Development is very much like growing Bonsai…it teaches you many a lesson, patience, knowledge but most importantly a willingness to never give up even if the code make you want to cry!
It’s been a tough few weeks of ups & downs for me personally as a developer. After WWDC I have been working on a total re-design of My Yarn Pal for the upcoming release of iOS26. As usual there are ups and downs, you win some you loose some. But the past two weeks have truly made me want to give up…have I?
You bet I haven’t! I am currently battling adding CloudKit to My Yarn Pal. In theory it should be pretty easy. The SwiftData models weren’t in too bad a shape for this, and despite my best efforts, every time I send a version into TestFlight for real world testing, that syncing just fails!
But after pulling my hair out time after time, it made me think, why is it that I don’t give up? I could easily just take this feature out and update with the redesign. But am I going to do that ? No of course not. Is it the stubbornness of me, the willingness to beat the computer at its own game against me or the need to impress my wonderful users with my efforts.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started”
I am quite stubborn as a person, but I truly don’t think that is what makes me not give up. I think it is the journey between me and the code. A push & pull relationship that will never truly end, but that at times gives me the high of such great achievement at the end of this part of our journey. Each update is almost like a chapter of a very large book. A journey which has ups and downs, forever growing & forever learning but with each chapter a larger willingness to never stop. To keep on this road, keep walking, keep stepping and ultimately keep growing.
In turn this journey helps me grow, as a human it grows my resilience, my forward thinking & my frustration handling. But further than that, the reward goes all the way down to my amazing users. The people who have entrusted their projects into my code. The people who have reached out to tell me how they now cannot live without My Yarn Pal and use it daily. They ultimately get a much better experience & i truly think that is what creates the feeling of achievement. Not so much winning at the bug disappearing & the app finally building, but the shipping it out and seeing how it improves the usability of users.
This week’s post is less informative and more discussion/experience based, but still I do love how development helps us grow in so many ways. It truly makes me feel very lucky to have the knowledge I have to be able to engineer all the mad ideas inside my brain!
What do you think, what is it about development that makes us keep going? Comment below!
