DEV Community: Jan Kohlbach

You're doing better than you think

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 14:43:55 +0000

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

Also known as the all-famous imposter syndrome. I'm a developer. I have social media. Of course I have to deal with this like others, probably most of you as well. And this can easily become really heavy and a burden for you, so it's important to become aware of it and reflect on yourself.

But first of all: what is it exactly? To keep it short, basically it's when you have the feeling of not being good enough. And I think this is always the wrong thought. Where does it root? Well look at what you're spending your time with. Most of us are on social media for a vast amount of our day. And now look who you're following there? 99.9% of the people arrange their desk, set up extra lighting and edit the photos for their posts. Do you think of this when scrolling mindlessly through your feed? Probably not. Your thoughts are 'wow that's a desk/setup I want to have' or 'wow he's working again hard on that thing'.

And there you have it:

COMPARISON 👻💀

The root of all our unhappiness. It's easy to make up a good-looking post that has nothing to do with all our struggles, the effort we put in, the downs we have. It's easy to only show the hour we worked a little on our project and not the 5 hours we struggled with something else or just did nothing because we didn't feel like it.

I think we are not aware of what we cause with this. These posts have their attention, they get their likes, shares etc., their so called numbers and traffic is what makes them 'succeed'. These people 'made it', they're influencers who reached the goal of having so many followers. These are not my thoughts, these are the thoughts that are in the people minds.

And because these are the thoughts in our minds, we automatically compare these on-top posts with our life. The gotcha here is: we don't compare the life of the person on the other side to ours. We compare this single post, this edited, set-up capture of a moment with our life. We think this is a real representation of the person's life.

This is ridiculous. We should stop this.

But I also know it's not easy. As this happens automatically, it's hard work to become more aware of this and change these thoughts and stop the comparison. But it's important, otherwise you will always fall back to: 'aw I wish I would be there / more like him/her / have this skill already / have his/her environment / mentality / discipline / talent.

Some advice from what helps me to reflect more and overcome these thoughts:

Raise your awareness: stop just scrolling mindlessly through your feed. Try to realize what all that you see and like there creates for thoughts in your mind. Are they good and inspiring? Are they negative like mentioned above? Is there anything at all 😉? And if they're negative try to think what's maybe going on behind all these posts. You really don't know all of these persons, maybe 1% of them at max. You know nothing about all their struggles, their past and their real life (and that's good, we don't need to share everything!). Maybe this will help you to realize what you see there is not the reality and nothing to compare with.
Reflect on yourself: really sit down from time to time and think about what you already achieved and overcome. This is by good chance a lot and you can be really proud of that. And if you're not satisfied take time into consideration. How much did you invest? Also think of how much you still got in front of you. Patience is really underrated these times.
You can use another trick, even if I'm not a big fan of this but it helps to become more grateful and adjust your perspective. You can use comparison, but instead of comparing yourself and your life to people who seem to be further along the way and more successful, compare yourself to people that are not so lucky. People that are on the other hand. That maybe don't have all the possibilities you got. It can help to become more grateful for where you are in life and switch your perspective in this more humble direction.
You can simply reduce the time you spend on social media and on things that make you feel not good enough. Rather use that time and learn something new that interests you. Do something that makes you feel good, learn a new skill or improve in a field. If you're really interested and passionate about it, this will make you feel way better than just 'wasting' your time following other people's lives.

Every problem we face are just new challenges for you. And of course there are some that you're maybe not capable of mastering yet. But you should be happy about them. They are the reason you can grow and improve. Happily attack them. Don't say I'm not good enough or I can't do that. If you secretly want to be able to do that, say hell yeah I want to try that and I'm putting in the work to master it and use it to improve. You will feel amazing when you did it.

That's it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

Going broad or specific and deep in your knowledge and skills?

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 10:36:07 +0000

As I'm a person that's interested in a huge amount of different things (different development topics, design, marketing and other hobbies), I wonder what's your opinion on this? Rather stay specific and go deep in one topic to become an expert or widen your knowledge with whatever interests you? Or a mix of both 🤔

Don't work too much

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 14:51:58 +0000

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

There was no post last week. Exactly because of this topic ...
The thing is, I set myself the goal to write something here every week. But the last 3 weeks have been intense. I was working way more than 40 hours in my job and then when I'm at home or at the weekend, I still want (or need) to do my private stuff. And that's just too much.

