Avoid feeling burned out/tired

Rafael Calvo — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 15:09:56 +0000

Must of us have felt burned out, exhausted or stressed at some point in our career. And might even looked like Charlie Jones:

Just because we have been working at home, thanks to the turns of events that happened in the world in the last year, and have more freedom doesn't mean we have to neglect our wellbeign. Here I'll modify a very famous quote and say: "With great freedom there must also come great responsibility".

What you'll read next are some tips that might help you pass throught your day without feeling (that much) tired by the end of it.

Make a schedule.

Don't just sit in front of your screen and type like a hollywood 'hacker' until you're done. Make a plan, put a time to each task and commit to it. And inside it put spaces/blocks to eat (outside of your desk/work space, and something healthy), rest, etc. If you're not used to it, it might take a while, but afte a while you'll adopt the routine and you'll feel more accomplished.

Take breaks.

No s**t Sherlock. Yeah, this might seem a little too obvious.
You can use whatever technique you find (Pomodoro being the most popular), but it mostly boils down to: Work for X ammount of time and take a break for Y ammount of time, while X > Y (in Pomodoro it's 25:5, then, after four 25 min tasks, take one 25-30 min long break).

Workout/excercise

This can be as simple as go outside and take a walk through your neighborhood or nearby park (if your country's lockdown laws allow it) for at least 30 minutes. If not, you can search online for any home workout routine and do it.

Disconnect completely from your work.

Close the editor, minimize/close your work related tabs. Here you can do something else in your computer (watch a series/movie, play a game, etc.) or walk away from your desk, go to a walk (if your lockdown restrictions allow it), clean your room, etc. That way you can focus on something else and do a soft reboot of your thoughts.

B.

Don't feel like doing an extensive load of work/code? Do it for a short period of time, like 30 minuntes, and do something else. And, if you made a breakthrough and feel like it, keep going! Nothig beats the joy of finding your code is working after hitting your head with the issue for quite a while.

Play some music.

If you like to work while listening music to anything else, do it! Find a genre that you're comfortable with and play it. Have in mind that if your living with somebody put some headphones (at a healthy volume, of course) or use you speakers at a tolerable volume.

And that's it. If you have another tip, you can share it in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!

P.S.: If the issue is bigger than just feeling tired, I'd consider going to a professional. I've just written what's been working for me and felt like sharing to see if it helps.

Getting Out of Tutorial Hell

Rafael Calvo — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 14:35:28 +0000

Disclaimer: Most of this article is based from my personal experience, so I don't guarantee it will work for everyone

Tutorial Hell can be, well... Hell. And many of us have been there following along many courses, YouTube videos and such, and thought "Wait, what am I doing? Is this enough?" because you've realized you have your computer's dev folder filled with "X tech crash course" or "Flexbox Landing page" and you keep doing it because you're not confident enough to start something from scratch, it's easier to follow and code along the tutorials or something else.

Until about a year ago I was in that position, and it sucked. And thanks to (mostly) Twitter's and YouTube's algorithm, and DuckDuckGo and Google, I got out of this Hell and arrived the where I am today. Of course, I'll keep going forward and look some tutorials of I'm hard-stuck somewhere.

Now, to the juicy part of this (already big) wall of text, what I did to get out (Note: These are in no particular order of priority/importance):

Disclaimer 2: I'm not trying to say it's easy, but I think this will help to take the first steps.

Coding Challenge sites.

This one's pretty direct. These sites provide you with intructions and the challenges are rated bt difficulty, that way you can try your skills in various levels. Some sites like these are:

Of course, there are more out there (and maybe I'll talk about them in the future), but these are the ones I've known and used (specially devChallenges and Frontend Mentor).
Note 2: If you're going to put the challenges don't put them separately, make sure you have a mini portfolio of those. That way you have a nice way to show them instead of having them scattered all over the place.

Copying/cloning existing sites.

A few times you've arrived to a site and thought "Woah, this site's nice/well done", right? Well, what better way to practice your skills and take another step out of that Hell than to copy that site?.
"But it has a lot of components, animations, transitions, etc." Alright, stop, look through the whole site, make a list of the parts it has (kinda like a dissection of it), and begin to code one part at time from top to bottom. If you're stuck you can always google it, just take yout time and code at your own pace.
It's not about making a 1:1 copy of the site per se. It's more something like "Alright, what can I do here?" type of situation. It's also a nice way to start compartmentalizing you process for future projects.

Use the tutorials as templates.

Alright, before you frown at me, hear me out. What I'm trying to say here is that you can use what you did in the tutorial/course as a base to a bigger or another project. That grid you did following that Youtube video and you liked the result? Use it! But add your own personal touch to it (this are the small letters in this part), same process with any other part you did in another tutorial (or even the same). Here the trick is adding your personal touch to the final product.

Aaand, done. I think this is a fairly good start and most of the stuff you make with the challenges or clones of those sites can work for your portfolio if you have nothing to add there yet.

DEV Community: Rafael Calvo