Full-Stack Struggles #2: I Was at the Gates of Tutorial Hell

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Show Notes

Returning to a project

• Difficult to get your bearings on a project after months away
• Forgot a lot of fringe topics that I had learned
  - Topics that I only used once, got taught by my mentor, or only touched on once
• This absence resulted in two struggles
  - Direction
  - Googling

Direction

• Not sure what to work on next and why
• Having to familiarize with the app again, how things worked and why I programmed things the way I did
• Trying to remember Svelte and SvelteKit concepts again
• This lack of direction was exemplified by the lack of plans (no designs, goals, or anything like that) since this is a learning project
• Took me a while to decide where I should start working on the project again (which feature I should start coding up)

Googling

• My lack of understanding the basics of Svelte and SvelteKit made it difficult to know how to phrase questions in Google
  - Asking AI didn't help much either, because my prompts were still incorrect
• My searches started leading in circles
  - I went from researching Svelte stores, to using LocalStorage with Svelte, then over to bind, reactive statements, queries, and then back to stores again
• After a couple of hours of sitting and researching with no progress I started to feel the pressure of wanting to accomplish something in the app

Stumped

• Once I realized I was stumped I started to think of and weigh my options:
  - Take a course
  - Restart
  - Ask for a help session

Take a course

• I thought I maybe should build up a repertoire of Svelte and SvelteKit basics
• This would potentially give me a good amount of foundational learning so that I could "think in Svelte"
  - Get my bearings with where and when to use bind, stores, etc.

Restart

• A lot of the things I'm doing with this passive income app are "advanced Svelte" (Mike's words), so I thought that restarting with my current knowledgebase would help me make a less efficient app, but would allow me to slowly build up my knowledge
• The problem with restarting is that it felt like I was giving up, and I feared that if I did restart it would become a bad habit
  - I don't want to restart every time the going gets tough

Ask for a help session from a mentor

I ended up going with this solution

• Screen sharing session with Mike where he can listen to my goals and intentions with the app and point me in the right direction
• The session I had with Mike helped me:
  - Code up my engineered idea (I had a concept already engineered and ready to go)
  - Explained the lifecycle of some variables (I had a console.log problem)
  - We made some decisions on re-engineering how my forms work
  - Discussion on data structure, preparing for a database by creating a temporary localStorage mechanism

How much progress did I make?

• The app has gotten hardly any further towards the finish line, and that's okay!
• I needed to learn how to refamiliarize myself with a project I've been away from for a long time (specifically using a technology I'm still learning)
• So...yes there has been progress, but no the app is no closer to being complete