Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I was speaking to one of the apprentice developers at work a few weeks ago about his familiarity with our codebase and with frontend development in general.

He’s pretty new to development so a pre-requisite to joining my project was to follow some tutorials on YouTube and Pluralsight to get up to speed.

But the main issue he was running into was deciding on what to learn and when.

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For example, if he spent a few hours learning about how to use Sass, but then was given a piece of work which focused more on JavaScript, he would then need to go an do further tutorials.

He basically wanted to hit the ground running with whatever work he was given, which is commendable but not entirely necessary.

As they say in the ShopTalk Show podcast jingle — “Just build websites” — and that was the best advice I could give him too.

You’ve got to learn to walk before you can run. You can spend hours learning how to do a task but unless you put it into practice, you’ll never fully understand what you’ve been learning.

You need to do the work to learn how to do the work.

Ajay