For the last month on stream I've been working on an embedded program. The first part of writing a display driver went down pretty smoothly, call it beginners luck or whatever but I was like, this is a lot of fun. Until I stumbled upon the ESP-01S, which has given me quite a few troubles so far. It might also just be the UART as I can't seem to read from or write to it. The worst part of it all is that I have absolutely no idea what is actually going on in the microcontroller. It's safe to say that I absolutely miss error messages, I will never see them as an annoyance, but one of the greatest tools in programming. I have ordered the debug probe for the Rasberry Pi Pico and the ESP-01S. It's a huge time sink otherwise trying to work on the hardware. Not to mention the small build up of frustration over time.
Streaming is quite a lot of fun
This is also something I never thought I'd be doing but I've been absolutely enjoying streaming. The interactions with people and the time they take out of their day to help you out is quite exhilarating. I've gotten over my discomfort of other people seeing me program, gotten used to the sound of my own voice, been working on enunciating, and the best part of all I've been able to follow through on my projects and been able to work on them consistently. At the same time it's also helping me get out of my own head and get used to sharing my work. All forms of it. It's what gave me the confidence to share these posts too.
The other side of your fear is a great place to be. I also think early on it's a blessing that no one actually cares about what you are doing. At least it has been for me. It gave me the time to set things up, get used to hearing myself and most importantly get some practice under my belt.
Not to mention the amount of learning that I'm getting to do. I've learned so many new concepts the last six months that it's insane. It has been one of the best multipliers to my rate of learning.
Letting go of all expectations
It's impossible to have zero expectations, but you can greatly remove most of them. It has been hugely helpful to be myself, not to chase any metrics, views or follows. My goal is to show up, do the work and then go home. It takes what it takes, any expectation time wise only leads to unnecessary frustrations. This email has been quite an influential piece of advice for me. In both my training and programming journey. I read it quite often, just to remind myself. As humans we tend to have short memories sometimes, so I find it's quite useful to remind myself about the important stuff.