Surely it has happened to you that before you start you are super excited about your idea and you start your project with all the motivation in the world but then once it is actually more difficult or easier than you thought and you think things like “It is not worth following creating it ”“ I am not gaining as much experience as I thought ”or anything that leads you to leave it.
This is a common mistake of any beginner (and others with more experience) that leads you to start projects and leave them halfway, which is what always happened to me (a beginner).
And it is good that you know once and for all that although your projects do not help you get the job of your dreams there is always something you can learn from them that will definitely help you improve professionally or even personally
My “masterpiece” (not really, but still love it)
This is my last project (my github repository: https: //github.com/ZambranoBeicker/app-for-drawing).
A small (and very simple) web application that lets you draw on a canvas and do other silly stuff with the lines you create. It's nothing from the other world. Rather it is nonsense, it is really basic. But, I cannot help feeling deeply proud of having proposed this small objective.
After doing this I have learned that even with something so small and easy I can learn truly valuable things for my next projects.
The great power of the organization
Before creating it, I was so determined to create something before the end of the year that I thought about all the things I never did in my previous projects and applied what I learned studying Personal Finances recently:
- Write the things that will improve in my life by fulfilling this goal
- Write things that could go wrong
- Keep track of my progress
- Tell other people
- Set a punishment
- Set a reward
I looked for my notebook and wrote all this and then continue with the statement of my objective and unstructured it in smaller steps and thus define what percentage I will complete when finishing what steps. There were 4 so each step was 25%.
At each step I also wrote certain objectives to define when I finished each step and at the end of each objective I wrote an estimate of how much percentage he carried.
As I am a person who needs to understand each of the things he is doing very well, it is very (too) likely that when creating the logic to solve my problems I was stuck when creating a function that uses conditionals to know the value of a variable bla bla bla and i can't keep focus on my main goal (the moments in which I want to commit suicide).
I wrote all this to keep myself aware that this was going to happen (and almost happened) to be able to contain myself and stay focused only on the problems I had to solve in order to meet my goals. Any other was just a waste of time.
The most beautiful commits I've created
It wasn't just the method I used to keep track of my progress and stay focused on solving the necessary problems. Being with this organizational and registration mindset also made me think about how I could use Git tools to organize myself in the creation of my project.
The result is that I created a branch for the canvas where I was going to create one for the logic that allowed me to draw (canvas-drawing), another to change the color of the line (canvas-lineColor) and so it went with every functionality of my project.
It is not so obvious to beginners
Yes, I know all this may seem too obvius, but understand that sometimes people can become so disorganized that doing something like this is equivalent to shaving your face after taking a week with all those hairs that do not even grow even (when you're a developing brat like me).
This is something that sounds very logical and that after knowing anyone can say: "This is nothing special. It's obvious that this is the right way to make your projects" and maybe those who have more experience do similar things all the time.
But when you're starting (and if you don't know how much the projects help you improve your personal branding) you don't worry about this even though you know you should do something like that, the pain of trying to do it takes you to take the easy path. That's what this post is for.
No matter its complexity, origin or elegance. Just do it!
You may want to create works that are worth showing in a portfolio or curriculum or really want to go further and solve real-world problems, but if it is just beginning, it is normal for your first projects to be insignificant enough to be helpful. And that's fine.
You should not concentrate on the usefulness of your projects but on the experience you want to gain (at least this is what i´ve learnt as a beginner). Later when you are a professional and have the knowledge and experience to create your own social network alone (even if it takes you a few years) you can create truly useful things, solve real problems.
Just keep creating, learning and in the process share what you learned with the community to show how amazing you are (something that professionals also do). That is the best you can do now and forever.
Please Let me know if this post has helped you and comment below if you as beginner have had these problems.
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