The last couple of days I've noticed something interesting. There were three separate occasions where I thought I was completely stuck and would probably stay in that state for a lot longer. The first one was when I decided to write a display driver from scratch by relying on the datasheet and a couple of blogs. Here is the thing, before I found the blog just reading the datasheet was quite overwhelming, it's like sitting in a driver's seat for the first time ever and you have never seen anyone drive before. My first instincts were that I was way in over my head and just wanted to do anything else than what I was doing at the moment. The shockingly simple thing to do was to stay there, ask questions, look things up and over time you understand where more pieces of the puzzle go. This experience has been quite valuable. I've been able to point back to this moment whenever I have been stuck and it works every time. The timeline is always skewed, but that's besides the point. The wisdom of knowing, that no matter what it feels like right now, this too will end.
It happened again today. This morning I woke up, completely lost and having no clue how to program the ESP-01S. All I did was ask the AI for some directions and one of the statements gave me an idea, which led to this wonderful introduction to UART. Which was the next piece to the puzzle. I still haven't written a single line of code, but I can slowly start to see a couple of photons sneaking into this tunnel. More importantly for me, I'm learning so much. Which is my destination anyways.
This is not profound information. It's stuff I have read or heard about a hundred times and even experienced in other aspects of my life a few dozen times. Yet, it's a lesson I keep relearning. Mostly because my assumptions about a thing make me believe that there is some secret sauce to this. So far there hasn't been any of it. The secret is simple, show up consistently, do the work and go home. How much of it to do, is for you to answer. If you are honest with yourself, you will know if you can do better or if you are doing too much. Whatever you do, hope you find success in your pursuits. It will happen, stay the course my friend.