I’m absolutely frustrated and angry with myself.

If there were ever a thing as Developer’s Block, I’ve got it tonight. It’s unfortunate, I did so well developing yesterday.

To summarize, I had a great idea for a tool around 5:30pm last night. I decided to stay at work and entertain the idea and completed some really awesome development during my 4 hours working on the project. I left the project satisfied with what I’d done, content with my accomplishment. I made a bad mistake of showing my work to my “client” today. While I got a lot of praise and kudos and the satisfaction that what I built as an idea was definitely on the right track, it also opened the requirements up on my project. As I spent the rest of the afternoon wishing I hadn’t shown anyone what I had done, I was also contemplating how to tackle various problems with my primitive technical options.

I came home with certain ideas on how to conquer these problems, I tried various methods, techniques to solve the problems. I have a very strong mindset that “everything is possible” to build. Optimistic eh? But everything is not possible without using standard technologies…Anything is possible with a server-side language and a database but in my scenario, I need to do things with only HTML and JavaScript. I tried to think of any and all possible solutions but unfortunately came up short. I couldn’t solve the problems that plagued me tonight.

And that’s why I’m frustrated. As for why I’m angry with myself…I’m not sure if the problems I’m dealing with are impossible given the tools at my disposal or if I’m not thinking clearly, but I stupidly wasted a lot of time pursuing different options I thought might work only to do a lot of development and fail. I then thought about the problem and my proposed solution and realized it never would have worked in the first place. What was I thinking? Wasting so much time on something because I didn’t think or plan it out thoroughly? Foolish and impulsive. Or possibly desperate.

The tool I built had such high hopes and possibilities but because of my tools, I can’t do what I want and what it should be capable of. It’s so frustrating being limited in this way. I know that if I had access to the things I should: a database and server-side code, I could do my task easily. To spend so much time doing creative workarounds…only to fail…I’m just so frustrated with everything.

I need to take a breather, I’ll stop for tonight with this unsettled feeling. Maybe tomorrow, my mind will be clear, fresh, and I’ll be able to solve the problems that confounded me all night.