Confronting Busyness

 Accepting Busyness

I've been able to up the hours I'm putting into coding. I've been surpassing 6 hours a week pretty consistently. I'm proud to nearly double what I was putting in before. However, my hope to code on the weekends continues to be unrealized. The realities of being a responsible adult keep catching up with me on the weekend and coding keeps getting dropped in the juggling act. And that's okay. My goal is ambitious, but my current job is flexible. If I need another month (or two) before I've got the skills needed to land a job I'm really wanting, they will work with me. I'm really glad to have that kind of buffer, especially now that learning everything come January looks less and less realistic every week that goes by.

Streamlining Processes

I'm getting better at recognizing when I've hit a wall and then changing my approach to break through that wall. I'm in the midst of building a to do list web app and there's a lot of moving parts. When I've run into issues, I've been able to sit back, recognize that my current approach is lacking, and try again from a new angle. This has looked like creating a quick wire-frame on Canva to better understand my web app's layout. It has also looked like writing down, on a piece of paper, the different kind of files to divide my JavaScript into so that the modules make sense. I've talked to other developers and they've given me feedback in the early stages to help me focus on simple things. Doing these practical things have helped me to keep focused when I start to run out of steam or hit a wall. 

Remembering Why I'm Doing This

Learning to code is hard. Building project after project is really time consuming. Recognizing how much more there is to learn is daunting. These are all real things I've been processing. I've been able to remember that I enjoy this process when I take breaks. It's not exciting to hit a wall, shut the computer down and walk away. But it is exciting to get a spontaneous epiphany in the middle of the afternoon of how to solve that problem that ate up half an hour yesterday. I'm choosing to focus on the epiphany moments more than the times that I have to figure out bugs. Having this focus helps to keep my momentum up. 

Tim David