I had a 2 week break because my son was born on 10th September! He’s a bundle of joy, if he can also be a terrorist when it comes to pee and poop.
Been just revising my mindset when it comes to coding after a break, and examining my motivations, etc.
What I learnt
That I’m good at the idea, I am terrible at the first draft, and then I’m good with any revisions. I think often I think of coding as “art” where you have a blank slate and you have to start from somewhere, but code is very different, where you usually are working with something rather than starting from scratch.
That if I feel like the project is “too important” I’m often not concerned with imperfections, simply because I don’t have the energy to worry about that stuff.
I think that I would learn better by working through code optimisations, rather than writing code from scratch which is the focus of a lot of the coding challenge websites.
What I did
Considered how I might be able to somehow blame something else for a first draft, rather than having to rely on someone else:
Time constraints, allowing only 30 minutes for coming up with a first draft
Using an LLM to generate initial code and building off that
Psuedocode, blame the psuedocode for messy code
Forking an open-source application and moulding it to what I want
This was my last post actually, and it was going through the implications of poor working memory and my ADHD.
I made some comments about web apps which was interesting but nothing that I haven’t forgotten.
Feeling like I bashed my head against the wall with simple problems goes back to my point above about needing someone else to do the first draft, and then I’m ok.