TL;DR:
Don’t wait to start a project just because you’re still learning. Oh, and I whined about a project I’ve been working on forever.
Learning is hard, but so what? Go for it!
We all learn every day. If you’re learning code, you’re learning a LOT every day. At least you should be, right? Let me ask you this. If you’re learning every day, are you actually writing code every day? And if you are, are you writing scratch code, or are you actually working on a project? If you’re not, you should be. If you can’t think of anything to create, find something on the web. There are tons of sites dedicated to coding challenges and project ideas. Just pick SOMETHING and go for it, regardless of your skill level. Trust me, I know learning this stuff is hard and overwhelming at times, but if you never do anything but learn stuff, you’ll never actually do anything.
So here’s a story…
That being said though, the more you learn, the more you will realize that you have no idea what you’re doing. Ok, that’s a little harsh. Let me give you a little anecdote. I started a project 4 months ago. It was a pretty ambitious project at the time, given that I had only been learning ASP.NET MVC for something like a month at the time. I was in way over my head, but I didn’t know that when I started it. I now have three or four different copies of that same project on my hard drive. None of them are complete. My latest attempt is moving forward much better mind you, I just don’t get to write as much code as I would like to be able to.
So what happened? Well, the first attempt was going great. I spent two or three weeks on a fairly specific section of the project and got that done. Then I moved onto a different section and realized I needed to learn some more in order to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. In that new learning process, I discovered that my original work was… well, complete crap. That sucked hard core, BUT the knew knowledge I had gained wouldn’t have been possible until I knew what questions I needed to ask. So I started over, after I pulled myself back together. I was wiser this time. I had what felt like a king’s ransom of new knowledge. This time, I accounted for my mistakes and had both sections completed. And then it got put on the backburner, for a while actually. While it was in the backlog, I played around with a bunch of other stuff and figured out a lot more that I could do with the code. Ya know, by asking more questions…
You guessed it, it was time for another rewrite BUT now I’m at a point where I’m confident in my knowledge and there is very little in this project that I don’t now know how to do, if anything.
The struggle is real, but that’s ok
I guess the point of this post is this: You’re going to struggle at first, and you’re going to rewrite code many times. That is perfectly fine. Don’t let this stop you from starting a project, no matter how big it seems. You’ll find the questions you need to ask when the time comes. After all, you can’t find an answer until you have a question right?
As always, thanks for reading and leave a comment here or on the forums!
