Posted on Jun 19 • Edited on Jul 1

Why most code feels forgettable and how obsession makes it unforgettable

#webdev #programming #javascript #beginners

1. The myth of discipline in coding

If you’ve spent any time in dev Twitter, bootcamps, or tech forums, you’ve probably heard this advice:

Stay consistent.
Code every day.
Discipline beats motivation.

It sounds good structured, responsible, almost like life advice that belongs in a productivity podcast. But here’s the thing: this assumes you already care. Deeply. Passionately. Obsessively.

And that’s the real problem most people overlook.

You can set 6 AM alarms, schedule Pomodoros, and build Notion dashboards all you want… but if you don’t actually care about what you’re building, every task will feel like dragging a boulder uphill. Motivation fades. Consistency becomes a chore. Burnout creeps in.

Coding isn’t just about showing up it’s about what pulls you in when nobody’s watching. And for that, discipline isn’t enough.

You need to give a damn.

Not in a “save the world with machine learning” kind of way. But in a “this weird idea keeps me up at night and I want to make it real” kind of way.

2. Your brain isn’t lazy it’s just picky

Think about the kind of things your brain remembers without effort. You probably know the runtime of your favorite movie, the exact moment your favorite anime fight peaked, or even cheat codes from games you haven’t played in years.

Now try recalling the syntax for parsing an integer in a language you haven’t used in a while. Not so easy, right?

That doesn’t mean your brain is broken. It means it’s selective.

Brains remember what they care about. We’re wired to latch onto things that feel exciting, rewarding, or emotionally charged. The dry stuff error messages, abstract syntax, pagination logic doesn’t stick unless we give it a reason to.

This is why tutorials often feel forgettable. They’re disconnected from your interests. They’re trying to teach you something you don’t yet have a reason to care about. And without that anchor, your brain quietly files it away in the “meh” folder.

But when the project matters to you really matters that’s when everything changes.

3. How I learned Go by building something I didn’t need

When I decided to learn Go, I didn’t start with a REST API tutorial or dive into CRUD apps. I built a stat tracker for one of my favorite games.

Did the game need a stat tracker? Not really.
Did I need to learn Go for it? Absolutely not.
Did I build it anyway? Without hesitation.

Why? Because it was fun. It felt personal. It solved nothing important but it made me excited to open my editor every day.

That one project taught me more than weeks of tutorials ever did. I wasn’t following some roadmap. I was solving a problem I invented, one I was emotionally invested in. Because of that, I pushed through confusing documentation, experimented with goroutines, wrote terrible code, rewrote it, and kept going.

Learning didn’t feel like work. It felt like discovery.

And that’s the point. When you care about the outcome, the process becomes easier to endure and often, weirdly enjoyable.

4. The irrational project advantage

The best coding projects are rarely the ones that make the most sense. They’re the ones that make you want to stay up just to see if you can get that weird thing to work.

That’s what I call the irrational project advantage.

You’ve probably seen examples of this floating around GitHub or dev Twitter:

A CLI tool that yells at you if your tests fail.
A GraphQL API to track your cat’s weight fluctuations.
A game where the only mechanic is yelling into your microphone.
A personal portfolio that runs entirely in the terminal.

Do any of these solve a pressing need? Not really. But they get built because someone, somewhere, gave a damn.

And the real magic? These odd little projects push you to learn more than any structured course ever could. You’ll tinker with edge cases, dig through API docs, and obsess over performance not because someone told you to, but because your curiosity won’t let you stop.

These are the kinds of projects that make you better without you noticing. And the best part? They’re actually fun.

5. Curiosity is the real bootcamp

Forget forcing yourself through another course or tutorial series. The fastest way to level up isn’t discipline. It’s curiosity.

When you’re building something you actually care about, you don’t need to schedule study time. You just… keep going. Stack traces stop feeling like failure they become puzzles. You don’t dread the docs you mine them for hidden features like secret lore in a game.

