Yesterday was Monday, and as is par for the course, all hell broke loose.

Not really, but at the time, it sure felt like it did.

Over the past few weeks I have been working through Ray Wenderlich’s iOS Apprentice, and the book is setup in a way where there are a few projects you create as you go through the book, and collectively they aim to cover the essential programming concepts the vast majority of iOS developers will need to know.

As I was working through one of the projects though, things went awry. When I went to open the project on Monday, while the project opened, chunks of my storyboard along with a view controller, were missing. To make matters worse, the app wasn’t building either. At some point, either to the fault of Xcode, or possibly my own, essential parts of the app had dissapeared.

Optimistically, I spent the better part of Monday trying to retrace and rebuild the app, but that didn’t quite work out. So I made the call to trash the project and start over. Suffice it to say, I was disheartened, at the fact that I had lost the files, but more so at the fact that I lacked the capabilities to fix the project, that hit me hard.

But after taking some time away from the computer, I realized something, that is, having to restart the app was an oppurtunity in disguise.

Throughout the chapter I was working through, I wasn’t satisfied with my level of understanding in regards to the programming concepts being explained, and as a result, restarting the app presented an oppurtunity to not only recreate the app, but to attempt to better understand the concepts covered.

Maybe this time around, I could bring my understanding of the concepts to a level that I was reasonably satisfied with.

While most developers will see this as an uneventful story, and some may think less of me and my abilities, I decided to write it up anyways, because I know for beginners like me, learning can be immensely difficult at times, and the motivation to learn, is paradoxically, simulatenously finite, yet easy to lose.

I wanted to remind myself, and other beginners, to protect our motivation; it’s one of the few things that keeps us going.

Special thanks to Becky Hansmeyer for sanity checking the article, and Kyle Cacilhas for helping me edit.