I wish I hadn't had the attitude of, "I'm going to learn everything from scratch because I don't need help or dependencies." I was stubborn and thought that to

I wish I hadn't had the attitude of, "I'm going to learn everything from scratch because I don't need help or dependencies." I was stubborn and thought that to be a "real" programmer I had to know how to implement libraries from scratch and build out every single feature myself and learn the ins and outs. Upside: Now I know many of the "under the hood" implementation things Downside: Took FOREVER to build anything useful, demoralizing to spend so much time on algorithms and learning every bit of C and JavaScript from the ground up and not be able to do anything useful quickly. Didn't know how to put what I knew to practical use in the modern web. I got into a funk and one day started learning a framework and it changed my life. I could use what I learned to build on top of the framework and quickly get webapps running that people could actually use. I regret that I was stubborn and wanted to "learn it the hard way." If I could do it over, I would go through a book on a particular programming language to learn the ins and outs, and then quickly apply that knowledge to a framework. Much better positive feedback loop being able to see the fruits of my learning come together into something practical and actually useful rather than little programs that lived on my local machine and didn't do too much. It's much more fun and less tedious to built out my own apps on the structure of people who came before me. GOod recent example: Building an app and wanted people to be able to drag and drop to upload files into their browser. Old me would have spent a month learning how to implement this in JS from scratch, new me just uses the DropZone JS library to make this happen and then I can focus on what I really want the app to do. Not sure if any of what I'm saying makes sense to anyone but me.