I’ve had this article from Dan Abramov in the back of my mind ever since he published it in 2018. In the article Dan talks about the gaps in his knowledge in a very open and honest way.

Dan is a super talented developer, so when he published his article it came as a surprise to myself and many others that even a highly skilled individual can honestly say they don’t know anything about topics which many might assume they do.

Software development is a competitive field and with so many great courses, blog posts and tutorials out there. it’s easier than ever to pick up the basic skills to get started. So in order to stand out from the crowd it’s pretty important to shout loudly about your skills and experience and mention as many industry buzzwords as possible on your resume and LinkedIn profile.

But we can’t all know everything, and there’s no shame in raising your hand to admit what you don’t know. Writing out a list like this may even be a catalyst to figuring out what you want to learn next.

With that said, here are some things which I simply don’t know (yet).

GIT command line

I know how to use GIT and I know my way around a command line. But I pretty much know nothing when it comes to combining the two.

I use GIT every day with either the GitHub desktop client or via some of the built in GIT tools in VS Code but I’ve never needed to commit (pun intended) the GIT CLI commands to my memory.

Node

I bought Wes Bos’ Node course when he had a Black Friday deal on a few years ago and skimmed through it once. His courses are all great, but at the time I simply had no need to learn Node and other than spinning up a dev environment or installing node packages, I still don’t have a need to dive deep into it.

Vue.js

If you want to be a JavaScript developer, you better pick a side because it seems that there will always be discussions about which is best — React, Angular or Vue.

Well… I chose React, and then picked up Angular. So while I currently have zero experience with Vue, I think it’s only a matter of time.

It’s ok folks. We can choose different frameworks and still get along.

HTML Canvas

Nope. Never touched it.

Bash

I’ve shared a number of tips about the Terminal on macOS here before so technically I do know some Bash but my knowledge is limited to traversing directories and running scripts. I pretty much need to Google everything else, every time.

Backend Development

I studied C++ at university and after graduating, I started my career as a designer for the next 10 years, and now I’m a full time frontend dev, so I never really looked at any backend languages in depth. I’ve worked with C# and Java teams so I’m familiar enough to find my way around, but definitely not full stack yet.

GraphQL

Version 7 of this site was built using Gatsby so GraphQL was baked into its structure and I had to customise some of the GraphQL code to match my data structure. That’s as far as I went with it.

iOS / Android

I once followed one of Chris Ching’s tutorials and built a card game for iOS. Ever since then, I’m perfectly fine calling my self a consumer rather than a producer of mobile apps.

DevOps

I’m pretty good at hosting a small side project on Netlify or FTP-ing into a WordPress theme directory to make some tweaks but I tend to stay away from anything more complicated than that.

Final Thoughts

This is a brief list of gaps in my knowledge and these are limited to web development. Of course there are many other things which I don’t know and that’s fine.

You don’t need to know everything about everything but it is important to stay curious and work on your ability to learn about new things (because learning is a skill in itself).

And for everything else… there’s Google.