I have heard about a terminology called Writer's Block. That is a situation where writers will not have any topic to write. That has happened to me several times in the past and even now at times. But today I came across a terminology called Coder's block. I don't really know how google reads my mind and give me suggestions to read topics related to what goes in my mind. This is completely strange to me. Okay coming back to the topic, today was a day where I was exploring something and got struck.
I was looking for terminology in Google to see if there is something even other developers commonly face. I was surprised to see so many results for my search. I think that is when Google grabbed what I was searching for and started giving me suggestions on this topic. I then wanted to write an article on this topic.
What is Coder's Block?
This is a situation for coders where there will be no step to proceed. The coders will end up in a situation where they will have no idea on how to proceed with the coding. This usually happens when they work on finding a specific solution. This can be easily compared with the Writer's block. The writers will sit in front of a blank paper for several hours to find good content to write but it will never happen. They will either end up writing and continuously deleting what they write or they sit in front of the paper with not even a single line written.
For the past few days, I have been working on a front-end development project. I have been continuously working on building a few things with CSS and Javascript. It was pretty easy and exciting to start with but later after entering deep into the requirements, I got stuck a little bit and was distracted so much. I couldn't come up with a solution to what I was trying to achieve. Even though I had dirty solutions in hand, I was not ready to implement that. I spent several hours together for just one part of the code that I had to achieve using front end Javascript.
Code becomes scary
After a few hours of trying I had a very bad feeling about coding as a whole. I had guilt that I couldn't solve this simple thing and started becoming highly demotivated. Today after reading articles on this topic I found that it is quite common among all the developers. When they don't get a solution to a particular problem, it is quite common to get a rejection of coding. I did not leave it as it is, I started exploring for a solution even further yesterday but no luck. I then realized that I have been spending a lot of time on this literally wasting time with no progress.
Today I decided to not explore anything on that particular topic. One good thing about my exploration was that I had a dirty solution available in hand. But whenever I keep looking at the IDE searching for a solution the code becomes a bit scary. I started to get a feeling that I'm not fit to be a coder and all such demotivating stuff.
Getting the motivation back
I cannot live with this dejection for a long time. Today I wanted to bring myself back to the motivation. I have a few topics on my list that I wish to learn new. Today, I thought I will spend some time learning something new from my list. I did watch a video to learn something new. But it was not sufficient. I took a small piece of thing in my pet project and started implementing that. After writing the full line of code for that piece of work, I got my motivation and confidence back. I'm now having a better feeling that I'm still a good developer.
This situation also gave me some lessons. I did not expect that my mind would play a game like this. This situation proved to me that our mind is very powerful and capable of keeping us both happy as well as unhappy. It is purely on us to decide how we would like to be. There is always some alternative solution for everything. We will just have to stay calm and divert our minds towards positivity.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://bala-blog.com/experiencing-coders-block/