I really love what I'm doing and what I can do. Really. That's the single one reason why I'm even able to put in such a crazy amount of work. I just like the process. But even then, even if you're absolutely in your thing, there is a too much. And I faced this more often lately. There is more than just this single thing in your life. In my case development. And there's especially more than putting everything in your workplace.

The first step is to be aware of this. Recognizing when you are doing too much and leaving other topics in your life behind. You should ask yourself why the situation escalated. Are you forced to do that much? Or are you like me and just doing so much because you like it? In the first case, you definitely should change something. Take action and look for a solution to get out of that situation. You don't want to be in that place for a longer period of time, trust me. The second case is not as bad, simply because you somehow enjoy it. But it happened to me that still then, there comes a point when you're tired. And then you'll lose motivation.

Also if you're putting all your focus on one single thing all the time, that's just not healthy and good for the rest of your life. Every time I'm seeing myself in a place of working too much, I recognize that other aspects of my life suffer. Sport, fitness, sleep, diet, friends. You don't want that. They are too important.

So what to do? Considering you are now aware that you're maybe in that situation or at some point in the future: Just do less.
Of course it's that simple. For me doing less and leaving the work for the next day or week is just hard, because I'm still dealing with perfectionism from time to time. I already covered this here. So what I have to do in this situations is dealing with that and just have to say stop at some point.

I managed to do this quite good this week I would say, and let me tell you, it feels really good. You will recognize the more time you'll have. Use it to make yourself some good food, read something, make some sport. I used it this week to recover a little, go for a run and fixing my bike to make a 30km bike tour. What did I learn from it? It increases you quality of life pretty much. Especially spending more time in nature can give you a huge energy push. For us developers it's so important to be more active and do something other for the mind and body than sitting at our desks. I'm definitely going for more biking tours now (plus point: you will discover really cool things around your place ;)).

I just wanted to say this today, because it affects me a lot and I think it's a really important topic. We need to keep taking care of our mind and body. You will help nobody working 100 hours a week when you're dead with 30 then. Let's try to enjoy a little more of this life and the huge variety it offers.

That's it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

Learnings from publishing my own VS Code Theme

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 14:04:09 +0000

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

As so often, it started because I was annoyed by the current situation 😅
Every time I found a theme for my editor and was somewhat happy with it, there came an update that changed the colors again. So what does a dude that is too picky about his editor colors and invests too much time searching for good themes? Right, investing even more time and building his own theme 😂

At this time I stumbled upon this article from CSS Tricks about making your own custom theme, so I gave it a shot. I knew I wanted some kind of mix of the atom one dark theme and the vs code material theme. I looked for the source code of both of them and used them as the starting point. What followed then is basically nothing but a huge amount of decisions. And I mean a huuuge amount 😅 Probably all of the UI parts in VS Code, you can customize and set your own colors. Plus all the keywords for the languages need colors ass well. To make it easier, there is a list from Microsoft here where all properties are listed. I don’t want to describe the whole process of creating the theme in detail here, maybe in another post if people are interested.

And now there was an interesting point. When creating your own extensions, you can use them just locally and that’s it. I could’ve been happy having my own colors exactly how I wanted them. And this is very related to my last post about perfectionism. I was nothing near finished or 100% satisfied with my result, but I thought about it like this: Why not just publishing it on the marketplace? Why just keeping it for myself when maybe one single other person could enjoy it? Why not doing it if there’s no one waiting for it, no one is expecting it? I didn’t announce it anywhere. So that’s what I did. And a lot of versions and 10 months later I’m now happy with it. It’s still not really 100% finished, but I’m happy using it since then and that’s the important thing.

