POSTS
Never Force Yourself to Learn New Skills Without a Concrete Project
As the job demand is going nowhere in a decade, a lot of new guys want to get into programming. There are numerous courses online, teaching a variety of skills in programming. There are also new shinning frameworks climbing up GitHub trending every day. I see a lot of people, typically newly graduated students, get confused. There seems to be an endless stream of knowledge to learn. How many skills are enough?
The truth is there is a lot of knowledge not worth learning in this field. Some are too narrow, some are too outdated, and some are too unstable. And you are very unlikely to grasp the core of any skill without working on a real project with it.
I learned javascript just to create random interactions on asoiaf wiki. When I needed to automate boring wiki maintenance I learned Node.js. When I needed to write MediaWiki Extensions I learned PHP. Almost everything I learned is driven by some concrete need.
On the other hand, I’ve never successfully mastered any skill without a hands-on project. I read about C# programming in the university. But nothing has left in my mind since I have never got the opportunity to build anything meaningful with C#. I also spent quite some effort in Tensorflow, but doing close-scoped exercises in the book failed to pave the way for me to data science.
For those who are still confused, just find yourself a project to work with. Maybe simply building a site about what you are passionate about. Then what you need to learn will follow naturally.