I can’t believe I worked on this project for 30 days. The growth has been fantastic, and I should be proud of all that I was able to accomplish. If this is true, why do I feel a pit in my stomach when I think about this project? If I did such a good job, why do I feel like such crap?

To be honest, the more I worked on this the more I understood why it takes teams of people to produce applications. I know there are gurus out there who can solo develop their ideas, but wow I never realized how not like that I am. I enjoyed every part of the development process, yet the more I saw of the road ahead of me to actually make this usable? That is what really scared me.

When I look at my work, it’s difficult to not see all the faults. CSS is not my strong suit, and I know I cut corners in some areas (please don’t resize my windows ಥ_ಥ). I made separate pages for things that could have easily been one page. I ended up ditching an entire process and offloaded in onto Calendly, which takes away from the entire point of the project if you think about it too much. The more I produced, the more inadequate I felt. I felt like there was more I should have done, more time I should have spent learning x or practicing y.

This is the wrong way of thinking about it. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I’m happy I was able to say I worked on something I’m passionate about. I’m walking away from this project with a better understanding of API’s, writing and handling requests, storing images via SQLite, sending emails with Yagmail, actually using JavaScript for the first time, and much more.

If anything, seeing how much I didn’t know motivated me to just learn more. I started going through the Odin Project, finally admitting to myself that yeah, I should probably learn JavaScript. I started looking into responsive design and best practices of working on the front-end of applications. The structure of working on my project alone has changed my perspective on my daily structure; I’ve started journaling to hold myself more accountable and have an outlet for my emotions and frantic thoughts.

I do feel sad that I’m walking away from these 30 days, and I’m no where near a master level engineer, and I don’t have a fully functional project. Was that the reason I started though? Not really.

I started these 30 days because I wanted to see if I could do it. No, the days weren’t consecutive, but why does it have to be? I don’t have to place arbitrary rules on things I design for myself. Had I been so serious about it, I likely would have never made it to day 30.

I started these 30 days because I wanted to be a good influence on my students, and show them that they should be proud to work on something, and make progress on their own creations.

I started these 30 days because I love my wife, and what better way to show that love than make something she can use in her professional life.

The reasons outweigh the reflective feelings. The longer you stare into the abyss, the more the abyss looks back (or something like that). I’m never going to be done learning, and that’s okay. To think there is some summit to reach where you’ll find all the masters sitting and waiting for you is a false flag. You’re never going to get there, but neither will the masters. The journey of learning is an ongoing process, and as long as you love the process, you’ll never stop learning.

If you haven’t already checked it out, please give my project a look at! Day 1