You’re Never Too Old to Become a Beginner

Re:You’re Never Too Old to Become a Beginner by singhrac on Friday January 01, 2021 @09:56PM (#25609895)

This comment really resonated with a feeling I’ve had over the past few years. When I was younger, especially at the beginning of college, I loved to build things by programming. I learned new languages, new patterns, wrote an OS, a website with all the front end complexity, etc. I could hack something on the weekend outside of schoolwork.

For a few years it has felt so difficult to start something - perhaps a curse of “experience” is that you see the failure modes ahead of time. I think I’m overall more efficient, but my motivation to just strike out there and try something has been wrung out of me.

Lately I’ve been trying to trick myself into working through that feeling and learning on the side. A desire to “finish” (i.e. write up as a blog post, publish software, send to a friend) is what gets me to overcome this bias to inaction. But it still shocks me how much more creative energy I had as an 18 year old than I do now.

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Re:You’re Never Too Old to Become a Beginner by Doxin on Monday January 04, 2021 @04:04AM (#25629057)

My trick for avoiding that feeling is to intentionally set out to do projects in a terrible way, just to see what that'd be like. So for example I might write a project all in a single file, or entirely without classes, or with wildly too many classes, or with weird fp-trickery for no reason. There's a million weird ways to write a project badly, and in practice you'll discover it's almost never a real hindrance to progress compared to best practices.

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