Today was focused on building a better understanding of classes, how they are made, how to subclass, why/how they are done.
It may seem obvious, but I have to constantly remind myself to focus on the fundamentals. There's a place that I want to be, but I have to understand and accept that it takes time, hard work, and starting from the bottom up. The last two are easy for me, however I can be impatient with myself.
On March 16th, 2020, I quit my job of 13yrs in Sales Management. At the time, I thought that I had enough FrontEnd WebDev skills to land a junior position. I had money saved up to help me get through for a while, I had interviews lined up, I had networked pretty solidly for several months. I was golden. Then COVID hit. Interviews were cancelled, the labor pool got A LOT more competitive.
Eventually, thanks to networking and base understanding of TailwindCSS, I was able to pick up some freelance work for a local agency. First project was handed to me with mittens. I was only needed for a week and the project shipped. The second... was different.
I was brought in with other developers in my area to help with a project that was way under estimated in its hours to MVP, plagued with feature creep, constant redesigns and additional components. It felt like at every stand up, there were new components be built and the repo was getting updated with new tickets all the while the designers acted like it had always been there. I remember the exact moment I realized that I did not have the skills I thought I had. I won't go into the details of it, but it was humbling.
I really enjoyed WebDev when it was something I was doing for myself, not so much when it got down to the nut-cutting. What made it not fun was my lack of fundamental programming and JS skills. So I devoted my time after that project to build my knowledge, but it never clicked. I never had that "A-HA!" moment. I was able to build this in vanilla from scratch. And that's when I decided to move into Swift.
I finally found a WFH job in sales. I'm trying to spend at least one hour every day doing iOS projects. I'm almost done reading the Swift manual. I will not be caught off guard like that again. I want that foundation where when I'm hit with a problem, I can resolve it. Not that I'll immediately know how to (logically, it wouldn't be a problem), but that I can leverage my core understanding to find better answers.
The one thing that I want to express is that nothing just happens. There are no brute facts. Everything comes from a base, a frame, a seed. If you are on the same journey as myself, regardless of language or platform, be patient with yourself. Take one step at a time. If you need to take a step back to get your footing, do it. If you need to spend more time on one subject, do it. Don't beat yourself up. Have fun.
And remember, there is no finish line. It's a constant learning process.
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