Don’t Give Up

You work 40+ hours a week. You have responsibilities outside of your regular work week. You have friends and family commitments to take care of. Then you have that web development thing that you never have quite enough time for.

Sound familiar?

When your full-time job is not web development.

Maybe you’re doing web development as a hobby, or maybe you are doing it in hopes to make a career change. Whatever reasons you have for doing/learning web dev, when you aren’t doing it full time, it can be very challenging. If you think web development has a steep learning curve, you are not alone. It takes time, commitment, practice and having projects on your own.

The challenging part for us, is we have busy lives. Trying to fit web dev in somewhere is difficult. Its not that we lack passion for development, but life can sometimes just get in the way.

Yes, we’ve all stopped at some point, or maybe multiple points

In the beginnings of your development journey, you’re excited, you can’t wait to get started and build the next great app/website. You watch tutorials, (which gets old eventually) maybe you follow a code along and build a site. You feel on top of the world. These feelings shift into more realistic expectations as we get into developing our own things, and better understand the development process.

At some point between starting your development journey, and to where you are now, you’ve likely hit a stopping point. Maybe you stopped a few days, weeks, months, or even years. Maybe you’ve stopped several times, to later pick it up again.

I think most of us have been there. Some of us may even be there now. In these times it feels like we should just give up, you may feel you will have relearn some topics, you may not know where to even begin again. The steep learning curve of web dev can start to overwhelm us.

Keep Going

I think we need to recognize that web dev is hard. It's even harder when you can't commit a full time schedule towards it. Accepting that, is a great step towards finding solutions for when we go through our slumps in the journey.

Here are some things that I think can be a help for motivation, and the continued learning of development.

Set Realistic Goals
Don't tell yourself you will spend 20+ hours a week on coding, if that's all the possible free time you have, its not sustainable. Set something that you feel confident you can adhere to, even if its less than 30 minutes a day (that is still 3 and half hours a week). Set some time aside for learning, and do your best to stick to it.

Shorter Coding Sessions
We may feel obligated to spend all of time we have set aside for learning, for only coding. The problem with this I believe is we risk running into burnout. I think balance is really important. Maybe instead of looking at code during your entire devoted time, take time to read up on the latest industry tech, blog or other things web dev related that you enjoy.

Get Involved with a Community
I think this is a big one. When your working together with others, on a collective goal, it will motivate you to keep going. Its exciting to build something with a team. Also you can learn from other developers knowledge and style. Find a small community to join, whether it be in person, or online. Can't find one? Create a small study group of your own and invite other developers to join.

The key takeaway from this hopefully, is don't get discouraged. Keep going, web development is rewarding, find the spark and remember the reasons that got you started. Find what motivates you, and stick with it.