The hardest thing about learning to code is when my ingrained software-design-perfectionism clashes with what I’m able to do. Stoins is going great. I’d say it’s an above average app for somebody who just started coding. Yet I can’t wrap my head around the solutions to some of the problems I’m facing and I struggle with accepting flaws that are solely there because I’m not good enough yet.

Everything works, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not as good as I know it could be. I think a better understanding of concurrency could solve one of the problems. Perhaps a second problem would go away with more knowledge about threads. Oh and something, something state machines? I just don’t understand any of it enough to solve my app’s bugs.

Here’s the thing though: Motivation doesn’t come and go by some magical whim of fate. Motivation is something you create. I know that my motivation is heavily influenced by progress. I tried fixing these issues for so long without getting anywhere that I’m at a point where I need to accept that those are flaws I need to live with. It’s my second self-coded app ever, of course it has problems.

I’m sure my next project will teach me some of the things I need to learn to come back to Stoins and fix it. A cycle of learning through manufactured motivation and not giving in to perfectionism.

I detest influencer culture. I’d rather not be a personal brand but a person. As clear-cut as this might sound, it’s virtually impossible to detach one from the other as soon as you’re visible online. By using marcel.io as the domain for my personal blog, I feel like I somehow slid into influencer territory. At the same time it’s the best name for a personal blog written by a human being called Marcel. Oh well.

Since my urge to start blogging again came up, I ogled tiptop.software as the venue for what I want to write about. I’ve spent most of 2022 learning programming, designed, coded and released an app to the App Store and thought it would be great to write about this under the name Tiptop Software. I installed WordPress, build this theme, wrote the first post and even released it.

However I quickly discovered that writing about cats, games and the weather will undoubtedly be something I want to do (you can look forward to that) and it wouldn’t feel right to put more personal topics into a publication hosted by my “software company”. I also don’t want to limit the frequency of posts to make the blog feel valuable. This isn’t supposed to be one of those blogs where every article has to be a work of art. I want to be able to throw out a quick thought and even end a post in the middle of a senten