How To Be Consistent in Programming
So, are you a programmer who struggles with being consistent, when it comes to learning a new skill or learning a new technology, or even programming itself? Well, you might want to read this small piece because I want to document an exercise that I am doing every single day that keeps me consistent in what I do.
I'm a front-end developer and designer and before I get into the actual exercise the actual process of how I'm keeping myself consistent on what time.
The first one is not to get fooled by social media and the second one is not to get fooled by yourself. And let's kind of elaborate on each of those. So, what I mean by getting is don't get fooled by social media. One year ago, I decided to become a full-stack developer by being a web designer and the motivation behind that was that I wanted to provide more value to my clients, and obviously, it pays much better. But my main motivation was to bring more value to what I want to know best.
So I wanted to become a full-stack developer because I've seen friends and colleagues that were handling it there were doing fantastic jobs, but the worst thing where it can draw motivation is from social media and that's because people don't usually post documents the frustration behind the scenes as your developer, and you probably know if you're developing Is the movie Shark developer or programmer for quite some time, probably know the frustration when you have like a bug, so people on social media don't usually post these kinds of things because it's kind of obvious. Obviously people don't want to see people mad, and that's understandable, but the wrong thing about this is that people want to get into these jobs.
They create some sort of misleading reality of what it's supposed to be a developer, and when they get into this discomfort and frustration of solving a problem, solving a bug, they feel like an impostor and that's because people think that these are frustrating. You have a bug being a discount feeling the discomfort when you have some sort of problem that it doesn’t solve doesn't come in the package of being a developer or programmer, so that's why I think people get frustrated and get burned out. So the first rule of these two works to be consistent is to find your motivation from yourself, like 4-5 motivation that keeps you going and keeps you going even though it gets discomfort.
So, the second rule is to not get fooled by yourself, and this kind of sounds a bit cheesy, but I've got this. I noticed something that we were doing me and my friends were doing one year ago, at least that we were kind of fooling ourselves that we are hustling, that we were grinding on some tasks that we were learning, and stuff like that. But the reality was that I Found out, I think that I was spending from what I thought that I was spending 10 hours a day learning web development.
I was actually being in VS code in the code editor for one hour so I was exaggerating that I'm learning so much. So, if you're telling something to your brain, it might actually believe you. So, if you're telling your brain that I spent 50 hours this week learning web development and I didn't get anything. I have no reward. I have no feedback from that. Your brain will actually believe you and that's when frustration comes into place.
Be True to yourself
Be true to yourself when it comes to how much time you're spending on one particular project, how much time you're spending on a particular learning, or something new, so these are the two rules now we can move forward with the exercise, and I think you're going to love it. I encourage you to try this come on a daily basis so the exercise I was talking about is to journal and document every single day what you're doing, and I'm not kind of. I'm not talking about your personal, intimate thoughts. Obviously, we can do that, but I was referring to a professional thing like documenting everything you do in terms of learning in terms of working on projects. This is a free application called CODA you can use it.
Conclusion
This is where I kind of summarize what I did to retrospect, have like some kind of love or some kind of reflect on the week I did or why I'm satisfied with the results where I'm lacking results and stuff like that. So, this helps me have like real data and honest data so that I can see why things are not the way I want. Share this piece if it was informative.