I’ve been learning web development for almost 2 years now, it has been fun learning all that stuff all by myself, I’ve met a lot of cool people along the way, found great online courses and teachers.

It has been fun. It has been confusing. It has been hard.

The first thing I learned online was playing the guitar I was 15 years old and that was a bit of a challenge.

Then I decided to learn English it was even harder, the first steps were challenging. Then when I could communicate in English I wanted to learn French, it was as hard as English.

Then I decided that I learn to programme, this was, for sure, the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.

Programming is not a common thing so to speak, I didn’t know anyone who did it, my references were hackers movies ( yeah I know I’m not proud of it ). Getting into it is hard, and when you know nothing about programming even the simplest things are challenging.

The point of this post though is to talk about what I am currently facing with coding.

The fucking intermediate level.

When you are in this level you can make some cool noises with the guitar but can’t play that song. You can understand a language but can’t have a conversation, you can code apps but you are tired of building todo lists or weather apps.

This is the hardest thing about learning anything. You know you can do something, but you can’t do something good enough.

Learning anything new is fun to me as it might be for others as well, in the beginning, it’s not so hard. You move fast, you clearly see your progress. But when you get deeper into something you see there’s much more to learn, know, understand.

It is not enough to know some words, you must know grammar, it’s not enough to know a cord, you must know rhythm, play and sing at the same time, change cords fast enough to keep the rhythm.

Javascript, HTML & CSS aren’t enough, you must know Sass, Webpack, React, Vue, NPM, Babel… It’s not enough to write code, you must write clean code, best practices and so on.

When you start facing these problems you start thinking you’re not good enough, you’re not learning so much, you’re stuck.

Maybe you start considering learning another language or framework, python is simpler right? It’s not as weird as Javascript, machine learning sounds fun after all.

But It doesn’t matter which route you take, you’ll always get stuck. Starting things are easy, but at some point they will get hard, you’ll get stuck again and the same will happen.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing a little bit about everything though. but you’ll always be a duck: it flies, it walks, it sings. But a duck doesn’t fly well, doesn’t walk well, doesn’t sing well.

If you want to learn something you’ll have to put the work, you’ll have to push yourself forward. It does’t mean you’ll become an expert to on this thing though but I ensure you you will get good at it.

If you love it.

What made me keep working on the guitar even though my fingers hurt it was because I love music. Same reason for learning English and French, I love talking with people from other places and learning from them.

This is why I didn’t feel like giving up. I was loving the process, not focusing on the end goal. If you’re enjoying what you do you won’t want to stop doing it.

Am I tired of building todo lists? Maybe, but this shit is too much fun. I love it. I believe that’s the key to learning anything

just enjoy the process.