My skill set used to be very similar to Brad's. I followed his blog for years and learned a lot from him. Several years ago, I decided that there seemed to be b

My skill set used to be very similar to Brad's. I followed his blog for years and learned a lot from him. Several years ago, I decided that there seemed to be better jobs for people who could write JavaScript, so I started teaching myself. The learning curve was insanely difficult. There were so many tools, syntaxes and buzzwords that I had to navigate and on top of that, it felt like things were changing every week. I'd post a question on StackOverflow or IRC about how to do x, and the answer would be that first I had to do a-w. I feel like this is what Brad is going through now. But by the time I got to learning React, I had already been writing ES6 for over a year and I had figured out the worlds of Grunt, gulp, Webpack, Babel, etc. And I knew some fundamentals like functional programming. Having all of that background made React extremely easy. I've never felt that I've used a technology or framework that's so easy and straightforward. Redux took a little bit more effort for me to wrap my head around, especially when trying to sync application state with a database, but I think that's difficult for a lot of people, which is part of the problem that things like GraphQL and Apollo solve. And even though Redux was more challenging, I found it to be a really useful pattern that ultimately helped me keep apps way more organized as they grew. All of that being said, I empathize with people who are trying to learn all of the parts of being a developer from ant high level entry point like React. There are a lot of contextual things that you have to know first and it can be overwhelming to someone who hasn't yet had the opportunity to learn those things. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that things in the JavaScript world are moving so fast and the APIs for things are changing faster than people can keep up. I can't remember the last time I read Getting Started docs or examples that weren't already outdated by the time I was trying them out.