To a Greener Me
Tags: beginners, webdev
Published: 2020-02-19 21:18:26

Here's the letter I'd like to send to a former self who was new to web development:

<i>Dear greener Charles,

<i>It has been quite some time since I was you. Bad news first: you haven't accomplished anything you thought you were going to do, and you're always a little anxious about that (sorry, bud). But the good news: you're always learning new things and the great expanse of programmatic intricacies are awesome and you can use that screen that hackers use in movies where it's just text cascading down the screen from erratic typing! 

<i>Nothing is going according to plan, but you're going somewhere and that keeps you together.

<i>I have some advice going forward. First, there is a near infinite number of things you don't even know that you don't know. And even now I'm confronted by aspects that boggle and competing concepts defended equally all too frequently. But knowing what you don't know is half the battle. Be diligent, organized, and undaunted; keep a running list of foreign terms and learn them with the fervor of your freshman days. Every new term is an ingredient in the cauldron to your many future projects. 

<i>Second, books are for nerds. Take a Nike moment and just do it. I'm not saying books and documentation aren't helpful, they are brilliant. But the moment you sit down to apply it you will feel lost all over again. Let experience be your scaffolding and literature be your blueprint. Acquire your scaffolding, then do the blueprint, and fill the details in after. It'll keep you sane seeing your accomplishments, but more importantly it'll let you retain knowledge in a way that is personal and retrievable.

<i>Third, you're not too cool to take the path well traveled. Sure it's not perfect but you'll find plenty of friends and tips to keep you on the right path. Every framework and library will try to seduce you, but they come and go like farts in the wind. Circling back to the first point: you will spend more time figuring out which ones do what best when and why than you will accomplishing because you don't know why you are doing anything anyway! Just pick a path well traveled and see it to the end. You will have many chances to venture afterwards. (Added bonus, employers are fond of the mainstream *hint hint*)

<i>Lastly, on the note of seeing it through just get great at one thing and let the world babysit the rest of your project. You are not a full-stack genius. HTML? You don't "got" that. All that time you are about to spend learning CSS particulars is going to really make you sad when you let it sit on the shelf for half a year. Your front-end is going to look great until you realize it's actually terrible, and your back-end is thee sloppiest. But now you're invested everywhere and completely obsessed with doing a four-man job with a half wit's intuition, spread impossibly thin. And somehow loving that sweet agony.

<i>You have always been you so none of this should be too shocking.

<i>Hopefully you make better decisions than I did, but if you don't at least you'll be as hopefully hopeless as I am.

<i>Yours necessarily, 
 
<i>Riper Charles

<i>P.S. Really though: CSS in a can, please. It's the hardest, saddest thing you will ever do.