In the VS Code terminal:
npm run dev
I’ve rewritten the page for the tenth time after design changes, and everything works fine.
It’s 11 a.m., but I feel utterly exhausted.
The marketing team’s voices are loud, as if they have nothing to do, and I wish I could make them quiet.
I have very little patience today.
I start wondering, was this the job I had been chasing for so long? A front-end developer at a startup?
This made me pause and reflect: why did I even choose programming in the first place?
The Origin
Nine years ago, my school decided to hold several extracurricular classes on different topics, and one of them was game development. I signed up for it purely out of curiosity. The class met once a week.
The teacher taught us with great enthusiasm. None of us knew programming, but that wasn’t necessary we were using GameMaker Studio. We could implement game logic simply by dragging and dropping events, and we created our characters with the mouse in GameMaker’s environment, something like Windows Paint.
By the end of the first session, I was completely absorbed in making a game and barely noticed what the teacher was saying. In my game, we had two characters, each controlled by a few keyboard keys. One could shoot dynamite with the spacebar, the other with shift, and whoever hit the opponent first won.
The class ended, but I was still trying to figure out how to keep the characters from leaving the arena, adding blocks around the edges. I don’t know how long I spent on it, but the bell eventually brought me back. During recess, I realized the teacher was standing behind me, watching my work. I could tell he was amazed.
I told him I had made a game but couldn’t stop the characters from leaving the arena. He spent about 30 minutes explaining it to me, and afterward, I had a really cool game we could play together.
Everything started from there
exactly there
from the joy of creating. from the joy of learning.
The class ended after eight sessions, but on Thursdays, another advanced class was organized for me and four other interested students. In this class, the teacher taught us game development at a deeper level.
The image below shows the "Plants vs. Zombies" style game I created in GameMaker Studio.
A little later, we participated in a game development competition with about 20 schools competing. We ended up in second place.
It was there that my path was truly set.
Programming…
Ah, those were such good days.
So why don’t I feel that same excitement and joy from programming anymore?
Where is the problem?
What Took That Joy Away from Me?
The sound of something like an inflated bag popping brings me back to reality.
I hear laughter from the marketing team and realize it’s probably their mischief again.
It’s still 11 a.m.
The problem isn’t programming.
The problem isn’t me.
The real problem is the work I’m doing here.
Don’t get me wrong , I’m working on some really interesting projects in this startup. But as I said before:
When you build something amazing but don’t really understand how it works (just following instructions from ChatGPT or similar tools), it’s not truly rewarding.
This fatigue comes from straying from the right process.
I’ve become like a robot just implementing things. What’s the point of implementing without understanding its purpose?
The real joy comes when you create something extraordinary and know exactly how it works. I’ve experienced this feeling over and over, it’s what drew me to programming in the first place.
I need to change this situation because honestly, I don’t think I can continue programming like this.
In Search of Lost Joy
Honestly, I have some plans.
First, I think one reason I’ve been feeling this way is that I don’t have any personal projects. I work on many projects at the startup, but I don’t make the key decisions for them. Even though these projects are important to me and I try my best to implement and deliver them well, a personal project is something else entirely.
It’s like having a meaningful goal, a beautiful horizon that you run toward, like a point of light in a dark tunnel.
So, I need to have a personal project again and dedicate time to it.
Honestly, I already have some ideas.
But there’s another important issue that has been occupying my mind lately…
Robots Without Expertise
It’s been a few months now since our team started looking for a senior front-end developer.
Many people have come in for interviews, but they were all rejected, we still haven’t found the right person.
Some days, I stood near the interview room, listening to the conversations. I wanted to understand what kind of questions were being asked that made everyone fail.
Honestly, the questions weren’t that hard. But when I heard the answers, I was genuinely surprised. It was clear that most candidates lacked any deep understanding of React or front-end concepts. They didn’t know why one approach was right and another was wrong. They just learned something once and kept repeating it.
One of the candidates couldn’t even explain why we need a state management library like Redux.
That reminded me of myself years ago.
I once built a fairly large application with React without knowing what Redux Toolkit was. I did everything using the Context API.
By the end of the project, I was on the verge of tears. My app’s states were tangled like a spider web, and debugging had become painfully difficult. I had too many Contexts, and managing them was chaos.
When I finally discovered Redux Toolkit, I truly understood the problems it was designed to solve.
Watching these interviews taught me something very important:
You can have years of experience and still remain a junior.
I want to make sure that never happens to me.
If I ever decide to leave this startup, I want to be as skilled and knowledgeable as I can.
In fact, I want to become more of an expert every single day.
Starting Again
I want to combine these two goals:
- Finding a deep understanding of front-end concepts and beyond.
- Working on a personal project.
I plan to work on a personal project where I’ll learn a lot and become more specialized in many areas.
Honestly, I don’t want to share the details of this project, but to build it, I need to learn backend topics — things like Node.js, Express, and how to create APIs.
On the front-end side, I want to go deeper into everything I deal with every day.
For example, I’ve been wanting to learn Canvas for a long time.
Or maybe I could try to build my own router for React instead of using React Router.
And there are many other things I’d like to try.
Honestly, even now, as I’m writing these lines, it feels really exciting.
I think this might be the only way to escape this swamp.
This project has other advantages too.
For example, it could become a great portfolio piece that I can use later,
or maybe I could even make money from it.
Isn’t that awesome?
But years of dreaming have taught me one important thing:
you must start small, otherwise nothing gets done. Step by step.
The sound of the marketing team is still annoying.
The clock’s hand doesn’t seem to want to move.
Everything feels the same.
Except now, I have some interesting ideas to implement and I’m going to experience that lost joy again and again...
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