You may have heard that it is often better to start slow and learn correctly first rather than jumping to (overly) advanced learning. How is it that we find out what it is to learn correctly? In modern times, sometimes this is tricky.

With respect to technology stuff, there are endless details one might master. For instance, if someone says that they are going to study some "coding/programming", this could mean any number of bossing around machines, generally. Probably the first coding I did was trying out some exercise in a book; for others it was programming graphic calculators. I don't think the "entry" into programming matters so much—

There seem to be distinguishing marks between good vs bad (or skilled vs unskilled) technologists, regardless of specifics of technology. Anybody can copy and paste some code or go through a tutorial to reproduce some results someone else designed—similarly, it is not too difficult to follow a recipe or tutorial video to cook some dish once.

Experience & results as a measure of success

What distinguishes a more skilled technical practioner is being able to adapt some (familiar) toolset to whatever problems/demands arise. For some things, like web programming, it may be necessary to learn more tools/techniques as approaches people take change. A skilled coder will know not to get too caught up in any one technique because experience teaches how transient fads in technology are. ¹

A distinguishing feature of people that have at some point enjoyed working with technology is that they experienced a sense of freedom "experimenting" or "hacking" with their tools. This sort of person tends to enjoy a kinda "reward/feedback" loop, writing more and more programs (or equivalently with other tech, using some toolset like a hammer and nails) and thus—given adequate self-criticism/awareness—iterative improvement.
On the other hand, a "purist" might get too obsessed with some one thing that prevents them from making progress. Let's suppose a person early on decides that "I will be a python programmer". Well, this might work out for a while, but what happens if/when python specifically falls out of a favor? ²

An experienced and skilled technologist will be able to recognize what is really new/different and what is just marketing or unhelpful abstraction. For example, in the world of web programming, there are a lot of different "Web Frameworks" which give various ways to smash together HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which are the fundamental "building blocks" of the (front end) web. You might learn some new system like Angular or React in order to generate a site that is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript "under the hood". Now, anyone skilled in using one of these frameworks will tell you that having a good grasp of the basic underlying HTML/CSS/JavaScript is essential for knowing what the framework can and can't do. You need to understand why big tech companies invested so much money into developing these frameworks—without a good understanding of the problems some tool is supposed to solve, it is hard to make good use of it.

We typically don't say "I'm going to practice using a pencil" or "I'm going to go do hammer exercises". Rather, we'd practice handwriting/drawing or building fences or have some other more concrete goal.

Without some kind of goal, it is hard to tell if we're getting better at what we're doing or if we're just going in circles becoming increasingly idiosyncratic but not any more effective. Clearly, you can spend lots and lots of time doing something that nobody ever asked you to do—many aspiring "creative" types may pour hours and hours into some projects nobody asked for. Are they getting better at what they do?

Some way of evaluating stuff is needed to make progress.

Thus the heading here, experience & results as a measure of success. The skilled technical practioner can't progress in increasing their skill if they cease to work by building stuff.

Regaining focus

There are some underlying technologies that change slower than others. Understanding the essentials of "base" underlying technologies can be thought of as the tech equivalent to "returning to fundamentals" and thus locating the things that need to be learned correctly.

By learning some basic things well, it is much easier to get to the comfortably building stuff phase as opposed to the recipe look-up phase. Like learning to write stuff, we first learn how to combine smaller parts, and then we find that we can piece together increasingly longer-form pieces.

One way I have lost a lot of time (and focus) is by getting too caught up in over-complicated tooling/configurations. Back in the day, I think this was less of a problem as the early computer users couldn't really complicate computing beyond how complicated it was inherently—you might have no choices with regard to which programming language was available to use with your machine! Now, you can find listicle upon listicle comparing/ranking your many, many choices of programming language, database, cloud service, etc.

I'm finding a useful heuristic is to ignore these and turn instead to,

• What is the market demanding? You can learn technologies based on what you know people will pay for
• Learning fundamentals; the more (useful) technologies they are common to, the better
• Understand problems before (proposed/complex) solutions—this is to say, know what sort of thing you want to build and why before getting too attached to some new tooling/technique

I'll use "computer stuff" as a case study. If you are doing any kind of software development, chances are you're going to be using git for source control. It would probably be a good idea to learn some of that well (enough). Similarly, all over the Open Source software world, you see UNIX/Linux stuff everywhere—probably most of the tools used today are connected with this tradition. So it makes sense to get comfy with how people have used these systems to do stuff for a long while. Learning terminal/command-line stuff might seem archaic and overly complicated until you understand what problems it solves and how it is useful—first try interacting with any remote system; chances are you will need ssh. You will find that learning all these text-based commands is really useful for describing and repeating actions. Compared with something like GUI-based mouse motion recording, you can see that a whole class of problems—such as how big your monitor is—vanish as dimensionality is collapsed.

Sometimes, we have too many opinions

Knowing a little bit about a whole bunch of different things is a quick way to become a scatter-brained, opinion filled person. Is this a good state of affairs? For getting stuff done, it probably isn't. It would be better if you were more effective at acting in the world and had no time for endless opinion spouting (or perhaps even worse, being butthurt because other people don't listen to or respect your opinions).

Thinking that you are right, it can be hard to see this in oneself—surely I have all these opinions because I know what I'm talking about!

I think it is better to just get good at what you do. Therefore, by sheer results, others will go do you and ask you how you got your results. Your opinions will be solicited rather than unsolicited.

nobody is making u read my blog, btw... lol :D