How to Keep Going

I've talked about it plenty of times in this blog, but the act of learning to code is not a singular concept. When you take on the duty of learning to code, it's something you must continue to work at throughout the rest of your life or career, whichever you choose. This has become my passion, so that's usually not a problem. I've gone through plenty of spurts, though, where I just didn't much feel like coding. The last time I felt like this, I had gone through a ton of denials in job applications and I kind of felt like things were spiraling down. So, what do you do when things get like that? For me, sometimes this is the best time to learn something new. In my case, back when I was feeling like that, I grabbed a course on GraphQL and dug in. It still wasn't easy, and some days I spent a bare minimum of an hour or so studying, and that's all I could muster up. To me, though, that's a heck of a lot better than turning off completely. Now that I am a professional software developer, turning off completely, so it's more a matter of keeping my self-study time up and productive. At work, I'm always improving my coding skills in areas I'm already pretty familiar with, but my self-study time is meant for building projects to showcase in my portfolio or learning new skills.

I have a fairly addictive personality in every facet of my life. This has gotten me into some trouble in the past, but it's also helped me when used for good purposes. In the last year, I have become completely addicted to coding, and this has led to a pretty quick ramp-up of my skills. Some people don't work this way, which can be good and can be bad. For others, they could spend an afternoon coding, learn quite a bit, put it down for a few days, and then come back to it later with the same vigor. If I were to do that, I would lose motivation pretty quickly and would likely turn that part of my brain off. It's hard to explain, but with an addictive personality, you basically have an on and an off switch. When in the on position with something, it's all you think about and you spend all of your time doing said thing, for good or ill. When in the off position, you have absolutely no interest in that thing and it's almost impossible to get motivated to do something. I know I'm kind of struggling to explain all of this, but my point is, for me, one of the most important things is to remain in the on position, no matter what.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been kind of struggling to keep myself in the on position. For whatever reason, I'm just not as interested in what I've been doing. I did have a personal project that I did, which I started because of this lack of motivation, and that really helped. Then I took this blog and completely redesigned it, which also helped keep me going. Last night, I finished up the redesign of my blog and was left wondering what to do next. I have a SQL course that I started a while back, but that seemed like a total chore to do and I had no interest in it. For whatever reason, that course was so boring to me. I decided that maybe it was time for a new frontier. Python has always been pretty high up on my list of things to learn, so I decided it was as good a time as any to start something new. I picked up a course by Andrei Neagoie and got cracking this morning. I've taken several courses by Andrei and I believe he is the best instructor for an introduction to something new. He explains things in a way where anyone could understand them, but he's often a little light on the more advanced topics. It's a 30 hour course, though, and it sounds like we're going to get into some more advanced stuff, so I'm hoping for the best. I am excited to get down to work tonight on this course, and that's all that matters.

Until tomorrow!