I just spent 6 hours learning and building out a Node.js project that didn't work -- and I couldn't be happier.

I've used Node.js in many projects, but as of yesterday decided I needed to understand WHY I was using it. It's always been a dependency I've installed for a hybrid app framework I use, but I never fully understood why I needed it. So I read up on a ton of docs, did a course on Treehouse, and started applying what I learned to an old project.

My project was a simple webapp that's core function was retrieving the status code of a prolific cryptocurrency website, and putting the response through a conditional statement to either display "Up" or "Down" onto the webpage.

A few months ago I ran into a ton of trouble with CORS and gave up. After picking up Node and seeing how easily I was able to retrieve the necessary information, I figured I'd jump back into my project.

After fiddling with it for a few hours, zoning in on my goal, and searching some errors on StackOverflow, I was coming to the conclusion that Node wasn't going to work for this particular project. It registered to me that I completely ignored Node's primary use case.

Node was not designed for running in a browser. It was designed specifically to bring your .js out of the browser.

I spent this entire morning super pumped about finishing an old project that simply can't work with the way I built it, and I feel more accomplished than I have when I've finished projects.

I'm pretty new to developing. While today may not have been a great success, it was definitely an "Ah ha!" moment that taught me a lot.

If you're also new to development, you should chalk situations like this up to a win. It's time well spent, and you probably won't make the same mistake again. Learn why you're using the tools you're using.