The feeling of progress can be elusive in development. Many days it may feel as if you are sitting and banging your head against something, not making much visible progress.

Maybe you have not submitted a significant pull request in a while because you changed your mind on an implementation, or you discovered a bug you can't quite get your head around.

Either way, it may feel as though you are not making progress. As frustrating as this might feel, do not let it discourage you! It is during these times in which we perceive a lack of progress in which we are silently, subtly, doing the hard work of progress.

You need to pay attention to notice the signs - personally, there were a few small moments during the past few days where I felt like I was seeing progress despite being somewhat bogged down in figuring out the flow of a challenging project I am working on:

• I noticed some peculiarities in the flow of data through some AngularJs components I was working on.
• I wrote new functions using ES6 features instead of old ES5 habits, not necessarily deliberately, but because, recently, it just feels more natural that way.
• I re-organised some Node.js code I had written far more quickly and easily than I expected to.
• I refactored some code originating from older dependencies according to breaking changes.

These may seem like insignificant moments, however in my view, these moments signify progression.