Man, lemme tell ya, February 2019 felt like a whole damn year crammed into four weeks. I was in a total rut, you know? Just grinding away at this gig that wasn’t exactly lighting my fire anymore. Every morning felt the same, punching the clock, doing the usual stuff, seeing the same faces. It wasn’t bad, not terrible at all, but it just felt… flat. Like a stale soda.
I remember hitting the beginning of February, looking at the calendar, and just thinking, “Something’s gotta give.” I’d been kinda dabbling with this idea, this crazy thought of trying to switch gears, to actually build something from scratch myself. Not just some internal tool for the company, but something that could actually live out there on the internet, for real people to see and use. I’d seen all these folks posting about their side hustles, their little projects, and I kept thinking, “Why not me?”
The Dive into the Deep End
So, February 1st hit, and I decided, screw it. I was gonna try to make it happen. My big idea was to build this super simple, almost dumb, little web app. Just to prove to myself I could actually do it, from start to finish. I’d been a backend guy for ages, pushing data around, dealing with servers and all that deep-in-the-guts stuff. The frontend? That was like another planet. All those fancy buttons, smooth animations, making things look good… always seemed like magic to me.
My first step? I spent the first few days just trying to figure out where to even begin. I knew I needed to learn some JavaScript, maybe some React or Vue, stuff like that. I grabbed a bunch of free courses online, watched about a million YouTube videos. My eyes were practically bleeding by the end of the first week. It was like trying to drink from a firehose, honestly. All these new terms, new ways of thinking. My brain felt like it was gonna explode.
Hitting the Wall, Hard
Then came the actual building part. Oh man, the struggle was real. I wanted to just whip up this clean, simple interface, right? Just a few input fields, a button, and some results showing up. Sounded easy enough in my head. But when I actually sat down and started coding?
- First, I wrestled with setting up the environment. Just getting everything to talk to each other, getting the development server running, that took a whole day.
- Then, the CSS. Holy cow. Trying to make a div sit where I wanted it to, making things align, giving it just the right padding so it didn’t look like a total amateur job. I swear I spent hours just on one stupid button, trying to get it centered.
- JavaScript was a beast. I kept running into errors I didn’t understand, syntax stuff that just didn’t click. My old backend habits of strict typing and clear structures just didn’t translate. I’d be staring at the screen, getting frustrated, thinking, “Why the hell isn’t this working?!”
There were so many moments in the middle of February where I just wanted to quit. Throw the laptop across the room, go back to my boring but comfortable routine. I questioned everything. Was I too old to learn new tricks? Was this whole “side project” thing just a pipe dream? Maybe I should just stick to what I knew, stay in my lane.
A Tiny Spark, Just Enough
But then, something shifted. I remember one late night, probably around the third week of February. I was banging my head against this one component that just wouldn’t render right. After hours of poking and prodding, trying different things based on some random forum post I found, it finally, magically, popped up on the screen exactly how I wanted it. It was a tiny win, a super small detail, but man, it felt like I’d just cracked the code to the universe.
That little flicker of success was just enough to keep me going. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. The code was probably messy as hell, full of bad practices I didn’t even know were bad yet. But it worked. And I had made it work. That feeling, that click of accomplishment after all the frustration, that was something else.
Looking Back at the Month
By the end of February, I hadn’t built my masterpiece. Far from it. The “app” was still ugly, barely functional, and probably full of bugs. But I had gone from zero to… well, not quite hero, but definitely something. I had actually gotten my hands dirty with frontend stuff, something I’d been putting off for ages.
February 2019 was a brutal month of learning, failing, and then somehow, pushing through. It taught me that just showing up and trying, even if you suck at it initially, is half the battle. It lit a small fire under my butt, made me realize that breaking out of that rut wasn’t just a fantasy. It planted a seed, you know? A seed that would eventually push me to keep learning, keep building, and ultimately, find a path that felt a lot more like me.
