Keep building projects!
After having completed my most recent project app “Buggernaut”, a bug-tracking and project management tool, I realized how important it is to keep building more projects.
While building your project, keep track of techs used, techniques/implementations that work, and of course the time it took for you to complete each task. This is important because sometimes we can bite off more than we can chew at the early stage of development. In my case, I had envisioned an “Overview” page to render right as a user logs in. This page would include project details, tasks/tickets, and statistics for the project that has been open the longest. However, I quickly found out that all of the components take time to develop, and it was apparent I would not have them all completed by the date I had set up. I ended up only completing about 50% of my original intended functionality for the overview page, and there were still 3 other pages I had to develop as well!
While developing Buggernaut (deployment date tdb!), I started to keep track of expected completion times vs actual times. I realized that when I make a detailed plan of creating a certain task, I tend to get it done quicker because I don’t follow every lead of issues as they occur, but take note of them and come back later so then I can complete my set out task. My ability to guess how long a task would take improved, however because I had employed this technique mid-project, I was still unable to complete everything I set out to.
If I continue to keep track of time while developing more projects of my own, I can definitely see myself getting better at time management. This would require I set out to program more and not lose the momentum I have gained over the past few months.
Last year, I had set to learn more about web development. I was doing a number of tutorials and building a few cool projects for what I was able to achieve at the time. However, I did not KEEP BUILDING. I paused, and what seemed like a plethora of knowledge gained over the course of 6 months, quickly manifested into feeling helpless and experiencing the dreaded “imposter syndrome”.
Keep building! I cannot stress this enough. As you gain experience in solving problems for your project, you become a better developer. Someone who can take an idea and bring it to life. Also, you get better at using available tools. This could be searching the internet for solutions, reading documentation, or writing questions/answers on Stackoverflow.com and various other tech resources.
I hope you found this article useful in some way. I try to keep things short and to the point. If you have an idea for an article or have any questions, do write to me. Thank you!
Jacob Lepler
