Getting Sidetracked

Ok, no surprise here: I got sidetracked — and I delayed posting for way too long.

So… what have I been up to?

I hit a point in FullStackOpen where the backend work started to feel a bit dry. So of course my brain went, “Hmm… what about React Native? That could be fun.”
And well — it was fun.
It was also several days of wandering away from my “planned” curriculum, which I could’ve spent moving forward. But honestly? I learned a lot, just not in the order I expected.

What surprised me most was that React Native pushed me into this new mindset of “good enough to start” and “try first, perfect later.” Instead of feeling like I must understand every corner of React before I even dare touching React Native, I just… tried things. And they worked! Sometimes not elegantly, but they worked.

When I got back on track, I realized I actually needed to adjust my learning approach. Here’s the structure I’ve started using:

1. Check what’s next in the course I’m doing.
2. Read/watch the intro so I know the big picture.
3. Try it myself first.
   • If it works → great. Then I go watch the “best practices” solution.
   • If it doesn’t → also great. Then I learn what I missed.

This probably sounds mundane to most people, but for me it’s pretty new. In the past, I always wanted to “nail it” — to write the sleek, clever solution immediately. Anything less felt like failure.
And sites like Codewars were torture, because I knew my solution would be longer and less pretty than the top-ranked ones.

Reading The Pragmatic Programmer and Think Like a Programmer has helped a lot too. All those fancy one-liners are nice to look at, but they don’t magically make code better. They don’t make it more readable, more maintainable, or more meaningful. They’re just… pretty.

In the end, what matters is:
It worked. And I understood it.

So yeah — this is a ramble. But I posted again, and I’m trying to teach myself this one lesson:
good enough is perfect.