Pushing Through!

It's a toxic relationship. Let me tell you this story.

For the first time in my life, I experienced the chills of being in a "relationship." I mean an actual one this time.

The long calls, the show of deliberate attention, and the giddy feeling when I'm with this person. And yeah the thoughts of "where have you been all my life" clouded my mind.

Well... it's the exact same feelings we experience in learning, especially a new programming language.

In the beginning, it's always a thrill. The constant fascination and daydreams of all you can build by grasping the fundamentals of working with this language.

So you delve deeper, immersing yourself in documentations, tutorials, and bookmarking every post that has business to do with this newfound love.

Yes, I agree, it's quite difficult at first. Dealing with little flaws (syntax errors), and deliberately pushing through nevertheless.

So you spend two weeks, maybe even a month or two basking in love with tutorials as your anchor.

You have memorized all the "tell me about yourself" answers (syntax) and have mastered all their love languages (the core programming concepts of this language).

And now you think you're ready to take on a personal project. You're excited about this world-class solution you're about to birth, and it becomes your little secret that you plan on surprising all your peers with.

Setting up the project was easy, your tutorial notebook has every process written down. Till you start coding, no tutorials this time. Just you and your blank code editor waiting for who would initiate the conversation.

And in these moments, we learn strength and resilience. You go on a talking spree with yourself, making all kinds of excuses why you need to make this relationship “work”. The unnecessary anger issues from your partner begin to piss you off, like when you declared the variable with a capital letter and called it with a small letter, they become so stubborn and refuse to talk to you again. So you have to dot on them now, paying close attention to them by reading your codebase line by line, taking them on numerous dates in the console (console.log), and going on Stackoverflow to find out how to appease them on days like this.

You see, I think every developer has passed through this phase. Advanced, newbie, or mid-level. We are constantly motivated to do more, but the real test of our strength is overcoming the first major block.

A lot of times, we've started and somehow fell off. Took one week from coding and it turned to two weeks, maybe months, and sometimes years before we realized that we needed to go back to our love.

Like that "newbie", who started with HTML and loved the beauty CSS brought but is avoiding the complexities of Javascript. So they keep going back and forth, shuffling between vanilla CSS or using a CSS framework while postponing the start date for Javascript.

It's okay to be a little scared, stuck, or blank on what to do. What matters is our consistency to stick around and push through the walls of limitations we have conformed our minds to.

So we keep striving, we keep pushing!! And this time, we are not giving up on this relationship.

I'm back to solidity!! We would keep building in public till we get there.

Thanks for reading about my latest toxic escapade with Solidity.