I'm stuck instead of moving forward. Now what?
Tags: beginners, webdev, codenewbie
Published: 2020-09-01 19:05:48

After 6 months of learning, I’ve started to feel like I’ve plateaued in my learning journey. In the beginning, even though everything seemed complicated as I was starting out, the pace at which I was learning new concepts seemed really fast. I was fairly quick at picking up concepts like HTML’s label elements or the fact that CSS is what you work on to improve on the design of your webpage. JavaScript was a bit tougher but it wasn’t too hard to pick up on simple ideas like what an array is or what a function does. 
The problem came about after going through the “easy” part. When you reach the end of the simpler coding foundations, you’re exposed to more complex topics and ideas, and that’s when you might feel like you’re in this no-man’s land where, on one hand you already grasp the basic concepts, but on the other you’re aware of how much you still have to learn.

## The list goes on and on
I’ve had to ponder on this feeling for a couple of days to deflect my inner saboteur’s attempts at making me feel insecure (once again) about my ability as a programmer. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to be kinder to myself and stop comparing my skills and knowledge to others.
When I first started on the path of web development, I thought it would be easier and faster to learn than Swift, but I was really wrong. Beyond the basics of HTML and CSS, you have to learn JavaScript which, by itself, is a fairly complicated programming language. 
But the rabbit hole goes much deeper than this. 
After mastering these three aspects of the front-end development you still have several frameworks like React, Vue or Angular you could take on. Then, you could also consider one of the many static site generators, like Gatsby, Next or Eleventy, just to name a few. And this doesn’t even cover the back-end aspect of web development where you can learn about Node, ExpressJS, Java, C++, Ruby…
So why should I think less of myself just because I’m not where I wanted to be or know as much as I think I should know? 

## How to deal with this anxiety
One thing I’ve learned and which helped me manage the anxiety caused by this deluge of information is to tackle it a bit at a time. You see, no one will ever learn everything there is to learn, let alone in six months. What you (and I) have to do is learn our concepts first, pace ourselves to really understand them, and then jump into something else. 
For example, when I was taking my full-stack course on Udemy I had this sense of urgency in me that made me almost rush through it. It was like there was some kind of expiration date on my head and if I didn’t learn all those concepts quickly enough, I would be out of some future, hypothetical job. As a consequence, when I started the React module, I wasn’t sure of anything because I hadn’t deepened my knowledge of JavaScript yet. And as React is basically JavaScript… You get the picture.

## Next steps
To deal with this “learning plateau” I’m in, my plan is to basically continue studying JavaScript and really dig into it. After that, I’ll start learning whatever piques my interest – another thing I’m trying to do is learn what I really like and not whatever is hot right now. 
There’s really no magic bullet to get you to your final destination – at least that I know of. The only advice I can give you (and myself) is to work on improving your knowledge and, hopefully, someday the plateau will be behind us.