I’m not sure path is a great metaphor for the learning process I’m looking to undertake. For a newbie, getting started seems more like breaking brush through scrub in search of a trail that I know / assume is out there. Am I headed towards or away from the path? I suppose a switched-on mentor could provide some fidelity here.
The problem right now feels like starving at a banquet. Even as I try to whittle my goals down to S.M.A.R.T.-level objectives, so many things seem to be competing for attention. Which tutorial do I follow first? Do I run tutorials in sequence or parallel? How do I recognize the reference material I’ll need in the future from the information that will become ingrained through repetition?
Practically speaking, this has resulted in a ton of churn as I whipsaw between investing mental energy in learning the tools (emacs, ubuntu, git, AWS) and the skills (html, css). I suspect that if I lock down the tools and framework first, I’ll at least be able to expend less effort fighting to make them work when I want to focus on the software side. At the same time, if I defer working on code until I master the toolset, I’ll never advance my real goals of expertise in development.
Hopefully, this post will provide me a bump of nostalgia when I read it a few years on.
