A little more of that thing you hate to repeat...

Like many people, I enjoy seeing the end-product of something that was made from almost nothing, or at least nothing that would have caught the attention of the inexperienced eye in a specific context. Makers /creators of products are different of course, so the appeal of raw material varies among people, even within this category.

Finished products however hardly tell the story of the hours of labour, of trial and error and many times can appear too easy. An example to illustrate this fair point would be the week I decided to take a monkey-see-monkey-follow approach to building a weather app with nodejs. As you might guess, the back-end in web development is not the place to be overly concerned about UI. This app had just about two visible paragraphs to show it was a weather app and an input field, but the process of building an API, of testing with postman, or utilizing it to make it work with a very basic front end page for the user to see took eight hours of coding along with my online tutor. This made me think...

Apart from the knowledge that I could not possibly master nodejs in 8 hours of copy-work, it made me see the value of repetitive behavior. No one wakes up to build an app that huge without having started from practicing how to structure and build units/blocks where they gained mastery enough to add layers of new skills onto. This is what leads to near perfection and that euphoric release in your brain when you realize that you no longer feel like the essence of your being is being utilized to accomplish a minute portion of work.

If it's not yet clear, what I'm advocating for is the appreciation of monotonous lingering over work practices, to not feel bad when you have to do something over and over again that it makes you sick to have to be born to live like a hamster. All these things contribute to making things 'click', to leading to success after long stretched of plateau. One block on-top of another till we have a massive structure that makes everyone wonder how we got to where we are...