Why I Build Things Before I Feel Ready

Learning in Public

Why I Build Things Before I Feel Ready

By MoAfrika Skotch Ntilane — 06 May 2026

The Graveyard of Open Tabs

My browser is basically a graveyard of unfinished projects, broken tutorials, abandoned ideas and error messages that look like demonic scripture translated through a microwave.

Some nights I genuinely cannot tell whether coding is a career path or a hostage situation.

And somehow I still keep coming back.

That is the strange part. I keep returning. Not because I always enjoy it. Not because I always understand it. Definitely not because I always feel confident.

I return because somewhere between the frustration, the confusion, the bugs, the late-night Googling and the emotional damage caused by JavaScript, I realised something important.

Ready is not a real place.

The Myth of Readiness

I used to think readiness was waiting for me somewhere in the future. Like eventually I would reach this magical point where I finally felt qualified enough, skilled enough, disciplined enough and financially stable enough to start taking myself seriously.

But every time I got closer to that feeling, the target moved.

I would finish one course. Then discover ten more things I did not know.

I would finally understand one concept. Then another tutorial would arrive and humble me like Eskom during winter.

Learning South African Style

People online romanticise self-teaching because they only show the aesthetic version of it. The clean desk setup. The certificates. The motivational quotes.

They rarely show the actual reality. The unstable internet. The price of data. The downloading of tutorials before the connection disappears. The switching between free trials because funding simply is not there.

I learned coding the same way many South Africans learn survival. Piece by piece. YouTube. Coursera. LinkedIn Learning. NetAcad. Random forums. Free PDFs. And stubbornness.

Building the Builder

Sometimes you are not building the app.

You are building the version of yourself capable of building the app later.

That distinction changed everything for me. Because once I understood that, failure stopped feeling so personal. The abandoned projects were not proof that I was incapable. They were proof that I was attempting things beyond my current level.

Final Reflection

At some point you must move anyway. Build anyway. Apply anyway. Learn publicly anyway. Risk embarrassment anyway. Because action creates clarity far more often than overthinking does.

The people doing meaningful things are usually not the people who feel fully prepared. They are the people willing to look stupid long enough to become capable.