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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

It only takes two things – curiosity and time.

When you are working on a project, if you hit the edge of your current knowledge / skills, push just a little bit further when it’s something that interests you instead of just aiming to hit the basic requirements / lean on other people.

This minor effort compounds over time; do it for twenty years and you’ll be an expert in multiple disciplines and also an expert in how to tie them all together into one cohesive whole. Aim to be a “T-shaped” person, and just expand over time.

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Actually I think it takes a third thing: need

At least in my experience I can read about different architectures all day and sort of understand them, but I only really "get" it once I find a non-toy problem I need to solve and attempt to apply the knowledge. Then you see how it really works and form hard skills which stay with you.

Absolutely this. Wanna learn French? Go to France and live there for a year. Wanna be good at spinning up infrastructure with Terraform? Take an infrastructure job at a company that uses terraform - a start-up if possible, so you get to solve all of the problems. I wanted to learn Terraform and Kubernetes for years, and no amount of books or online courses really helped. Taking a job at a start-up fixed it. In fact, our stack is spookily similar to the one OP posted, Which is validation and also admiration because this person did it solo.

> Wanna learn French? Go to France and live there for a year.

I actually did that but only for 9 months, my french isn't that good...

I find it is best to do the tutorials. The really basic ones. First one tutorial or article, then another and another. Don't get distracted by using it on your own project yet. Do more and more tutorials. Read the docs. Not just the getting started guide. Read the docs for like 2 days. Then get a book and read that.

It may also be helpful to share some details on effective ways to be curious. I’m a curious person too, but in the early days I just didn’t know where to start.

My advice: - There is no defined learning path yet (to my knowledge). - Start by reading the GitHub readme of technology in these articles (ex: nginx or kubernetes). - If interested, try to spin up a tutorial app. - Try to make something useful. Maybe this is a spin on a tutorial, or something novel. This is the hardest but best way to learn.

Finally, I’ll add that many folks learn these skills on the job either directly or having worked in proximity to new tech. It does seem this was how the author learned.

Hope that helps! I’m sure others will have great advice, too!

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