How to do you "pick up" and "put down" web development????

[Succy Beverage]

Hey Y'all, I don't post on here much often, but I think this one is pretty applicable knowing most of the folks on here, if I am anyone to assume...

Some time ago, and man does it feel like forever now that I look at it, I wanted to make a website for websites sakes, along with it I made a Heyspace page and bunch of other whobody things that I never kept with; that's the way alot of things go I know; who the Fu-uF else doesn't do that during their formative years of youth and teenagerism? Which feels weird to say considering that I am still, by most standards; still very young. Here's the ruins of what I had: https://succy-beverage.neocities.org/# (removed most pics out of fear of being taken/reposted).

In any case, I haven't touched those things in a LONG time, and it's been like this for quite a while too! Unfortunately, I thought it was a good idea to be a standing part of society and get degrees in computering that leaves with me little to no freetime; because no engineer I ever met has ever been happy; and that includes me :(. While yes I have alot of Hobbies I've always kept steady work with all of them; but with alot of them I'm reaching a point where it requires the one thing I don't have: TIME AND CONSISTENCY.

My main goal is to make Video Games, made alot of ideas, made alot of assets,developed some slight prototypes, know my coding well but dammit is it hard to do so when College doesn't understand the term "BOUNDARIES" with my time! I used to be able to make assets, write characters, ideas and things and be happy with it but I'm reaching a point yet again where i want to do more but I just CAN'T with this damn place putting my nose to the grindstone 24/7!

Until it doesn't, like a hurricane suddenly there's no storm, but I know it's just the eye of it, and we are swept back into it in about a month or a week; and that's just life for me for a while now; and I've been trying my best to make the most of it; but It's like picking up a complicated game or a very intricate book a year later; you don't remember jack on what you were doing! Yeah that's good for some things but once we have code we need to worry suddenly it becomes very risky to leave that for me a year or months later to remember all over again! It'd be like trying to remember the wiring diagram for a mechanical pinball machine a month after you've got halfway through fixing it! So maybe, I can learn on something easier code wise, or at least not as catastrophic; fire up the old website possibly? but I know this will have the same issues; i just hope not as bad as game-dev.

I know alot of you are in, or were, in the same boat, so how did you pick these things up again after MONTHS of downtime inbetween? or how did you put them down properly?

TLDR; I don't got alot of time to myself these days; but when I do I try to make the most of it, and it's really hard to do that when picking these things up again is a chore in itself. How do Y'all pickup and develop your websites after long hiatuses?, or long term projects that typically contain some code?


sorry for the rambling, just a whole lot to think, and not much in terms of answers... or maybe I'm looking the wrong places online

[poesu]

I've been through webmastering slump for months a few times and yeah, I know the feeling of not knowing what the heck you were doing with your project, why this is here, and that is there, and why you've written this chunk of code like this.

What helps me now is that I've established a habit of heavily commenting anything that may even mildly confuse me when I come back to it in a while. I consistently write, like, a few lines of comments just to remember stuff. I also write down techniques I've tried but they didn't work out for some reason, so I'll know to not try them again if I think there might be a better solution for a particular problem. Others might inspect my website and find those, but I don't care. I think these notes actually make it inspecting my site more fun and personal.

Other thing is to have some note-taking app to track your plans, save guides, and other pages you might find useful someday. Commenting and describing these notes in detail is useful here, too. I personally use Joplin, because you can put your notes in folders to better organize things, though there're other applications that do that, too.

[Dan Q]

Seconding note-taking, but also: always have several projects on the go! Then, when you're not "feeling it" for one in particular, you can pick up another.

[Furbisms]

Honestly a lot of it for me is just asking Ms. W3Schools how to do things over and over when I forget, or rereading my own code to remember how I did things. I will admit I am AWFUL about commenting my code (as in, I basically never do it) and I need to get better about doing that for sure, I don't have much of an excuse haha...

I think the hiatus I just broke was maybe 6 months, maybe a bit more, I'm not sure. I'm afraid to look because I know if it was a very long time I will absolutely cringe but you know. I got burnt out a bit. The thing that got me back into it was joining a site that had customizable profiles with css, doing that, and remembering how much I enjoy this process. I guess that kind of warmed me back up a bit.

This is just my experiences though.