If you’ve ever started to learn something new, you might be familiar with the feeling of being overwhelmed—there is so much to learn, where do I even start? Things usually get tough once you start but sticking through it is how you challenge yourself and become better.

For me, I didn’t do that. I don’t typically like talking about the times I’ve quit doing something but this time feels like an exception. In this case, I actually feel like quitting actually helped me in the long-term but it took me almost a month to figure it out.

My first design internship

This past summer was very important to me (or that’s what it felt like at least); the year prior I had decided to make a career switch from Digital Marketing into UX/Product Design. I was nearing the end of university, entering my last two terms that fall, but I knew if Design was the career for me, I knew I needed to get some sort of professional experience before graduating.

I decided to extend graduation in hopes of landing at least 1 internship so I wouldn’t be going into the full-time job hunt with 0 experience. I had spent countless hours reading Medium articles, doing the #DailyUI challenge, and meeting with designers that could pass down some knowledge.

Then it happened—I got an offer for my first design internship at Square. I knew this was a really great opportunity so I wanted to be prepared to take full advantage. I wrote a self-assessment of the skills I lacked and where I wanted to grow, I set up coffee chat’s with as many designers as I could and I tinkered around with the design system before getting my first project.

Discovering a new way to grow as a designer

In those coffee chats, I met a few amazing designers that introduced me to the world of SwiftUI—this new toolkit from Apple that was going to make it easier for anyone to build their own iOS apps.

Up until that point, most of the work I’ve done up (e.g. the #DailyUI challenge) were mostly mobile designs but it never went past the point of design. So I thought—I spend most of my time downloading and playing with apps that I could use make my life easier, why can’t it be an app that I design AND built?

As a new designer that was looking to take my skills to the next step, SwiftUI could be the catalyst that brings all of my ideas to life and show people that I can actually build something to solve a problem.

So I decided to start learning SwiftUI with the goal of being more involved with the process of not only designing products, but building and understanding the engineering side of things to be a more well-rounded designer.

Learning SwiftUI for 100 days

I decided to dedicate the last few weeks left of my internship to learning SwiftUI. I started the #100DaysOfSwiftUI challenge and posted it to my Twitter to help keep accountability and track my progress.

Thread] Decided to start learning SwiftUI for 100 days to become more involved in the end-to-end process of building products, more specifically mobile apps🤷‍♀️Posting to keep me accountable so if anyone else is learning or looking to learn, hmu!!!#100DaysOfSwiftUI

Day 1–6

I don’t come from a technical background (Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo) so trying to learn fundamental concepts (e.g. Throwing functions? Inouts? Closures?) was a mess and nothing was really sticking.

Day 6/100]Closures store functions in a single variable??????? This section was/is super confusing so I think it'll be a section that I'll brush up on when I need to😅Going through "Intro to SwiftUI" from WWDC with more intention to hopefully build a sandwich app on my own.

So I simultaneously started to following along with tutorials (e.g. Recreate Code) to learn about the syntax and it was a lot more fun to dive right in and build things I was familiar with.

Day 7–18

After much trial and error, I really started to learn how easy it was for people to start building apps. I found more and more tutorials that showed me how to use the different components (e.g. tabs, sheets, rows).

Day 9/100]- Using lazy in front of properties will only create them when it's first called upon.- Static variables are shared across all instances. Reminds me of Master Components in Figma.Separating components from @_Kavsoft 's videos make it a lot easier to grasp. pic.twitter.com/YKg5JUMWY3

Day 19–25

By this point, most of my free time was filled with learning SwiftUI. I had kind of stopped opening Figma or reading design articles on Medium—overall kind of stopped “designing” and started to just build things directly in SwiftUI.

Day 20/100]The hardest part was the actual conversion but starting to get comfortable with @State values! pic.twitter.com/VEj2tKc51Z

I eventually got to a point where I was comfortable enough to build my own things. I had a grasps of how to take inputs and change the variables to display different things.

Been fun playing around with pickers and reading selections; thought I'd practice more with my top emojis🥴 pic.twitter.com/y2POX7Jvyr

I was more focused on how things worked rather than understanding why it needed to work or what the point of the thing was—how do I convert these numbers? vs. why do I need to convert the numbers?

Day 26

It wasn’t until Day 26, I attended an event for new grad designers that talked about how to prepare for new grad interviews—which were a lot more intense than internship interviews.

Things like whiteboarding challenges and app critiques were very common yet I never actually did any of them, formally. They used terms and principles that I had learned about before this point but forgot. That’s when I started to have a mini freakout.

Here I am: a new designer that is trying to break into the field and still hasn’t “mastered” the fundamentals or principles of design but now I’m trying to shift ALL of my attention and move onto building apps? It didn’t sit right with me so I had to re-evaluate what I was doing.

Knowing when to stop

I lost sight of what got me to this point and what made me so passionate to change careers a year before graduation.

I’m not saying it’s binary where you can only do this OR that, it’s definitely possible to do both, but I felt like my focus was too diluted that it wasn’t helping me progress the way I wanted to.

So I decided to put SwiftUI on the shelf and focus on building up my foundation as a designer and improve on skills like visual design, interaction design, and product thinking.

What I learned from “quitting”

I didn’t finish the challenge and that’s okay, I was still able to learn some valuable things about the future of design and how I should be thinking about my career:

• Understand what your goals are and how you can achieve them: There are a lot of things I don’t know, but if you’re switching from a new field or looking to advance in your current one, it’s important to understand where your skills lie and which ones you want to improve. As a junior designer, there is so much that only comes with experience, but with an understanding of where you are and where you want to be, you’re better prepared when those opportunities for experience come to take full advantage.
• Designers don’t need to learn how to code, but they easily can: SwiftUI is not only another tool for developers, it represents a paradigm shift of designers/developers in the process of building digital products. Anyone who is taking part in the process can now contribute more.
• Let your interests run wild: There’s nothing wrong with having multiple interests, in fact, a lot of your interests overlap. Continue to explore the things that interest you and you’ll naturally start to find ways to bring it all together (check out this article on the pros of having too many interests).

Closing

This is my first article so thank you for sticking all the way until the end. I know this wasn’t written well but it’s a starting point and takes everything I say with a grain of salt (assuming you take anything at all).

I’m hoping to get better as a writer so if you have any feedback, feel free to comment or send me an email (brandonxlaw@gmail.com)! Any and all feedback is valued (please be constructive) :)

How doing 26% of a challenge got me 100% of the learnings was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.