7 Mistakes That Are Keeping You Behind
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Web, Web Development, Code

Learning JavaScript is not fun for everybody, and especially not those who are impatient. Sometimes there comes a point where people start to question whether this is even the right career path for them.

But JavaScript was never meant to be a walk in the park.

The good news is that your learning process can be improved by making better decisions and formulating better approaches to learning. The bad news? Well, this won’t happen on its own. The only person who can change this is you.

This article will go over 7 mistakes developers can make that keep them behind while learning JavaScript.

1. Rushing Through Concepts

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Once you begin to understand concepts like closures or higher order functions, it’s almost never a good idea to skip to the next lesson without first getting some hands-on experience.

It may be tempting to move on to the next subject, I know — it happens to everyone. But believe me, if you spend some hands-on time coding first, even for just five minutes, it will make building projects easier in the future. Often the feel of coding a concept is what will stick in your mind and help you to remember things in the long run.

If you do rush through concepts you’ll end up forgetting and have to search through old materials to refresh your memory. When this happens, it can be discouraging to lose losing valuable time when you have already spent time learning the subject. Then those negative thoughts start to pile up in your head….

And that’s important, because people often say they quit their programming career due to insufficient time.

When a concept is a piece of cake to you, you should be ready to move on!

2. Not Owning Your Code

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A common thing I still see today are people becoming too dependent on other people’s work — whether this is copying another person’s file from a tutorial or using the lodash library to do everything. While there’s nothing wrong with using lodash for a lot of your tasks, you can also be setting yourself back in the long run if you haven’t ever applied many of those concepts yourself. The concepts is what will stick to other tools/frameworks/languages because they’re ways to think in programming.

This is the reason why a lot of interviews still give coding challenges — they want to see how you think or how you apply concepts to common problems in development. You can be using component libraries alone to make the best looking user interface while making lodash handle applying the algorithms for you, but when problems arise they need you to be ready to apply concepts and solve them. They don’t look forward to npm installing another library to solve their problems. They need you.

You don’t want to end up in situations where you’re having a hard time applying concepts you’ve already learned. So it’s a generally a good idea to take a bit of your time to practice them on your own. Own your code!

3. Overthinking Everything

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With all of information you can find online, it can be tempting to sit down and gather all of the resources you need before learning the next topic in JavaScript.

But I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say that was the way to learn and become better. W seem to have the urge to do that because we want all the information in front of us, so we feel set for the rest of the year.

It’s all in your head.

Don’t get caught up gathering 80 tutorials, 6 ebooks, a collection of over 50 bookmarks of resources, and attempting to start tackling them together for as long as you feel like the king of web development.

If you’re learning JavaScript, get your hands dirty with hands-on learning — just starting writing things. Use whatever you learned over the past hour and put together a small example for yourself. These activities will stick in your head longer than the marathon of learning material you gathered.

4. Overwhelming Yourself With Too Much Information

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When you spending a lot of time taking in information, without coding in between, you’re actually setting yourself up to forget when you come back to the material later.

You feel like you’re learning. But what happens a couple of months later when you end up forgetting? You’ll find that for some reason you’re unable to apply the concepts and material you’ve learned months ago.

If you need a guideline, spend at least fifteen minutes coding for every one hour of consuming information.

5. Comparing Yourself To More Advanced Developers

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When you compare yourself to others you’re not thinking about how they got there — just where they’re at now.

Do you assume all successful programmers began their learning process writing clean, awesome code?

Keep focusing on what you’re learning now and you’ll improve as you go. Soon you’ll be in a position where people start wondering how you got there.

6. Learning The Tools and Frameworks Built On Top of JavaScript

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You’re supposed to be learning JavaScript but you’re learning React/jQuery/Angular/Vue right away instead. What happens when a new revolutionary tool comes out and you make the switch? You’re going to end up relying on someone else to figure out the neat tricks and hope someone shares them because they learned JavaScript and you didn’t!

If you haven’t sacrificed a good amount of your energy into learning vanilla JavaScript, I highly recommend you really learn the language . If you learn the language, then you should understand the tools that were built on top of it, why they were being built and what problems they solve. Learning the why in JavaScript will help you avoid making bad code design decisions as well.

One of the most regrettable mistakes I have made in my career is learning jQuery before I started learning JavaScript. When React came along, I hopped on the bandwagon and began learning React. However, this became a very awkward learning process after I realized I didn’t know why I had to use react or why people needed it. It suddenly just became a game of memorizing react code just to get by. In JavaScript tools or frameworks, a lot of the important bits are hidden away.

7. Not Splitting Concepts Into Smaller Pieces

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Learning JavaScript is like learning math as a child. Once you have learned the basics of addition, multiplication, division, subtraction, you can move on to comparing numbers using > (greater than) and < (less than), long division, basic algebra, etc. When you find yourself having difficulty understanding something, it’s often because you jumped too far ahead, instead of taking small steps. Going straight to algebra would feel impossible without going through the basics first!

By taking small steps, when you encounter a concept that doesn’t make sense to you, it will be a lot easier for you to get assistance because you’ll already have the topic narrowed down.