One of the biggest challenges in programming is becoming better. For anyone just starting out the biggest challenge is to understand all the abstract information from books, courses, and tutorials. Why did the author do it this way? Most often the answer is not obvious.

For seasoned programmers it’s a bit different, because what is “getting better”? It is often about drilling down on methodologies and how to approach problems.

Either way, I believe in projects and scoping projects. I am not saying that courses are bad. However, they are there for a different purpose: A structured introduction into a certain topic. And that raises the first issue:

• To become better you need to identify what you want to get better at
• You need a structured and focused approach in your training

And that is where you can quickly lose motivation. Because coming up with structure is most often very boring. However, without any structure you can quickly get overwhelmed with information which in return might result into a losing motivation.

That’s why I say that projects are the best way of learning. They are most often the reason we started programming in the first place. Of course, the first projects that come to our mind are completely out of reach, because they have been scoped with an amount of work to keep an entire business busy for 1 year, but hey, it’s a fun project.

Either way, with focusing on our own projects we have to go through a lot of real-world problems. The project itself has a structure. The big project can be broken down into small little problems and these depend on each other.

Therefore, we don’t need to waste our time thinking about structure. But instead, can focus on the “problems”, which effectively translates to objectives like “we use library X to accomplish our state management”.