Anxiety when coding

Question

Is it normal to have anxiety when coding? What I mean is when starting to figure out a problem I get a strange feeling inside of me which tells me that I’m not going to be able to complete the task.
Also any ways of tackling this problem ?

Answer 1

Sounds like self-doubt; less anxiety and more psychological, though of course anxiety can worsen it. The easiest thing would probably be to just remember that it can be done. The way you're trying may not be the way it works, but what you want can be done.

Once you've given something a shot yourself try looking for an implementation to use as an example online -- while we think our projects will always be unique, and some actually are, there are always at least portions of every project that are related to some other projects. Find an open-source program, no matter if it's just a simple script or a full-blown takes-an-hour-to-compile program with a GUI, that does the basic part of what you're wanting to do -- for example reading a file into a string or buffer in Node.JS -- and then try to mutate that code to fit your needs. Then add some more on top, and more, and more. Along the way you'll notice things you can fix and optimize, or things that are not necessary, and eventually rewrite it all yourself.

One thing that's been helping me a lot is automated testing to help speed up fixing bugs and making sure functions are working properly -- far faster to run a script to test the code than it is to manually press buttons/call a script or function with different arguments.