Remember how I proudly proclaimed that I'm done with Wordpress and moved this blog to Astro? Well, that didn't last very long. I still think that Astro is great but it feels like it's better suited for marketing websites and maybe web apps than blogs. The one thing that got me in the end was the fact that I did not manage to create a proper RSS feed with images and other bells and whistles.

I’ve been using WordPress since I was 15, which is now over 15 years ago. Since I never bothered to learn PHP or read the documentation, I’d be lying if I said I knew how to actually build something with it. I’ve always relied on friends for help.

This is the first time in forever that I’m blogging on something other than WordPress. There’s no backend, no theming, no plugins, and for the first time, I actually understand how to add whatever I want.

It feels great.

There’s a slight chance that I’ll grow tired of using a static site generator as my blog framework, sure. But in the context of my ongoing effort to get better at coding, I feel like gifting myself this playground, with all its possibilities, might make the few downsides worth it.

Look at this cool library of all the books I’ve read in 2023! I wouldn’t even know where to start with something like that in Wordpress.

Okay, hear me out. Web development is actually kind of fun. I mentioned that I worked through The Joy of React recently and while the course managed to transfer a lot of valuable knowledge, it didn’t do a great job at keeping me motivated.

I’m not one of those people waiting for motivation to magically hit me. I know that it’s something you create by actually sitting down and doing the work. Nevertheless, something about the course constantly trying to trick me into working on something it hasn’t taught me before, made me just watch the solution videos before actually trying to solve the problems. I knew that I could not possibly know the “right” solution, so I stopped trying. That resulted in me finishing the course without applying most of the things it covered.

100 Days of SwiftUI‘s approach worked far better for me. It covered a couple of concepts, then gave me a challenge and told me that I already know everything needed to solve it properly. I knew that it’s completely my fault if I don’t manage to come up with a solution and I also knew that I only had to re-watch the previous lessons to stumble upon the answer at some point. That’s motivating! Telling me that I’m theoretically able to solve the challenges gave me enough confidence to sit down and try until something worked.

So here’s how I got over my disgruntled and unmotivated “Web dev sucks” state:

I forced myself to build something.

At first my goal was to set up a project. Hard enough with all the tooling involved. That worked more or less smoothly. Then I started playing around with a button that puts something into an array, which led to an input element that allows to customize what to put in there and so on and so forth. I didn’t plan on building a shitty to-do list app but it happened because motivation came as soon as I started experimenting.

I wandered from “Oh, I wonder if I could…” to “What if I try to…” and grew increasingly more excited. Our brains are hilariously easy to manipulate. Create a few achievable moments of success and you can string yourself along until something exists that previously didn’t.

Nobody is in need of a to-do app called “Your Plate” but it exists now. I’m a bit proud of that.

So, here’s what I did:

• Set up Visual Studio Code in a way that’s acceptable.
• Learned how to deploy something through Vercel and the Terminal. This was a huge “Wow, this is so easy and cool” moment for me.
• Played around with objects and destructuring.
• Added a few libraries for random stuff like playing sounds (and added a setting to turn sound off!), throwing confetti and animating the list.
• Figured out what TailwindCSS is and how to use it. Another “Oh wow” moment.
• Added local storage capabilities.
• None of this was very hard, I built far more complicated things in Swift and SwiftUI already. It’s something though and it managed to drag me out of my “Ugh, where to start?” rut.

Next up: Upgrading to Typescript. I want types. Type me up, baby.

I bought the limited early access to The Joy of React the other day and worked through the whole course since then. Switching to web development while still being at the very beginning of my journey of becoming a Swift developer might not be the smartest choice but I never claimed to follow a thought-through master plan in regards to my learning, so whatever.

Before we get started: These are my current thoughts on getting into web development as somebody who has only a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. These thoughts will be different in a year from now. Cool your jets and consider this as something like a user test for the question of “How accessible is becoming a web developer?”.

Web development is a pain in the ass. You need to understand what a terminal is, what it’s used for and how to use it to even get to the point of asking yourself “What the fuck is NPM?”. Then NPM needs to be installed which feels like hacking the Matrix, since it does something somewhere but you won’t see anything but lines of text in your little terminal window into the soul of your computer that you’re afraid to touch because what if you sudo your SSD or something.

If you managed to install NPM, you have to… boot up your project by hacking even more Avada Kedavra shit into your cOmMaNd LiNe. Something happens and suddenly there’s a terminal you can’t use for anything else anymore because it’s doing… something and is busy forever. You end up with a browser tab directly plugged into whatever terminal magic is now showing you your empty project.

Great. It took only two and a half years to understand all of this and to get it to work. Fun!

Even if you managed to do all of this, you’ll end up in Visual Studio Code which only seems to work properly if you install a dozen plugins and hope for the best. I bet there’s some kind of user experience to be found in VS Code but it sure doesn’t stack up against anything I’ve grown accustomed to while using Xcode.

My whinging doesn’t stop there, no worries!

I’m not happy with JavaScript and React either. JavaScript feels weirdly incomplete after getting used to Swift, even though (or because?) it’s old as fuck. Even simple things like capitalizing a string is a non-trivial endeavour with something like three different solutions. I found those in Stack Overflow threads from 1932, by the way.

React does have similarities to SwiftUI and I see why people can grow to like it but it lacks the fun of SwiftUI. It feels clunky and verbose. JSX, CSS, a sheer endless amount of semicolons and angle brackets… it’s a little ugly? Granted, I don’t know anything and haven’t used it for half as long as I’ve spent with SwiftUI but still… there’s a lack of grace there that’s a liiittle bit repugnant.

So, where am I at right now?

I couldn’t wait to start my first project after finishing 100 Days of SwiftUI. Xcode was fun, the iOS simulator worked great and everything felt thought-through and like a paradise of possibilities. Finishing The Joy of React on the other hand left me with a feeling of dread and a weird taste in my mouth. Everything related to web development seems to be fragile, fiddly and like a late-game Jenga situation.

I’m not giving up though. This seems to be modern web development and since I want to be able to create web apps I’m going to stick with it. It’ll get better.

Anyway, here’s my little “You did it” achievement the course gave me. I’ll slap that on my LinkedIn profile now and consider myself a junior frontend web developer.