Comment by suhail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suhail | Hacker News Reader

If I were you...

1. Start with something simpler & work on building up your fundamentals. Build momentum & confidence.

2. Recognize your struggle is part of the journey of learning. When you read and don't understand a word, you look it up. Take the time to fight through the abstraction & learn some core concepts when you don't know what something is. It's ok to get distracted & go down a mini rabbit hole.

You may need to learn 5 things that seem unrelated to the task at hand. Those 5 things aren't a waste, you'll likely find the concepts useful later. I always did.

Consider not using some frameworks to remove some of the magic.

Build something you want so you finish it.

> Consider not using some frameworks to remove some of the magic.

Learning a framework for a single project can sometimes mean a lot of learning abstractions that you'll never need again, and that didn't teach you any new core concepts.

I would only learn tools like React or Vue if I intended to use them for work, which is what I did. If I'm doing a fun project, I write native code because it's more fun to figure stuff out on my own and I come across more novel concepts and fundamental understandings that way. If I'm building a new project I will use familiar tools/frameworks, so that I can remove the noise of learning new stuff and focus on the build.

Frameworks take time and iterations to get used to and use effectively, they're best if you're going to be building a lot of things using them. They're more like a box of weirdly shaped tools that you like.

For the most part I agree, but there are times where a framework can teach a valuable pattern that, even if you don't end up using it, expands your view of what's possible. Vue helped me understand events a lot better than I did before, and Redux is good to try at least once simply because it's such a different way of thinking about state mutation compared to what you'd usually come up with using just native code.

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