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Gracrys
Gracrys

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Why i stopped coding?

First of all, Im Hazy or Gracrys, I studied a big part of my life to be the best front end developer i could become, i have like 1 year experience with one different framework at a time, first vue, later react and last year Svelte, and a good pair of months with languages like typescript, reasonml, clojurescript, haskell, etc...

I always loved this path, the road of the developer and programmer, there are too many new things you can learn only to discover how to change your mindset just to end doing the same thing you could do with a less complex technology lol, but the fact that all these frameworks and languages lead to the same results but with different approaches and its own pros and cons, is just, beautiful.

I worked as freelancer, mostly lending a hand in some projects and working with a pair of companies, after some time, finals of last year, i stopped coding, and focused to design, As designers you adapt the requeriments to your design approach, projects flow faster, you set the price per project, etc, as coder, i have had a good pair of bad experiences

As a designer you can set your limitations, if you are a ux designer your work is not to do logos or merchandise, is to abstract an idea, and make it into a skeleton for further work, as coder... not so nice.

  • Most of the work you can asses as a coder are paid per hour, and being in a not so first world country some prices are not.. "fair"
  • My work consisted more on fixing other problems, or trying to make platform not suited to "x" process, make more or less suited to "y"
  • This is not a race, but a marathon, everybody has its strenghs and work at its own pace, sometimes learning a new technology or debugging something cant be solved in 1 hour iteration
  • The fact that most companies look for full stacks, or personal capable of doing all kind of tasks, while i'm specialized in something and believe me, it have been hard for me to feel comfortable about this, and i think other specialists could agree on that
  • This is not a work that can be made alone, i have had to study things that werent even part of my career or path to push some projects, things that can be solved by using the right designer, testers, dev ops, etc.
  • Entering to some project and asking somebody how does it work and they saying "i dont know, last person made it like this and we didnt want to touch it again" Every line of code has its purpose, with documentation and communication your work can be more tender
  • And the overall situation with courses.

All these free courses make people think three things, that they can learn anything just by watching 2 hours of courses, which is half true, learning half assed things just because you have reached your point in which you "know enough" or, entering that downward spiral of courses.

Not all courses are good, some leave bad practices into anyone like

  • smelly code
  • lack of approach on general matters
  • not a full perspective about certain technology
  • course dependency and other issues

I learned my path the hard way, learning documentation and trying to grasp more and more of what i could, trying every single html atribute, and learning about it, just because i disliked that storm of divs on my work, learning how to use every single css property, or atleast most of them, i have forgotten how many times i have looked to mdn list of css atributes out of curiosity because of the helpful some obscure css elements can be... or tricky.
At this point i returned to coding again, i still see a good pair of old problems that i tried to run from, But also, i became rusty, i have forgotten a lot of things, and, something i tried tohard to do, that was to learn both parts of the great divide, i, now have forgotten mostly one side, i used to think i could have called myself mid or semi senior developer, but with the lack of knowledge i know have, al i can do is to start again i guess.

There are some other issues that made me turn back and others that made me stand again, but i think it does summarize it pretty well...

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