Everyone goes through this. I stumble on this stuff over and over. I have been for over a year.
For me, coding is fun and it gives me another creative outlet. It’s challenging enough to keep my interest, and there are so many examples out there to look to for project ideas. And unlike a lot of creative mediums, I get to see how a person made something in code. Granted, the intricate stuff is over my head, but I can look at a website and then use my browser’s inspector to see how most of the things on the website were made. I can tell that the website didn’t appear out of thin air or in one single moment of inspiration. I can look at the code, see how something was created, see why it was created (mostly), and learn to replicate pieces of it to see if that code is something I want to incorporate with my own stuff.
It’s similar to my relationship with video games. When I was a kid, I played video games a lot—but I was really bad at video games. I enjoyed figuring out how the game world worked, how characters worked, etc., but I didn’t care about beating a game. I just wanted to play around and see what I could do.
I don’t know if you’re hoping this will turn into a job. That was a mistake I made when I first started learning on here. I thought it could allow me to make a career transition if I wanted, and that’s a lot of pressure to put on learning something new. It makes every setback, every stumped moment you have during your learned feel like this huge weight is being dropped onto your shoulders. And every stumble adds more and more weight. It’s an exhausting feeling. When I started to think of learning to code as a hobby, just a fun thing I could do on my own that’s just for me, I started enjoying learning a lot more. The stumbles also didn’t delay my learning as much because these stumbles stopped feeling like failures.
My advice is to just try to have fun with it and don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself. You’re learning something new that’s fairly challenging. You’re going to get stuck, things aren’t going to make sense sometimes, and you’re going to see amazing things written in code and wish you could do that already. If you’re doing it because you enjoy it, all these negatives will feel pretty small compared to those moments when you figure something out.
Everyone stumbles tons when learning to code. That’s just how it is. There can be a lot of value in this constant challenge, though.