We'll never know the counterfactual, but in my opinion:
You could have learned the same thing more efficiently, with more support for why you didn't need to reinvent the wheel.
You could have learned the same thing more efficiently, with more support for why you didn't need to reinvent the wheel.
Also, a valuable guide when deciding whether to write code yourself or introduce yet another library to your dependencies.
Their were so busy trying to get stuff done that they never had time to explore. I don't mean blog post or tutorial explore, I mean weeks and weeks of implementation and testing of patterns and low level engineering. Building database engines from scratch or writing a compiler or a distributed message broker, for instance.