In my day job I mostly work on the frontend, building UIs and maintaining a component library. I like it and I’m good at it. That’s what I’ve been doing for years. But this is exactly why I prefer to work on the backend with my side projects on weekends.
It leads me to annoying problems.
Is that bad? Feeling frustrated, not knowing the answer. Building something really not optimized, barely working. Trying to refactor bunch of times, getting closer to a working state. But constantly feeling that there must be a proper solution.
And the next phase is glorious. After googling for months you finally learn the name of the problem. Now you know what you didn’t know. And there are blog posts and books about it. It’s a whole new world.
If you’re always doing the same - things to learn just run out. You never run into unknown issues. You feel like you know everything, but in reality you just don’t know what you don’t know.
This is why I started embracing that feeling when I run into something I don’t know the answer to. Something new. It’s not annoying anymore. It’s an opportunity to learn.
I swear there’s metaphor somewhere around here about watching the same shows every night…