12/07/2021
If you want to become a better web developer, you have to love programming.
If someone came to me today and told me that they will give me a billion rand to never write a line of code in my life again. I will turn them down. I admit there have been times that I have been tired of it. I know what it is like when you had a long week and a client’s website suddenly goes down on a Friday afternoon leaving you to work an extra 20 hours on a weekend. Lately, I find myself doing work over weekends or I will write code on some of my own projects. This is how much I love what I do.
If you are just starting out in the website development sector and you feel bad because you are bad at it, it is a phase that every developer goes through. Nobody is born a developer. If you are a web developer and you do not love what you do, try and find something. I love programming and it has not always been easy. You need to keep your passion alive. It will feed you energy in situations where you need them.
I have written a couple of hundred thousand lines of code in my life and my excitement over code is the same it was when I wrote my first lines. I hear horror stories of people who lose their love for programming.
So just how do you keep your passion alive?
#1 Find projects that you want to work on
You need to find a project that you want to work on. This can range from something in the source community, a charity or maybe your own custom project. What I am personally busy with is an MMORPG game. I am writing NPC plots, building worlds, monsters, databases and all sorts of work. I have been working on this for the last few years, put in more than 500 hours and have not been paid a cent. It is a passion project that I am doing for the love of code. Sometimes developers forget that coding can be a chore or a hobby and even a full-time developer can treat their code as a hobby.
#2 Partake in development competitions.
Something that pushes my love for code is a coding challenge. In South Africa, there is a yearly Artificial Intelligence competition called the Entelect challenge. This competition is fun, it pushed me to learn and I made a few friends in the process. Sometimes while programing you get tired, stressed and the code just does not want to flow.
#3 Be grateful for the knowledge you have.
I tell myself that I get to program. I am in a career where I get to turn my thoughts into reality. Programming is a field with no limitation where you can build worlds and change lives. No career is perfect, every single one has their own set of difficulties. If I compare programming with some careers out there I am glad I decided to become a programmer.
Question of the post: Have you ever lost your love for code and how did you get it back?
How To Become A Better Web Developer, by Willie Theron, Snr PHP Developer of CyberDevs.
