Update/improve training projects: To do or not to do? (Whether it's nobler in the mind to suffer 💀 )

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Hello all,

Here’s the deal: you learn web dev for a while, create projects( do the best you can), learn new things, then eventually looking at your old code hurts so much, you start seeing tons of small ( or even big!) irritating wrongs on each level.

At the same time you still must study constantly, learn new more complex things, create new projects and you still have only 24 hrs/day, and suppose you can’t find your name on ‘the best programmer in the world’ list.

And the question is what do you do about it? Is updating old training projects worth it? ( they are a part of your portfolio…)

ps Of course if there’s something that is used by other people the answer is “Just do it!” :slight_smile:

upd: with ‘the best programmer in the world’ I was referring more to speed and effort, e.g. if you could fix everything within a minute with your left heel, it could make it a bit lesser of an issue

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It’s completely okay to apply new skills on old projects to brush it up a bit (portfolio projects should reflect the tools you possess as a programmer).

But sometimes it might be more rewarding in a lot of sense to create something new rather than shedding more prominent light to observe old objects in order to change it, but that observation is very useful in itself.

And trying to be the “best in the world” at something is really not something I personally find meaningful.

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One of my favourite quotes is “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

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Honestly, once you’ve learned what you can from them, most of them (and more than likely all of them) can be binned straightaway. Generally, you’re not going to gain much from retreading. You will always see lots of errors, that is the nature of things: better to take a mental note for next time you do something similar. They are just there for you to help you learn, don’t be precious about them. The temptation is to think that because you put a lot of work in to make them, that they should be kept and maintained. But doing that is, mostly, going to be a waste of time.

Edit: it’s a bit like keeping all of your school exercise books for years after with the intention of going over and reviewing them later on. Maybe there are one or two things that would be useful, but in the vast majority of cases they can go in the bin, they’ve done their job

I’ve heard “perfection is the enemy of good”, which works as well

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