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I'm 23 and I consider myself to be a programmer. I've programmed for hobby, in college and for the last 2 years I've been working at 2 companies. Definitely the working experience formed my career and made me kind of love what I'm doing.

The issue is that somehow I always have the feeling that I'm not getting the best of what I'm trying to do. I always get back to some old code I've finished and just make a small improvement that I consider to be "better".

This actually eats some of my time, and makes me wonder if I'm handling the issue properly. The point is that the more I learn and see other people's code, I realise the mistakes I do and then it keeps going through this refactor/improve cycle. Should I just move along and focus on the next tasks?

Do you ever run away from your past like this?

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It sounds more like not willing to learn anything new or fear of change, than crysis. Just do something. You are 23, still young, if you will not learn to learn now - you'll have very sad life in your 30s ;) – c69 Feb 4 at 23:08
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Programming is a constant learning experience. I've been programming for a good part of the last 10 years and I still learn new things all the time; I still look back at "old" code I wrote and think "oh wow, that's bad" and refactor and improve it. Welcome to the world of being a programmer :) – Deco Feb 4 at 23:18
@c69 I'm definitely not running away from learning, the issue is that I always feel there's a better way and never really consider something I've done and it's working as being "finished" – Samson Feb 4 at 23:21
Perhaps you need to try giving yourself hard deadlines. Work on X project for a month. Then step back and work on Y, then maybe go back to X for a week or 2 and refractor and rework. – jozefg Feb 5 at 4:25

closed as not constructive by Eric King, Blrfl, Robert Harvey, Jim G., Glenn Nelson Feb 4 at 23:56

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