I’ve noticed a trend developing about myself the past year or two: if I’m not learning new things I am completely frustrated.

The past few months have been excruciating. I’ve been working on contract projects or repeating things I’ve learned before. My frustration level boils over. I’m irritable. If I have to write one more UITableView I think I could kill someone. And the last project I worked on was almost all UITableViews.

When I think about it, though, I had fun early on as I was starting to learn how storyboards work, learning what to do (UITableViews are a heck of a lot nicer, leaving me wanting to maim instead of kill) and what not to do. (Segues. Ever.)

This year the most fun I had was working on Javascript and jQuery and attempting to make Equals run in a web browser. Oh, sure, it was painful at times but the exploration was incredible. It felt like every sense was alive.

This isn’t restricted to code, though. Learning new business concepts, about marketing or advertising or minutiae of business is interesting, too. It’s just that the new learning opportunities seem to manifest themselves more often in code. There is always something new to learn there.

While we aren’t making much money from powerOne anymore, the learning opportunities associated with completely redeveloping the app have been overpowering. I know in my head this doesn’t make sense and that we can improve the product by improving the existing code base, which is a heck of a lot less expensive than starting over, but the allure of writing it again is so strong.

Head or heart, which will win? I guess we will all find out soon enough.