Back in college, I had a summer research internship where the previous year, the interns tried to migrate a large Java code base to Gradle and left it in a broken state. Knowing little more than the Java language at the time, I spent about a month getting Gradle to build it correctly. It was incredibly frustrating not to be able to understand what Gradle was actually doing, instead only copying random lines from example configurations. Almost every time I would fix some errors, new ones would appear with no way to know how close I was to the end.

It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who struggled!