Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

The Pain Of Programming

Published on in Medium Archive
Updated on
Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/36e
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed. When I wrote this post, I was only 17 years old!

Boredom might be good, but also bad

Some time ago I published this article about how boredom might be good for getting new app ideas and so on. That’s still true. Boredom might bring you the ideas, that transform yourself from a nobody-cares developer to the genius on earth one.

The Success of Boredom-Inspired Apps

But let’s talk about the bad sides of boredom. About how a project, you just can’t abandon, takes you down, to the point were you start doubting, if developing things is still the right thing for you.

Take this example:

You developed an app, whether it’s your own one, or one for your company or for whoever else. That app became quite a big util with many different features and it became a big part of your and others lives. But because you don’t have much time for that project, you start ignoring it, start caring about other things.

But then you need to restart work on this app. First you need to update all the dependencies and the list of new versions doesn’t stop growing. Of course, updating all of them doesn’t work without breaking something. Whether that are essential parts of the UI, important things in the backend or anything in between.

You try to fix everything, but always when you think you fixed one thing, you broke another one. That just doesn’t want to end. If many people rely on your app, they start asking for updates and they wonder, why everything takes so long. That just demotivates.

You start procrastinating or just loosing the high amount of motivation you got when you started the project. Your new baby became the hated child. Everything sucks.


That’s the real pain of programming. We always just read positive things about developing products like “How my app got famous in X days” and so on. But nobody talks about the bad side. Because nobody wants to show, that they somehow fail.

Now it’s your turn, to get out of this hole. You need to fix that thought, that you’re to bad for your product.

Just ask a friend in exchange for helping them, once they have trouble. Together you can fix it. Together you can get motivation again.

But that’s life. Life has ups and downs and sometimes you just need to experience some downs to appreciate the ups. Don’t let that little bug destroy your life!

You’ll manage to fix it, don’t lose hope! 😉

I hope this little post gave you motivation. If you also experienced this pain ones or even multiple times, feel free to share your experience, of how you got over it!

Tags:

Jan-Lukas Else
Interactions & Comments