Hola Mundo!

Oh frustration! 🤦🏽‍♀️​

I've never been the most patient person. And if there's something I've learned - the hard way - as developer, is that there is a lot of frustration involved🙅🏽‍♀️.

But I'm lucky, most of the times the frustration kicks in, I try to manage it and I ask for help 💬​. And I have received that help, which is a huge privilege.

Now...let me tell you about that time I almost quit a Hackathon.

The thing is, a couple of months ago, after I started learning Swift, I enrolled to a Femhackathon 👩🏽‍💻​ that has mobile challenges. Fun right?

I got in the Hackathon with a good mindset: I'm gonna do as much as I can. I'm learning and this is another opportunity to try new things. I was like, I can do this 💪​!

The challenge 💻

So the challenge started, they gave us this list of things we have to do. And well you had until certain time to send your solution.

I did like a list of things I needed to tackle. Wrote down all the requirements. But for some reason I didn't follow my own list.

Now I'm starting to write my "solution", starting with the Database. An optional requirement and something that 💥​I've never done before💥​.

The quitting point 😵

Well, it took me a lot of hours to do the Database. I decided to use Coredata, checked some notes I had and did my thing. But then when I thought it was ready, it wasn't. I had errors and I wasn't able to solve them on my own.

At this moment, I watched the clock ⏱️​ and got so frustrated it felt like I've being doing so much for nothing and THIS WAS A PLUS. Am i dumb or what!? 🤦🏽‍♀️.

I honestly thought like, you know what? I'm done, I'm going to play some Playstation and won't compete. Why did I even enrolled to this, I could be relaxing on my weekend, blah blah blah...I was in a wormhole.

But then I looked at my own checklist again and well...it didn't look that hard ✅​.

So, I deleted the nonsense I've been doing and decided to go step by step for another time. To follow the list that my past self did and to send whatever I was able to do, because that's the idea: to learn 🧠​.

The outcome 🌈

Definitely I did learn to have patience and to prioritise 💯. And also to believe in the progress. If I had written my pseudocode and wrote down a series of tasks I needed to do, why did I start by the end? So this was also a reminder to focus 💡.

Actually I did pretty well and scored 🥈​second place🥈​ in my category which made me feel very proud and also was a perfect motivator to keep reminding myself to not give up.

And of course sometimes things will go wrong. But if they go bad, I want it to be because I've to keep on learning and not because I didn't try it 💪.​

So to you, thank you for reading this much and remember, do not give up. 🫵​ You are worth the shot. 🫵​

Have you had any similar experience? Let me know and if you haven't see it, check on my "Jr. Dev: Do not give up" series 💪🏽.