Mark Westerweel

Mark Westerweel

Just read docs

Tutorials, webinars, courses, Udemy... man -- or insert your preferred pronouns here-- the interwebs are filled with loads of them. How to become a better JS developer or all the nifty tricks in whatever programming language... and not much is wrong with them, except when it comes to charging $$$. Some are definitely worth it, others... not so much.

Personally, I have tried quite a lot of them and for the most part, they just taught me two things: yup, I want to career switch and just learn to read docs. The first lesson is the best one. Yes, or at least for me, the learning curve is steep, and just when you climbed the first hill and start to understand the anatomy of a proper function, you will dive into the beautiful valleys of asynchronous threading and mountains of different datatypes. You will have to put in some blood, sweat, and tears, or you are some naturally gifted, freakish autistic superpower ( <3 ). The second lesson came to me when I followed probably the last course that got me out of tutorial hell: just read docs. The course was about Gatsby and React. And it just hit me, the instructor is one of the better that I got, but for a lot of parts, it was just holding my hands through some documentation.

Hmmm, this made me think back of the "Treehouse Full-Stack Course" that I did... most of the time the instructors gave you links to docs for further reading. You could skip the $200 bucks a month and skip the vids (although of great quality), just read docs and start to build.

Your projects may be hideous when you start, but it's not like your old code is going anywhere and you can use it as refactoring practice anyways.

To sum it all up: start figuring out what you want to do as a developer and pick the best documentation out there. If the docs are a mess, it's like getting surgery at a butcher shop. If the docs are good, the community probably is too and the ecosystem of the tech of said docs will probably stick around long enough --making it worth your while to learn and work with it.