All praise to almighty God, and thanks to Google and the DEV Team, a while back, I won the Google Cloud NEXT '26 Writing Challenge!
A big congrats to all the other winners of this challenge. 🥳
The "interesting" thing is, I almost didn't even publish the post! 😬
I was running behind schedule and I still had too many things to say. I wanted the post to be perfect! But then I remembered the saying:
Perfectionis the enemy ofgood enough.
So I focused on a specific topic, and completed writing right around 20 minutes before the deadline.
And just when I wanted to press the Publish button, I thought, why don't I check the Challenge page and see how much time I have left.
To my utter shock, the DEV [Challenge page](https://dev.to/challenges/google-cloud-next-2026-04-22) was showing the status: **ENDED**!
For a minute there, I thought I must have miscalculated the deadline based on my time zone, but then I got my confidence back after double-checking the deadline and timezone conversion.
At that point, there was no time to confirm with the DEV Team, so I just published the post first, and then wrote a comment on the Challenge announcement post.
Long story short: it was showing me the
ENDEDstatus because of a bug.
Phew! Man, was I ever glad that I went through with publishing the post!
Obviously, after becoming one of the winners, I was totally thrilled, and in a way, gained a few pleasant lifelong lessons:
Never give up!
Ship, even if it's not perfect.
Hope my story will motivate others to publish more.
If you liked the post, here's another real-life story where I learned a few more lifelong lessons - and this time, the hard way!