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Have you ever wondered what the difference is between people you admire for how driven, persistent, and probably successful they are, and the ones who always talk about what they will do but never do it? I have my take on that, and the only difference between the two is not talent, luck, or money, but not relying on motivation to do things they want. And why do I believe that? Because I don't want to live a life in which I'm not the one making a decision and acting upon that. On the contrary, I actually don't have to wait for this outer source of power named motivation. I am not an expert in psychology or neurobiology, nor was I a millionaire at the age of 26 or sth. These thoughts came to me with time and a little bit of digging into some productivity and well-being content. Also, there was an epiphany that I am wired differently, and maybe I'm not lazy and unambitious, just need strategies to come to my full potential. That's why I took a chance and learned programming, leaving my previous career with no doubt I could succeed, I secured the coolest job I could've ever imagined, and today I ran a 5k Halloween run with my new Personal Best, and was able to work with my dog so he's not a self-absorbed warrior, but really nice, hugging mascot, and now I'm back with this blog, and creating a game that I always wanted to play. Here are my strategies to remove motivation from the equation.

What about planning?

Having a calendar with a list of things to be done and an estimated time to deliver is a lifesaver.I have a plan for the whole week written down on Sunday. But there is a special tweak to it. I write down even my commute time, and what I will be doing on the train, even if it's just scrolling or looking for some blog content or bouncing ideas back and forth with chat GPT. I also write down my training goals like on this Monday I will run 5k, on Wednesday 6k, on Thursday I will do HIIT that would burn 500kcal in about 40 minutes, and I write down the exact video that I will be using for that. There is also a place for planning meals, as I am cooking them on Sunday, so I know what exactly we will be eating and what my grocery list will look like on Saturday. Does it mean there are no surprises in my life? There are many, but they are somewhat planned, I know I will be eating my work lunch with the rest of the team exactly on Tuesday, but I don't know what it will be. There is also this extreme satisfaction when you can cross out the thing that is done. And the more meticulous your plan is, the more frequent this dopamine shot is served. All the small things matter.

10min rule

OK, you have your calendar and the plan, but instead of doing the thing, you grab the phone and brainlessly scroll the content. Or, instead of waking up at 5a.m. to go for a run, you press one button and sleep till it's too late. That also happened to me, believe me, I'm the queen of procrastination. What is the solution? Just say to yourself: I will be doing that for ten minutes, so I know there was an honest attempt to do this. If I still have no willpower to continue, I can reschedule the thing. Guess what- most probably you will finish it because the first step is always the hardest. Your brain is always calculating if the effort is worth it. And with long-distance goals like: I want to learn now, so I have a good job and play games or watch movies when I retire, your brain is like "Well, we can watch movies and play games right now, why bother?" We want to break this circle by just starting out to see if the effort is really as hard as we thought.

Mini missions and pomodoro clock

We know that with long-distance goals, it's really hard to grasp if it will pay out. The second trick to actually start and have some sense of purpose is just splitting your big goal into some smaller, and more achievable steps. Let's take my running. Three months ago I hated running with every piece of my soul. I got shin splits after 2 minutes, got out of breath after 5, hated this bouncing movement in 1. But with a busy schedule that I have, approaching winter which means it's dark and rainy or snowy most of the day, and with a little problem with indoor cycling called: there is no wind to cool you down, running seemed like the only solution. And there is a bonus: I always wanted to run half marathon. I would never run even twice if it weren't for the fact that I planned a week to sort out the plan from couch to 5k. The time to buy shoes and gear. The time to actually start walking and running for a few minutes. The time to figure out where is this pain coming from, and what can I do to make it go away. These goals are more approachable, and they don't seem overwhelming. The second thing is using Pomodoro for things like learning or cleaning. If you have to study for an exam, and you know you will be doing that for the whole day, it's terrifying. But, if you know that you will be studying e.g. variables for 25 minutes, and after that, you will take a 5 min break, and again 25 minutes of using the variables forwarded by 5 min break, and after that, you have again only 25 minutes to test if you remember all the things you learned, and after that, there is 15 min break for a snack or a quick walk- that makes all the difference.

