Portfolio website building and learning with work,
The one thing that all of us will face during the learning phase of the Web development journey is how we realize what and how much we have actually learned, how shall I grade myself even if I write the codes and made a few small projects? The most common or I shall say the most famous project is making a Portfolio website. You have heard this all piece of advice about building your own portfolio website and making a brand of yourself.
Let me tell you first, building your own portfolio website does not signify you became a brand, it is advised because the way to learn things in the real world is not by learning and implementing but by implementing and learning. You can never remember all properties and working of your codes of projects, memorizing is not your job, it is the job of your device. Your job is to organize the implementation of what you stored or decided to implement. So all of us start from the same starting line i.e., surfing through the internet->watching Youtube videos/tutorials of making the structure of a website and making portfolio websites-> writing your own version of code to make your website.
You start collecting designs and start writing code for the structure you decided to make. After two to three hours of coding HTML and CSS, the first thought that comes to mind is why am I not getting the design I desire to make, You become restless and tell yourself about this project you started but it is fucking with your brain and now you think you need a break and solve the bugs in code afterwards.
That afterward never comes if you may realize it. So let me tell you something keeping aside the coding topic and web development. The human brain becomes restless when it does not get any confirmation i.e., the results of the work he puts it. Starting any project or initiative in life is what most people like to do, but staying in the lane of consistently doing and repeating the same work is something that very few people can do, and that is not related to hard work or motivation, it is a psychological term called conscientiousness: meaning the ability to repeat the same work effortlessly for longer period of time. SO someone ranking high in conscientiousness may not struggle with repeating the work again and again. They do not need any driving force or someone to tell them, teach them, navigate them about getting back to work. They get back to their work at the fixed time they decided to, and they do it regardless of any other factor. So one thing that every person shall never do is to compare the pace at which they are learning or executing things, because conscientiousness is a personality type and it differs from person to person based on thousands of factors from your environment to habits, from groups to individuals interests, etc.
So coming back to developers and coders. Yes, you may feel restless because you are unable to solve the bugs, also it may be possible you leave the file and start it again from scratch, and it may happen you get stuck again. Again do not panic, For a while, take your eyes out of your body, watch your own body doing things and ask yourself, Is he doing the same mistakes? Is he taking feedback from the mistakes he do every time? Is he doing things in a smart way or Is he somewhere stuck in biases or pride of doing everything, all on his own? Because that is not the way we move forward in the developers or software development world.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I have experienced all of it in every aspect of work I did and do in my life.
1) I face this when I write daily as a part of my routine, I face it when I write things for my regular Blogs (Jimmy's Blog).
2) I face it when I wrote and published my research paper with my team which took almost 10 months of hard work and consistency to finish the task (Advent of Big Data technology in environment and water management sector).
3) I face it when I was making my own portfolio website project from scratch: yes, I saw 10, 12, 15 youtube videos and Blogs to join the dots which were not visible when I started the project (https://www.jimmytaravia.com).
4) I face it when I decide to share important facts and information on DEV blogs (https://dev.to/jimmytaravia) for the community and I can see myself holding back a lot of things because somewhere I can answer my brain that I cannot give away shitty information that is so generic that it is known by most of the people. And there is no end to what I am learning.
I realized these things when I started observing myself of what type of information I am consuming, and it struck me most efficiently when I observed someone telling me right brain left brain concepts of psychology thing from Mark Manson's book "The Subtle art of not giving a Fuck", But I was like "It is not discovered by Mark Manson friend, this concept is studied and given by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman" and I realized most of the times when we think about something we are not thinking about its authentic reality but we think of it's most famous reality. This also means that most of the time you see the perfect developers famous around the internet, they are not the best but they are most famous and it never signifies the fact that they are perfect in it.
Anyways, all these facts lead me to one single coordinate that is called tutorial hell, because the fact that I should know everything about the thing I am going to implement comes from 100s of years of education system brainwashing you making you think that you only shall raise your hand if you know the answer correct.
So do not get trapped in the loop of not doing anything and finding yourself restless and helpless. Instead, start nurturing your conscientiousness behavior and ask yourself "What work did you finish today?" Does not matter how big or small, what task you finished?
If possible I will share my journey of making my portfolio website (https://www.jimmytaravia.com) in these Blogs. Until then, keep coding, keep writing, keep doing the work you do consistently. we'll meet next time.
Credits for the Cover Photo by Christopher Gower from Unsplash
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