So last year, I hit up a friend asking how to integrate Stripe into this app I was working on, and he's like "oh yea just check the docs, it's actually simple." But the thing is, I had already gone through the docs and literally couldn't understand anything. I'm very sure I was on Twitter that whole period complaining about how "hard" integrating payment gateways were lol.

But looking back now, was it actually hard? Or did I just not understand it because I didn't know enough yet? Because honestly, the whole thing has been abstracted into something you can basically plug and play. It's wild how something can feel impossible when you don't have the foundation, but then seem super straightforward once you do.

Just to give you an idea of how much I didn't know back then - I thought Prisma was a database, yea!. But to be fair, I'd never touched anything backend-related so. All I was doing early on was animations, making stuff move around with GSAP and whatever. None of that needed you to know about auth, database queries, webhooks, payment sessions, any of that. So when I finally tried reading the Stripe docs, I didn't get anything. It just felt like there was just too much going on, each piece of the code depends on understanding the previous piece, you know?

That whole experience really motivated me though. I realized I was lacking so much knowledge about how the frontend and backend actually connects. I wanted that end-to-end understanding, you know? So I ended up taking a Next.js course where you build out an entire functional e-commerce store. Despite juggling school and a six-month internship with barely any time, I made it work. You learn server actions, route handlers for building APIs, you design your own database schema, all of that. And gradually, as I kept learning, things started making sense. Stripe integration? That's like the easiest thing you'd get to handle.

It wasn't some sudden "aha" moment - more like slowly realizing that the stuff I thought was difficult wasn't actually that complex. I just didn't have the prerequisites. Each concept builds on the one before it.

And honestly, it's not just coding. It's everything. Like with math, you can't solve complex equations if you don't know basic addition and subtraction first. You can't do calculus without understanding algebra. Same with learning a language, you need vocabulary and grammar basics before you can have actual conversations. Everything has prerequisites. Prerequisites.