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.
Continue reading “Maybe web development is kind of fun”