Potential, Intimidation, Procrastination

Code still scares me. It’s hard to admit, but I can’t deny that there’s something about JavaScript at the very least that freaks me out a lot. And I guess that this factor is my primary justification for why I haven’t really worked much on my dailies this week.

This issue of mine can be traced back to exploring the p5.js website and finding the gallery page, and at that moment realizing “jeez, I’ve only just scratched the surface of this shit, huh?”. While I understand that this is a process of baby steps, it’s hard for me not to feel kinda bad about myself code-wise; I’m still having a great deal of difficulty with the relatively basic exercises we’re doing now, while other people out there are making legitimately great works in the same language. This issue, above all else, reminds me of a similar stumbling block I had while first learning how to play guitar; in short, my problem is that my eyes remain bigger than my stomach. Back then, the problem manifest itself in consistent attempts to move to the next step without totally grasping the previous one, and here I think I’m kind of experiencing the same thing.

I think that one of my fatal flaws in keeping up on the dailies is my constant attempts to try and move on to the next ones without doing all of the previous week’s. Had I been going chronologically the whole time I think I would be having much less of a problem now. However, I’m planning to try and remedy this situation starting in tomorrow’s class/coding sessions; this is one of the many reasons why I’m incredibly thankful for the class’s slowed pace, giving me more time to catch up on what I’ve previously missed.

Another aspect of the solution came to me in a reflection on Hassan’s p5.js sunset, which he showed me next week and I was really impressed by. To be more specific - rather than considering my boundaries to be the affordances of p5.js itself, I need to make sure to account for my own relative newness to the field as its own sort of “affordance”, and work to do the best I can within those boundaries, instead of contemplating what I theoretically could accomplish at some point in the future, with greater knowledge. With these personal guidelines in mind, I’m returning to my dailies with considerably more confidence than I had before, at least because I’m aware that the benchmark is not determined by scope, but execution. I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.