Slow Down...to Speed Up...Reflections on the Coding Journey

I'm in a reflective mood this evening.

I feel a bit triggered by my inabilty to build my own Redis on codecraters.io. I figured out the first 4 stages of the "Build Your Own Redis" challenge, pretty much on my own. I hit Stage 5 though, with the need to build a Redis Protocol Parser, and pretty much found myself unable to reason through the steps.

I started watching one of the walkthnroughs and immediately started to hate myself for it.

"You've got to slow down to speed up"

"Slow is smooth smooth is fast"

"Try to focus on the process, rather than the result. As soon as you start enjoying the beauty of the process, results/value will come naturally"

These are messages I've read, or have been told, by the internet the past few days. This weekend, they are really ringing true.

I've been at this coding thing, basically every day, since late December 2020. I've developed a lot of muscle memory, and overall my understanding has grown by leaps and bounds. Even with that, I'm not improving as much as I want in terms of my problem solving ability.

I'm not going to quit, far from it, but I'm definitely going to take a step back and figure out another path. It's not Rust per se, it's not the language syntax, it's a fundamental inability to break things down into small tasks...smaller problems. I'm unable to ask questions about the task and in doing that form smaller problems to solve. All I can seem to focus on is the final result.

I have to find a way to address this fundamental flaw in my abilities...this obsession with pushing the final result out of my forehead, like Athena sprining from Zeus, without actually doing the work to get there.

The rush stops here and now.

I have to slow down to speed up.