As programmers we often find ourselves in a situation where we feel like there is no way I am ever going to get this to work. Or maybe we just feel like we know absolutely nothing. The second one is called imposter syndrome, and it’s a tough one to get past sometimes. In preparation for my class Monday evening I wrote the code and tested it and it worked 1st time up and I felt ok, I am going to be ok. We have been building an application and each lecture we add a new part. This part? Was officially adding in a database to our Django App. We had been using local storage basically up till now so nothing was ever saved. But now we are going to start to save data. So making sure I had my notes and steps ready ahead of time was important. I was so proud of myself when it worked when testing it. I should have never thought that. Come time for class and all sorts of things start going wrong. Given the limited time for lecture I opted to basically just reclone the repository and start that part again. It was some weird errors with migrations. I will fix it….I promise…at least in that copy I will. So anyways new copy is up and running. I add the new content, bing bang boom,
off we were.
So now I feel like hey I am on a roll. Lets work on this other personal project that I keep getting stuck on. Granted this one had more complex content but regardless I should try to work o
n it. Next thing I know I have errors coming from no where. I double check my code. It looks right, but it is saying something about it’s not defined. I can clearly see that it is in deed defined. By the way I am horrible at following my own advice. I tell my students and fellow programmers to follow the 20 min rule. If you are stuck for 20 min stop, step away from the computer, go get a drink or something and then come back. Yeah I almost never follow that. I really need to. I ended up spending almost 2 hours trying to find where the code was wrong only to find out, I had a miss-spelled word. Stupid fat fingers added an r where it didn’t need to be. So I fixed it. I am like whew…. finally got it. NOPE!!! By now I am yelling at my computer, my husband is looking at me funny, and also waiting on me so we can take the dogs outside. I tried putting the last part off due to the pouring rain. At least that is what I was telling him.
I did stop though and helped with the dogs, came back and wouldn’t you know it? I found the stupid error. It helps if you map everything correctly when adding url patterns. 
And now my app is up and running, not even close to being done but up and running at least. You would think it would teach me to follow my own advice. Maybe one year it will.
But the moral of the story is this. Even when you are discouraged, or think you can’t get it to work, keep plugging away. Take those breaks (HINT HINT MELISSA), keep trying. Look up those errors see if that helps. I have almost given up on this project at least a dozen times because I kept hitting new walls. I would get some progress and then another wall. However after tonight I am 1 step closer to finishing it. In the end I am learning more and more. In most cases once you make an error (especially if you are stuck on it a while) you tend to not make it again. Or you add a new post it note to your monitor.