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This is the first thread in a long while that's given me a lot of FOMO anxiety. I've made a lot of one-off server-side rendered apps in Flask, and right now I'm

This is the first thread in a long while that's given me a lot of FOMO anxiety. I've made a lot of one-off server-side rendered apps in Flask, and right now I'm doing some backend work ASP.NET Core for my job, but I have this overwhelming feeling there's so much I don't know and I'm not sure where to start. I only bring this up in case I'm not the only person sharing these feelings.

adriand 6y ago
Honestly I don’t think you should worry about it. Once you know how to program, you know how to program - the fundamentals don’t change very quickly. Anything you don’t know now you can learn when you need it. The most important thing to retain is your love of learning and excitement about new technology, so that when the time comes for whatever is next you rise to the challenge with enthusiasm.
jstummbillig 6y ago
Try this for size: Are you feeling effective at what you currently do? Is there any tangible reason why that would change for the worse in the upcoming year? If not, you are doing fine. There is absolutely nothing out there that obviously and significantly increases your output by dropping whatever tooling you are effective with already and switching as of this time. I have looked. It's sobering.
nickelcitymario 6y ago
It's not a feeling, it's an observation. Technology is like a tree, branching infinitely in all directions. When I was a baby web developer, just knowing CSS on top of HTML was considered advanced. (This was back when the bleeding edge was using tables for layouts.) Today, I can't keep up with all the different ways there are to do something as simple as loading a web page. This splintering is true in every area of tech. At first it freaked me out, but I've accepted two things: 1) The only option is pick a path and specialize in it, knowing there will always be things I won't know. There's nothing wrong with learning new ways, of course. And often that's necessary. But I've given up on trying to master all of them. 2) Just because something is new and popular doesn't make it right. The proliferation of frameworks for otherwise simple things (like loading mostly static web pages) is one such example.
- deleted 6y ago
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aswanson 6y ago
Im even lower-level in the stack, and some of the comments make me want to just learn php. I remember one comment where Joel Spolsky wrote on twitter where he wrote stack overflow in asp .net and scaled it running on one box. Its all about getting stuff done.
cholmon 6y ago
I feel this a lot too, but I find that I can quell the anxiety by looking at the huge list of $things_i_dont_know not as a chronicle of how far behind the curve I am, but instead as a buffet of new techniques/technologies that I can sample. Many will be irrelevant to the things I'm building, but some will likely help improve my productivity or ease my maintenance burden. So I try to have a taste of one or two new things every so often; try them out on a couple of projects to see if they help me, or if they just confuse and overcomplicate. I'll never be able to try them all, but I feel like I slowly get a better understanding of many of the new items, and feel a bit better about ignoring things that I've already established aren't likely to help me to be more productive.
mbrodersen 6y ago
There is a 99% chance that you will not need whatever “tech” you are reading about. Keep up to date with what is out there but only deep dive if it might solve a real world customer problem you are actively having right now and the cost of the deep dive is less than the potential value gained.

adriand 6y ago

Honestly I don’t think you should worry about it. Once you know how to program, you know how to program - the fundamentals don’t change very quickly. Anything you don’t know now you can learn when you need it. The most important thing to retain is your love of learning and excitement about new technology, so that when the time comes for whatever is next you rise to the challenge with enthusiasm.

jstummbillig 6y ago

Try this for size: Are you feeling effective at what you currently do? Is there any tangible reason why that would change for the worse in the upcoming year? If not, you are doing fine. There is absolutely nothing out there that obviously and significantly increases your output by dropping whatever tooling you are effective with already and switching as of this time. I have looked. It's sobering.

nickelcitymario 6y ago

It's not a feeling, it's an observation. Technology is like a tree, branching infinitely in all directions. When I was a baby web developer, just knowing CSS on top of HTML was considered advanced. (This was back when the bleeding edge was using tables for layouts.) Today, I can't keep up with all the different ways there are to do something as simple as loading a web page. This splintering is true in every area of tech. At first it freaked me out, but I've accepted two things: 1) The only option is pick a path and specialize in it, knowing there will always be things I won't know. There's nothing wrong with learning new ways, of course. And often that's necessary. But I've given up on trying to master all of them. 2) Just because something is new and popular doesn't make it right. The proliferation of frameworks for otherwise simple things (like loading mostly static web pages) is one such example.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aswanson 6y ago

Im even lower-level in the stack, and some of the comments make me want to just learn php. I remember one comment where Joel Spolsky wrote on twitter where he wrote stack overflow in asp .net and scaled it running on one box. Its all about getting stuff done.

cholmon 6y ago

I feel this a lot too, but I find that I can quell the anxiety by looking at the huge list of $things_i_dont_know not as a chronicle of how far behind the curve I am, but instead as a buffet of new techniques/technologies that I can sample. Many will be irrelevant to the things I'm building, but some will likely help improve my productivity or ease my maintenance burden. So I try to have a taste of one or two new things every so often; try them out on a couple of projects to see if they help me, or if they just confuse and overcomplicate. I'll never be able to try them all, but I feel like I slowly get a better understanding of many of the new items, and feel a bit better about ignoring things that I've already established aren't likely to help me to be more productive.

mbrodersen 6y ago

There is a 99% chance that you will not need whatever “tech” you are reading about. Keep up to date with what is out there but only deep dive if it might solve a real world customer problem you are actively having right now and the cost of the deep dive is less than the potential value gained.