But there happened one other thing … I really didn’t expect that but let me just show you:

So, yeah, looks like some people also use and like it 😂
The funny thing on this is, I really didn’t market it. Neither do I have such a large following, nor did I post that much about it. I also promise, I really didn’t think much about the name, that was just like a little joke. When I now think about it, it was probably really clever to name it The Best Theme, because you know, what are people looking for when they search after a theme? 😉

I just wanted to show you this as a little real life example of why it can be really good to not be caught in perfectionism and wait too long before putting out your projects. Even if you might do things only for yourself, there are most likely some other people that have the same problem, or could benefit from using your stuff. So I really encourage you to do so. Worst case is no one is interested, but then you still did it for your purpose and can use it. Best case is actually not limited, so I guess it’s worth it.

That’s it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

Fighting perfectionism

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 10:54:05 +0000

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

I have to admit, I really suffered from this in the past (and still now from time to time). And to be honest, I think it’s not bad in every aspect. I’m pretty sure it helped me having such high standards for me when it comes to quality of code or products. But of course, most of the time there is nothing like perfect, especially being a developer, there are always different ways to solve a problem, and everyone has it’s own preferences when it comes to how they build their solutions.

The biggest problem with perfectionism though is that it stops you from getting things done and putting them out. And this is one of the most important things at the same time. You shouldn’t be afraid and make as much as you can. Only this ensures you will become better and grow your skillset. Waiting till something is perfect will make you wait forever. There’s always gonna be the feature that you want to implement first or optimize it or this little bug that 90% wouldn’t even notice. It’s important to overcome this feeling and improve later on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s super important your code is well organized, structured and makes sense, but there comes a point, where you need to make a cut and put it out there.

As a little challenge for myself, I chose this blog. As I mentioned before, I already tried to write a blog, but that one died pretty quickly 😀
So, this time I wanted to focus on what’s important having a blog. The content. So I decided the goal is to have my first post out on that weekend on sunday. Everything has to be adjusted to meet this goal. This means, no headless-cms – react – server-side-rendered – on netlify deployed monster of a blog, but just a dead simple WordPress instance with a free basic theme and some css twerks. Don’t get my wrong on this, I think personal projects are one of the best ways to try and learn new things, and it maybe would’ve been a good possibility. But also that would’ve meant I need to sit on it for some weeks until I have it all figured out. Now, as you apparently can read this, I have my blog set up and I am writing a post the third week in a row. I can always choose to migrate it now and try out different things on the side, and I can even write about this in my blog then 😉

So, did it work? Yes, but no, but yes 😀
I met my goal and set everything up on that weekend and wrote my first post. I’m of course not satisfied a 100% with the design and theme and everything. But I’m ok with it for the beginning as there are just a bunch of loyal readers anyway for now (props to you when you’re reading this now ❤).
And I can always sit down for some hours and change this now, implement a new theme or even build my own frontend for it. But the important thing is, as I mentioned above, I’m putting things out the third week in a row.

It’s always easy to get distracted by every small little thing you want to be perfect, but most of the time this just stops you from being productive. I want to encourage you to take the step and show your stuff, even though it might not be perfect for you yet. The feedback you will get will help you 1) gain some motivation and momentum again and 2) show you what is important for your users / followers.

That’s it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

What sharing my journey has taught me

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:27:08 +0000

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

This time I want to share some thoughts about this whole developer/coding community and what I learned by sharing my journey and connecting with more people.

I basically started my frontend journey in late 2018 and for one year I think I didn’t do much except for learning as much as I can and becoming somewhat good in what I did. And, as I had no knowledge and experience at this time at all, this needed all my focus and time. Of course, I had this obligatory instagram account, but neither the quality, nor the content was something special or a bigger idea behind it.

Somewhat after one year into all of this, I already knew there is a bigger community out there and people that are sharing their journey, what they are doing, learning and making. So I decided to try this out as well. Using instagram I just started sharing what I am learning and engaging with this community. I also tried to start a blog around this time, but I didn’t have the discipline nor the skills to make this a good (looking) one 🙄

Nevertheless, I learned a ton of different things from putting myself and my journey out there, and I want to thank everyone that connected with me, inspired me or helped me here. It has been amazing to experience all of this. I want to list some of the important things I learned:

– If you start putting out content, you will probably start to compare. Compare likes, followers quality, maybe everything. And this is challenging, but learn not doing this. You shouldn’t do this just because of numbers anyway, but if you compare your first tries with somebody that’s focused on high quality images and 3 years of experience you will be discouraged pretty quickly. You should do this because 1) it’s fun for you to do it and 2) you will gain connections, opportunities and extra skills for your future self. Try to be somewhat consistent and authentic, and don’t try to be someone else or mimic specific things or styles. You will automatically increase the connections and engagement then. The key here is patience. Also, this was helpful for my entire life. “Comparing is the death of happiness”. As a developer you often think you are not good enough. Be aware you will likely experience this imposter syndrome and work on your mindset so this will not impact you in a bad way.

