#19 | Coding is frustrating sometimes (but it’s so rewarding)

So I’m rebuilding my fraternity’s website (berkeleypse.org) using React, a JavaScript framework I learned and use for my summer internship.

It’s a big personal challenge to design the website to my liking, because I don’t have much design to go off of (I don’t like the current look of our site). I also have to make it responsive (look good and function well on mobile, tablets, laptops, and desktops). And then there’s my personal deadline for the project — finished in its entirety by end of next week.

So it sucks when I can’t figure out simple problems as to why my files (more specifically, the constant variables defined within these files) won’t export and import correctly, or third-party Components aren’t recognizing my data.

Yeah, I’m complaining for this post. It just frustrates me that I have great ideas and I know what I’m doing (or at least, I think I do), but I’m held back by my technology and I can’t troubleshoot the problems without help.

But let’s switch this up.

I’m thankful that this is the biggest of my worries. In the absolute worst case, I’m reverting back to regular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to mindlessly copy-paste code and make sure everything works. In another bad case, I pull a few all-nighters and take a few more days to complete my work or find work-arounds. In the case most likely to happen, I figure this all out and things work well in a week or two. No big deal.

Or that note, I’m super thankful for code and developers. Github hosts amazing code and React Components (thanks to Tanner Lindsey for React Table) which are simple and (for the most part) easy-to-use. It’s amazing that there are so many selfless people just building code to have fun and contribute to a larger community. That’s the kind of work I’d love to do in the future — build programs and reusable code that budding and experienced developers can use to make their lives easier and, in turn, build better products for people.