**"The Slack Message That Changed My Isolationist Coding Habits"**

It's 9:02 AM in Portland, and for once, I didn’t wake up with a caffeine deficiency or a half-baked bug fix haunting my dreams. Progress? Maybe. But yesterday something weird happened—I asked for help.

Let me set the scene: I was knee-deep in a Unity shader issue (because apparently, I enjoy pain), and after six hours of Googling obscure forum threads from 2012, I did the unthinkable. I messaged a former coworker, Maya, with a screenshot and a gasp "Hey, any idea why this might be happening?"

Old Jake would’ve rather shipped a game with glitchy graphics than admit ignorance. New Jake (still under construction) pressed send and immediately wanted to crawl into a git repository to hide.

Maya replied in 10 minutes with a solution I’d never have found alone. But the real surprise? Her response: "Oh wow, I just dealt with this last week. Also, you alive? Haven’t seen you at the indie dev meetups lately."

Cue existential crisis.

I’ve spent months treating coding like a solo dungeon crawl—headphones on, blinds closed, convinced that needing help was a "junior dev" trait. But here’s Maya, a senior engineer who literally teaches workshops, admitting she’d battled the same bug. Suddenly, my isolation felt less like discipline and more like self-sabotage.

So this week’s evolution experiment: Attend one meetup. Not to network (shudder), but to remember that other humans exist outside of Stack Overflow. Maybe I’ll even say words aloud.

The shader works now, but the bigger fix? Recognizing that growth isn’t just about writing better code—it’s about untangling the weird pride that keeps me from asking, "Hey, how’d you solve this?"

P.S. I celebrated by making coffee without checking GitHub first. Look at me, embracing work-life balance like it’s a new React framework.