Road To An Internship - The Rough Break [2/3]
Tags: reactnative, javascript, adventofcode, github
Published: 2021-07-22 10:56:36

What's up!

We're continuing to the third part of my Road to an Internship series! Last time I was sharing my experiences with API's and the little Discord bot I made which implemented my knowledge of API's. In this part I'll put a highlight on burnouts in programming and the learning curve I had with React. 

### The Rough Break 🛑

There was a silent phase from me after the last project. I was making websites who never saw the light of day and I was trying to master Node.js more each day! However one day I decided that I was ready for React and so the journey began. It was a long journey, mainly because I couldn't really get the hand of React, there were multiple tries back and fourth but I couldn't understand the main concept of React. So I began to think of a way to overcome React and I decided to do what I used to do on my previous project and how I learned past technologies - a pet project! 

One thing you guys might not know about me is that I love music and I'm always around music, it was always a dream of mine to make a website that displays your favorite artists and tracks from Spotify and one night as I was browsing [Spotify's API](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/), I had a breakthrough - I decided to make a website to display a user's favorite artists or tracks using React. 

Before I continue I want to talk about the minor burnout I had as a programmer. In my case it wasn't that serious but I was so obsessed on becoming a better programmer it killed my motivation. After I made my Discord bot, my motivation went down and now when I look back to it, the main reason was because I was overworked. This is the main reason I struggled with React so much. It was a big learning curve, I must admit but combine that with a slight burnout and it wasn't the most pleasant experience. No matter what's your skill level, we should all take a step back because a break is almost as important as doing our job.

Now, let's continue where we left off! As I was building my website, I started to fall in love with programming more and more. I found a place where I could share my creativity. After a week and a half, I was finally done and it was time to name the project, so [Andrej's Tunes](https://github.com/aacevski/andrej-tunes) was born!
 If you visit it, you can see it's an archived Github repository. Why so? In the next chapter I'll talk on how I reworked this website and how you can always improve your code. So what resources did I lean onto when I was making this website? In this specific chapter of my series I'll give you a tip that is used a lot in the real world. The best resource on learning a new technology is the documentation, I was heavily leaning on these following documentations:
- [React](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html)
- [styled-component](https://styled-components.com/docs)
- [Material-UI](https://material-ui.com/)

### What's next? ⚡
In the next chapter I'll talk about how I burst out of my bubble and surrounded myself by amazing programmers who made me take my programming skills to the next level!