As a scholar who has spent nearly a decade working on a variety of digital humanities projects, my contributions to the Digital Orientalist present an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned through working and teaching in the field. Largely self-taught, I have had plenty of experience of building things that don’t work, or which had a poorly defined scope, inadequate documentation or other fundamental flaws. But the good news is that these ‘failures’ always present an opportunity to re-evaluate, think about what went wrong, and to refine or reimagine the process for the next time. Against this backdrop, an important trait to cultivate is resilience, or the mindset that if (or rather, when) things don’t work out the first time, then adjustments are made and work resumes. There are parallels here with the process of ‘doing DH’ itself, which is also inherently iterative, reflective and flexible.