I feel like my progress is very slow on my project, is that truly the case?
Posted by Dry-Entrepreneur-216@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 4 comments
Just for context: I'm starting university as a CS student this year. My knowledge so far comes from one year learning on my own, and another year attending a bootcamp for tech stacks (Spring Boot, Flask, Django, and MERN). I mainly got comfortable building CRUD applications.
The last project I completed was a social media site on MERN, which I built over the course of a month while working on it full-time. Later, I revisited it to use for learning TS, but converting it was a nightmare. Poorly organized, no comments, and could’ve used some refactoring (honestly I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, i finally understood the memes).
After that, i decided to challenge myself building a fully fledged e-commerce website. I thought it would be a great learning experience and a good addition to my portfolio. It’s been four months now, and all I’ve managed to complete is the design and about 7 pages of the frontend prototype.
Lately i can barely motivate myself to work on it for more than 2 or 3 hours, twice a week, constantly doubting my ability and questioning if there are some pieces am missing
Is this a common experience?
Beneficial-Ask-1800@reddit
I think that's normal,
We're all have high energy spikes, when starting a project, and then energy starts to die out as the project grows, lol.
That's why we also need discipline and consistency, because motivation or passion, sometimes is not enough.
Also, another tip is try to keep your project, simple then when you finish its mvp you can start adding more features.
Lastly, it's normal to visit your code and find how it was very poorly written. One time visited a project I wrote like 9 months ago, I but I found that refactoring it was would be harder than, rebuilding it from scratch, lol.
So I would say that's a common experience, don't let it discourage you.
Calm_Woodpecker_9433@reddit
like the mvp mindset.
Dry-Entrepreneur-216@reddit (OP)
"Refactoring is harder than building it from scratch"
Exactly how i felt lol
I almost suspected i was anhedonic, its a bit of relief to know that its not a skill issue.
jeffwithhat@reddit
I find it more rewarding to finish a feature than to move 4 things each 25% closer. So try to carve out features that are small enough to finish (and test) in less than, say, 8 hours of work. Progress may still be slow, but it will be easier to see, and your code quickly returns to a functional state.
That applies to refactoring as well: a major refactoring is like trying to boil the ocean. Choose a narrow slice that is directly related to a problem right in front of you, and finish that before moving on.
More broadly, you might want to mull why your interest level has fallen: e.g. is it a perceived lack of progress that the above steps might address, or do you habitually give up when a project is 90% complete, or was this always kind of a boring scenario that you’re doing purely for the resume (etc.)
Even more broadly: yeah, most interesting apps contain a lot of concepts and decisions, and each one takes time :)