Ask HN: Coping with time anxiety while learning something new?
I’m a college student who recently finished the semester and I’m trying to use my free time (internship was cancelled) to skill-up on a programming language I like (Python).
I’m working on a fun personal project in the language and every time I have to do something new, I encounter more and more in-depth information about the language and the ecosystem surrounding it. Small example: yesterday, I was looking at some Python repos on GitHub and noticed that all of the README files I saw were .rst files instead of Markdown, so I started learning about reStructuredText.
But when I first realized this was a markup language I was not yet familiar with, I felt this mix of dread and anxiety at having to learn something else in order to keep progressing with the project. Then, I realized I’d had a similar feeling when I was trying to implement a particular feature in my project and read through a pretty long piece of documentation to figure out how I could use the library in question to do so.
I generally enjoy learning new things about software, and want to be a programmer for at least part of my career, but I’m wondering if others have these kinds of feelings? I want to have a deep understanding of the things I do, but I also feel this weird pressure to just grok something “good enough” so I can move on to the next thing and keep building/learning new stuff.