Every blocker becomes a challenge. Every bug becomes a boss fight.

This is why people build full-stack dashboards just to track how much coffee they drink. Or write their own frameworks for blogs that no one reads but them. These projects are fun, not because they’re easy, but because they’re theirs.

Learning happens naturally when the goal is something you actually want. You start exploring tools, languages, and systems without realizing you’re doing it. Before you know it, you’ve built a deploy pipeline just to ship cat stats from your Raspberry Pi to a cloud dashboard and suddenly, CI/CD isn’t abstract anymore.

It’s personal.

And that’s what makes it stick.

6. Passion is a cheat code

When you’re genuinely excited about what you’re building, everything accelerates.

You don’t need to “find motivation.” You don’t need to trick yourself with productivity hacks. You’ll voluntarily spend your evening refactoring, not because you’re chasing a job offer but because it feels wrong to leave it unfinished.

That’s the power of passion. It’s not logical. It’s not even always productive. But it gives you access to effort levels that discipline alone can’t reach.

You’ve probably felt this in other areas. Ever stayed up late finishing a game, or got so into a hobby you forgot to eat? That same energy, when applied to coding, turns your brain into a high-performance engine.

You’re not learning because you have to you’re learning because you can’t stop.

That’s not grind culture. That’s flow.

The key is not to force it. It’s to find the thing weird enough, specific enough, or personal enough to pull you in. Once you do, you’ll stop seeing practice as a chore and start treating it like play.

7. But what if I don’t know what I care about yet?

Not everyone wakes up with a burning desire to build a Kubernetes dashboard for their smart toaster. And that’s okay.

If you don’t know what excites you yet, start small. Ask yourself:

What are your favorite games, apps, or tools?
What’s something ridiculous you’ve always wanted to build?
What’s a daily annoyance you’d love to automate, even if it only saves you five seconds?

You’re not looking for the next billion-dollar startup idea. You’re looking for the thing that makes you laugh, tilt your head, or say, “wait… could I actually build that?”

Here are a few idea sparks to get you going:

A bot that sends you random trivia every time your tests pass
A Chrome extension that changes all ad copy to pirate speak
A music visualizer that turns commit frequency into sound

The more personal, the better. When the project makes you smile just thinking about it, that’s your cue.

Don’t wait for permission. Start messy. It doesn’t have to be useful it just has to be yours.

8. Final boss making it stick

So you’ve found a project you care about. You’re learning faster. You’re finally enjoying the process. Now what?

Make it public.
Even if it’s half-broken, weirdly scoped, or filled with comments like “I’ll fix this later probably.”

Share it on GitHub. Write a short post on dev.to or Hashnode. Drop a demo in a Discord server or subreddit. When you share your work, even in its early form, you create a feedback loop. You get encouragement, curiosity, even constructive criticism and most importantly, accountability.

You also start to build an identity around the things you make.
Not as just another developer, but as the person who builds delightful, quirky, or surprisingly smart things. The kind of developer people follow because they never know what you’ll try next.

It’s not about likes. It’s about momentum.

When your weird ideas are out there in the world, you’re far more likely to keep going. Not for approval but because sharing is part of the loop now. You make, you learn, you post, you repeat.

That’s how you build consistency: not by forcing habits, but by building identity around what you genuinely enjoy.

Conclusion: Give your brain a reason to show up

If there’s one thing to take from all of this, it’s this: you learn fastest when you care the most.

Not when you force yourself to build what the internet tells you to. Not when you chase job-ready projects you secretly dread. But when you follow your curiosity even if it leads you into ridiculous, over-engineered side quests.

Obsession, no matter how irrational, is a shortcut.
Caring deeply about something even something silly makes learning feel like play. And that’s the real trick: making your brain want to solve the problem.

So build what makes you curious. Track your cat’s diet in GraphQL. Animate your GitHub profile with commit-driven pixel art. Hack on your game’s mod loader until you forget what time it is.

Because the moment you give a damn, everything else starts to click.