When Coding Gets Boring

Over time I've realized coding got boring, for me. Yes, you read that right, the first love of my life became such a bore to me, actually felt seething pains in my heart any time I open VS code and nothing I write nor read just does it for me! And nothing excited me past the first-minute no more, not the new trends like Serverless CMS and all of this fast-rising frontend design utilities.

See, it was quite devastating though I tried to downplay the effect it was having on me, while it was taking its toll, you could find me strolling in the park saying I don't care, after all, most know me as a poet and that's it, but what was bringing pain was not what most know me as, but what I knew myself as and was beginning to see myself less of.

After a couple of months of letting the mental frustration that came with it drive me to weakness even on days I did nothing but game around with my mobile device in a bid to distract myself, I said to myself one day: I can't possibly be the only one experiencing this! and there must have been a couple of folks that have gone through this too.

Upon asking myself that question, I headed on to give our friend a visit and it provided me a couple of answers that led to this link. Over there, is an article from about 9years back! And the dude literally poured my heart out! one of the highlights of his rant for me is:

I feel that all this new stuff is all the same, with simpler (or more) abstractions or automation in it, but it all sounds the same to me. Over and over again. The computable language is all Turing computable, so coding is only a replication of a similar pattern in this subset of a partial function.

 Now that part hits differently. Well, I read on and scourged comments and some other pages, and guess what? I dare say coding has become less boring and our relationship is healing. How have I come about that? Keep reading.

The thing is, to have a proper relationship with a buddy like codes, you have to see you both as married and understand that marriage comes with lows as it does highs, so what do you do when the stormy tides come? You baby it out!

Finding that peace you found in coding when you had just started out will not actually come from mastering a new language or a new framework (you won't find happiness in your marriage again by getting another woman, you just gotta see your woman again how you did the first time), it will come from going back to the basics and finding once again the complexities in basics. You gotta HTML and CSS your way out child :) (working for me). And how do you come about implementing that? Don't take up a new job, this is a time to work for yourself.

Give yourself a simple task to build, e.g a URL Shortner web app, for me, I decided to work on www.cirphrank.com - my homepage. To go about it, I downloaded a simple template, a bootstrap, hewn off clever manipulations of CSS and HTML. Just those two and nothing more.

After deploying in my localhost, I toured it, then headed back to VSCode and started reading, yes, reading the codes and that's just it. ( I recalled that's how I started out learning PHP). I didn't care if I knew what I was seeing before, I just read it anyways and sometimes was wowed by how much basic stuff I'd forgotten about their existence. This kept on for a couple of days before I started manipulating as calmly as I could be, I was never in a rush to fix the color scheme of a typo after deployment. I took my time to find all that excited me into starting off this journey in the first place, and it feels good.





And also, I needed to apply what has best been explained in this post too? Dealing with your Inner Critic - a dev's guide.

Recap.

• Be a calm baby about it. -Let go of the toxic inner critic.

And that is all I have for you when coding gets boring. I plan to give a walkthrough on how I deployed Cirphrank online in a pseudo-dynamic protocol when next I talk about web development, see you soon. Çiao.

Images: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

P.S.: I'm not a lady nor a white man, I'm a black boy.