Hola Mundo!

Oh frustration!

I've never been the most patient person. And if there's something I've learned - the hard way - as developer, is that there is a lot of frustration involved.

But I'm lucky, most of the times the frustration kicks in, I try to manage it and I ask for help . And I have received that help, which is a huge privilege.

Now...let me tell you about that time I almost quit a Hackathon.

The thing is, a couple of months ago, after I started learning Swift, I enrolled to a Femhackathon that has mobile challenges. Fun right?

I got in the Hackathon with a good mindset: I'm gonna do as much as I can. I'm learning and this is another opportunity to try new things. I was like, I can do this !

The challenge

So the challenge started, they gave us this list of things we have to do. And well you had until certain time to send your solution.

I did like a list of things I needed to tackle. Wrote down all the requirements. But for some reason I didn't follow my own list.

Now I'm starting to write my "solution", starting with the Database. An optional requirement and something that I've never done before.

The quitting point

Well, it took me a lot of hours to do the Database. I decided to use Coredata, checked some notes I had and did my thing. But then when I thought it was ready, it wasn't. I had errors and I wasn't able to solve them on my own.

At this moment, I watched the clock and got so frustrated it felt like I've being doing so much for nothing and THIS WAS A PLUS. Am i dumb or what!? .

I honestly thought like, you know what? I'm done, I'm going to play some Playstation and won't compete. Why did I even enrolled to this, I could be relaxing on my weekend, blah blah blah...I was in a wormhole.

But then I looked at my own checklist again and well...it didn't look that hard .

So, I deleted the nonsense I've been doing and decided to go step by step for another time. To follow the list that my past self did and to send whatever I was able to do, because that's the idea: to learn .

The outcome

Definitely I did learn to have patience and to prioritise . And also to believe in the progress. If I had written my pseudocode and wrote down a series of tasks I needed to do, why did I start by the end? So this was also a reminder to focus .

Actually I did pretty well and scored second place in my category which made me feel very proud and also was a perfect motivator to keep reminding myself to not give up.

And of course sometimes things will go wrong. But if they go bad, I want it to be because I've to keep on learning and not because I didn't try it .

So to you, thank you for reading this much and remember, do not give up. You are worth the shot.

Have you had any similar experience? Let me know and if you haven't see it, check on my series .