Member-only story
My 4-Step Strategy to Learn Any New Technology Quickly
It works for me — I hope it will work for you too
Aaaaargh…there are too many things to learn!
— Me, 2019
New frameworks and technologies are constantly being released, each one vying for our attention and claiming to be being faster, safer, and more efficient. As developers, we sometimes feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. We may even experience imposter syndrome.
To keep up with the pace of learning, everyone needs to find a method that works for them. In this article, I’m sharing my four-step strategy for learning to program. This is what works for me. Hopefully, you’ll be able to reference it and chart your own path with it.
Step 1: Identify the Fundamentals
What you learn is more important than how you learn.
Time is limited, so we need to pick our battles.
In every role you take on, there’s a set of fundamental concepts that you have to deeply understand in order to build a strong foundation for future learning.
To identify the fundamental concepts, you need to do a bit of internet digging:
For example, MDN is the best reference documentation for web technologies. If you want to be a web developer, probably you should go through each of the fundamental technologies listed there — HTML, CSS, Javascript, HTTP, APIs /DOM — first.
It might be boring. It might be tedious. It might not be cool and trendy. But it will give you a solid foundation to increase your learning tenfold.
Step 2: Speed Learning
A common mistake people who’ve just started learning to program make is to get trapped in “tutorial-hell” — taking tutorial after tutorial without making significant progress.
In my opinion, tutorials are great for getting started. However, we should speed through the tutorial and limit the time spent on them because:
