When To Stop Learning Something New

Better to have tried and failed.

I spent the past 3 months digging into how to alter product gallery thumbnails on desktop vs mobile for WooCommerce products. There’s a plugin involved that did a lot of the heavy lifting, but I wanted to display product thumbnails on desktop but only pagination dots on mobile.

Accessing those product thumbnails via code took me on a journey from WooCommerce hooks to FlexSlider to Swiper.js to Vue.js (the plugin that’s doing most of the heavy lifting is written in Vue.js).

I understand a LOT more than when I started digging in 3 months ago. I also understand just how much I still don’t know to actually accomplish what I set out to do. I’ve exhausted Google, Stack Overflow, Vue.js articles, and Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). I’ve written a few blog posts documenting my journey, and have now closed out the 30 browser tabs I had open for the past 3 months.

I reached a point where I was treading water in the deep end of a pool and the ROI of spending more time no longer made sense. I cut my losses and let the product thumbnails remain just as they were when I first started looking into altering them 3 months ago. Better to have tried and failed.