Day 181 of writing every day.
Having received responses that have led to upcoming interviews on top of looking at job postings and applying, I find myself less motivated and driven to put in time to study. I’m subconsciously telling myself that I did the important part of job hunting and somewhere in my head I’m thinking that no matter how much I try to learn now, it’s not going to make a significant difference in my ability to get a job at this point with the time limit I have that’s the end of June. The inner procrastinator is hard to get under control.
I did get myself to study today and fortunately or unfortunately, I ran into an issue with XAMPP, which is a database application used for testing web applications locally. It worked fine before, but looking around for solutions online, there were probably thousands of people who experienced the same issue I found that made it impossible for them to start up the mySQL function, which would prevent them from testing the web applications properly.
After digging around for answers and trying the most popular and thumbed up answer, I found that the solution didn’t work in my case, or at least I tried it and the results reproduced didn’t match up. So, I did the last resort action of uninstalling the XAMPP after making copies of the files I used in my project and saving them in another directory. Then I restarted the PC to complete the uninstall, and then reinstalled XAMPP.
The experience was a bit stressful even though this was just for learning and not dealing with actual workplace problems. But it did feel satisfying after I got things to work, even if I don’t feel like I’ve really “fixed” anything or if things are guaranteed to work as they did before the problem arose. I’m guessing these types of experiences are just as valuable to being competent engineers. Human mistakes are a reality and even AI will pick up on human mistakes until corrections are implemented by humans for who knows how many times.
The experience has given me a reason to be focused, and that has helped me recenter myself on what I should be prioritizing right now in regards to utilizing the online school I paid to enroll in.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 