Make someone else also accountable for your progress

The thing is, you already know, that motivation is not propelling you forward. But it's easier, when someone you care about, does. If you pass the exam that you are studying for, you and your partner will go on vacation, if you don't- well, you'll both have to wait for the trip for another few months. That's setting mutual goals, which acts a little bit like body doubling in a way. Your family won't distract you if there is a gain for them in this game too.

Get yourself a prize

It doesn't matter if the task was so small that even crossing it out of your list is satisfying, or as big as getting a job after 2 years of learning. Get yourself something that will make your life easier, more beautiful, or just the thing you always wanted. Spending the time on choosing the prize while making those huge changes, will give your mind some time off. Trust me, it's better to look for the best deal on headphones that will help you survive in the office and thrive in a new role, than to watch another TikTok video on kids crawling on the shop floor.

Crash the barriers before they come crashing on you

This one is pretty simple. The more you have to prepare to do the thing, the less is the chance that you actually will do the thing. Not clear enough? Let's say you want to lose weight. You know that the only way to lose weight is to create a caloric deficit, by eating "less" (it's usually not less but this post is not about that), and burning calories with some exercises or walks. So you prepare a plan that you will be doing Nordic walking in the morning for half an hour before breakfast. Cool plan. What usually happens in the morning is that you can't find the shoes, the poles, the jacket. Time flies, your half an hour has come to an end and you are still in slippers. If you'd had prepared all the gear yesterday- you would have crashed the barrier and made the training as planned. As simple as that.

Be kind to yourself

In all of that we tend to think all or nothing. One small misstep and our brain is preparing a scenario where we are losers, won't achieve anything, and there is no point in trying. That's not true. If I have a soar ankle, I won't run today, but it doesn't mean that my goal is unachievable. If I am under the weather, I probably won't spend another 2 hours creating new features in my game, but that is not something I can control. And even if it's just an I-don't-want-to-day, it is not diminishing my progress. It's a marathon, you don't have to keep the pace from start to finish in order to get the medal at the end. You will get it anyway if you just show up, and run towards the finish line. If you need to catch a breath- it's completely fine.

Why do people still talk about motivation?

Summarizing all of this I keep wondering, why do people believe in motivation. I think it's a perfect excuse. Everything is out of our control because of that superpower. I really don't feel motivated to get up at 5 a.m., but I'm doing it anyway because I want to be able to run away from a zombie apocalypse. I would gladly watch a movie every night instead of learning a new programming framework, but in a long run, I would be much prouder of myself when I publish my game. Motivation is nothing if you just keep showing up as planned. Hope my thoughts on the matter help a little bit and good luck on your journey!

Logging data or messages into the console is probably the most common line of debugging. But did you know that beside basic console.log() there are a whole bunch of other methods that can structure your data, simplify tracing errors, and even time the execution? If not, this post is for you, so you can play the console game more effectively with these hacks.

Image by mabelizt on Freepik

The basics

As we stated before you can use console.log() for anything. It can be some message, it can be data from an API call, you can showcase dataflow within your application, or even message yourself in the future by logging some fixes or enhancements. Let’s take a look at that.

Nicer UI for warnings and errors

Although you can use classic console.log() for warnings and errors, it’s always nice to add some graphic implementation for logging these. The implementation of the UI depends on the browser, but usually errors have some red signs, and warnings yellow ones. Here is how it will look in Google Chrome

Orderly data with table

This one is extremely helpful when dealing with objects or nested arrays. It improves readability and helps you imagine how your matrix would really look like and how to debug. Let’s take a look at both scenarios:

Dealing with performance

Timing execution time can be helpful when trying to find bottlenecks in your application’s performance. And Javascript has you cover here too with console.time(), console.timeEnd() and console.logTime(). Just start the timer before function call, and mark the end after.