– There are and will be always be people that are further and better than you. This will never change and shouldn’t be a reason you are not motivated or discouraged. Everyone started from 0. But, no matter at which point you are, there are always people that are not as far on their journey as you are. Or they are learning different things and are interested in your stuff. Anyway you can always help people. At every point in my journey, I could help someone with my knowledge, and this is absolutely worth it. Also, if you are honest and friendly you can always ask for help and most people will give you advice. Just don’t waste someones time 😉

– I learned that social media has a big potential. Knowing how and what works will become an important skill in the future. Especially if you’re in a business environment or even if you’re just building a personal brand around yourself so people know who you are and what you do. Reaching a lot of people online can always be beneficial. For me this and meeting some absolutely awesome humans has made this a really fun journey and I enjoy it a lot. As a creative person, I really can understand why so many people are becoming ‘creators’ and putting out that much content and helpful resources.

So, for me, putting myself out there and sharing what I do has absolutely benefited both my developer journey as well as my personal life. Thanks again for this amazing community where you can connect with so many awesome people.

That’s it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

Hello 🤙🏽

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:15:23 +0000

Alright, aloha and hello internet on my new blog 👋🏽.
Welcome to my very first blog post here (well, actually I tried this before to be honest, but that was a total fail …).

I think I’m gonna use this one to write a little bit about myself and what I’m doing here and then the next ones will hold some more specific content. At least the first topics are planned to make sure this time this will be a little bit more consistent 😀

Ok, so what’s important, I’m Jan, 22 years old at the moment of writing and living in Karlsruhe (in the south of Germany to be more precise). I studied mechatronics after school for one year but also not more than one year … I quit this because it just wasn’t the right thing which turned out to be a pretty good decision. After that I took myself a year off to decide what’s next and spent 2 months in beautiful South Africa with some penguins.
Next up, in fall 2018 I started my apprenticeship at an agency in Karlsruhe as a webdeveloper and I have to say since then, I’m pretty much enjoying this journey. Overall this is an awesome community but I want to say more on this another time. I’m really happy I’m in the last chapters of this apprenticeship, because the school part is not really that much helpful and enjoyable (this is actually much understated, but I get angry every time I try to argue why the school system is a little bit messed up, so that’s enough for here :D). Luckily the team and colleagues, and also friends I met and made during this time and in this environment is just awesome and I’m really happy and grateful to be in that place.

So, you guessed it, or if you even came from places like my instaram (otherwise, go follow me there 😬), you already know I do a lot around the web. My main passion is playing around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and all the other frontend stuff. Nevertheless I also already got in touch with backend stack like PHP or MySQL and although I can work with that as well from time to time, it’s not my favorite. Besides that, I’m also into design as well. Not my best skill, but I’m trying and making things like this blog or my homepage 100% on my own to practice and get better. So please don’t be too hard with me on this one 😉

Generally, I’m interested in a ton of different things. Actually I would say too much but at least I’m sure I never get bored … This includes developing more skills in design (some illustrations for example), improving marketing and business knowledge, getting better at playing the piano and just a lot of technical skills that I don’t need all to mention here on their own. You will here about it when I will make some time to work on and with them.

So, I guess that’s pretty much everything you (don’t) need to know about me for now. If you want to follow me, I put all the different links right up there in the sidebar (if you’re not reading this on DEV) so you can check out my other profiles.

That’s it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽

I finally implemented Push Notifications in a React-PWA with Firebase, Ask Me Anything!

Jan Kohlbach — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:36:18 +0000

This was a tough one and I procrastinated hard on it, but now it's finally working, easier than I first thought and ready to be shipped in a few hours.
Learnings: don't give up and do enough research until you find the best solution for your 'problem'