# I Won a Writing Challenge That I Almost Didn't Publish!

> Source: <https://dev.to/fm/i-won-a-writing-challenge-that-i-almost-didnt-publish-2cn0>
> Published: 2026-08-24 17:24:53+00:00

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](https://dev.to/fm/the-2026-agentic-era-with-gemini-agent-platform-surviving-cascading-failures-and-runaway-cloud-1gbk)!

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!