genuinely felt like learning a new language from scratch.
But this time, I didn’t give up. Copilot became my guide. At every step, I was taking screenshots, asking what to do next, and trying to figure out where things were on my screen. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t smooth, but it worked.
I created my first repository. Then another. Then another.
And just like with YouTube the process began to feel familiar. I still didn’t know everything, but I no longer felt completely lost.
What made the biggest difference, though, wasn’t just the tools. It was the community. After I shared my ordeal, people offered help, shared suggestions, and pointed me towards learning resources. There was a genuine sense of support from people who understood how difficult those first steps can be.
If you’re at the beginning of your GitHub journey and it all feels overwhelming, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just learning, and learning is rarely tidy.
It’s completely fine if the interface feels confusing. It’s fine if you need to ask questions that feel basic. It’s fine if you lean on tools like Copilot while you figure things out. None of that makes you less capable; it just makes you human.
Start small. Take it one step at a time. Share the messy version instead of waiting for the perfect one. Every repository you create, every tiny improvement you make, every moment of “wait… I think I get this now” builds confidence in ways you don’t always notice immediately.
You don’t need to master everything at once. You just need to keep going, and trust that each step is taking you somewhere worth reaching.