You can always use timestamps throughout your application with console.timeLog()

Measuring calls’ count

In scope of performance, you have to remember that not only the execution time is crucial but also count of the execution calls. Of course, there is a method to deal with that too:

Summary

We discussed more advanced methods of using the JavaScript console beyond the basic `console.log()`and got familiar with several useful techniques for debugging and performance monitoring:

• **Console Methods**: Apart from `console.log()`, methods like `console.warn()` and `console.error()` can visually differentiate warnings and errors with color-coded messages.
• **Structured Data**: `console.table()` helps display objects or arrays in a readable tabular format, enhancing data visualization and debugging.
• **Performance Timing**: Using `console.time()`, `console.timeEnd()`, and `console.timeLog()`, developers can measure the execution time of code blocks to identify performance bottlenecks.
• **Execution Counts**: `console.count()` tracks the number of times a specific piece of code is executed, which is useful for performance analysis.

These techniques aim to enhance debugging efficiency and provide a clearer understanding of code performance.

We know functions are building blocks of any program. We can use our beloved concise syntax of arrow function expressions since 2015, but as with everything we should know and understand their superpowers and limitations. In this post, we will delve into their caveats and nuances.

The syntax

Arrow functions are always anonymous, so the basic syntax consist a pair of parenthesis, an arrow and expression.

You can also use rest parameters, default parameters, and destructuring. In these cases parenthesis for params are required.

It’s also working with asynchronous code

You can also assign them to a variable and give it a name to make them more reusable

The body, as you probably noticed, can be either an expression body, where you can omit curly braces and an explicit return statement (this way it will always return an expression, and only one expression can be specified). Or can be a usual block body, where you can put multiple statements in curly braces. This way the arrow function by default returns undefined, and you have to explicitly provide the return value.

You are probably wondering, what if I want to use the expression body, as more concise, but I want to return an object. Well, you won’t get the result you want, instead your function will return undefined. Why? Because JS can only understand the expression body if there is no left brace after the arrow. We can simply fix this by wrapping our object literal in parentheses.

As you can see the syntax of arrow functions is super compact and readable. Especially with body expressions, you can omit some boilerplate for traditional function expressions, and save some development time.

What about bindings?

Here comes the first limitation of arrow functions. They don’t have their bindings for ‘this’, ‘arguments’, or ‘super’, so you really shouldn’t be using them as methods.

Problems with ‘this’

You can feel temptation, however, to use them in classes. The class’s body has its own ‘this’ context, so using the arrow function as class field would correctly point to an instance of the class, or class itself (if used as static fields), because it is a closure for that field.

But there are two caveats of using ‘auto-bound methods’ as arrow functions are named in this context. First of all, because it’s a closure and not binding of the method itself, the value of ‘this’ won’t change based on the execution context. This can lead to some unexpected behaviors in your program. Second of all, you have to remember that fields are defined on the instance of the class, not on its prototype. So every time you create an object based on such a class, the new function reference is also created and gets new closure, potentially leading to memory leaks.Here is a proper way of dealing with the 'this' keyword in traditional functions used as class fields:

Problems with ‘arguments’

Arrow functions do not have their own ‘arguments’ object. However, they will take the arguments of the outer scope if called for.

We can use rest parameters tho as an alternative to arguments object, and it works as expected.

What about using as constructor?

Arrow functions will throw a TypeError when called with the ‘new’ keyword, so there is no point in using them as constructors.

What about using it as a generator function?

Arrow functions will throw a SyntaxError if you try to use the ‘yield’ keyword in their body. The only way you can do that is to nest a traditional generator function inside the arrow function.

Proper generator function

Where those arrows shine?

Shorter syntax for anonymous functions

As we stated before, especially with expression body, arrow functions are very simple and readable alternatives to traditional anonymous functions. Having an implicit return makes this solution even cleaner.

Dealing with array methods

Arrow functions provide a very concise way of writing array methods, enclosing them in one line of readable code:

Dealing with callbacks for event listeners

Some of their characteristics can be both pros and cons. While using them as class fields could potentially lead to bugs when dealing with state, they are a great solution as a callback for event listeners, as their ‘this’ context comes from the outer scope of the class.

Summary

I hope I could provide some insights into when and where you can leverage arrow functions effectively, and where the caution is needed. They can be a way to write concise, readable, reusable code. Having their limitations in mind will help you avoid errors and frustration in the future.