02/08/2024
Martin kozon once answered a question about
"How long will it take me to become a full stack web developer, if I am devoted to learning 7 hours a day?"⁉️
And that really got me thinking where I'm I actually?
This information is really a eye opener
Here's what he said...
I’m a Front-End Web Developer and I’ve been working with it for the past 3 years.
I started learning the web as any other Web Developer does - First the HTML, then CSS and then JS. After just about 3 months since I started, I thought that I knew everything and that I could call myself a Front-End Web Developer. And so did I. What was the next frontier? Becoming a Full-Stack. I thought that it’d be really easy - all I had to learn was PHP and MySQL. I learnt these languages in about 2 - 3 months (at least I thought). So that’s it. I could call myself a Full-Stack Web Developer. Yeah!
In the beginning, I’d like to show you a Web Developer map.
You can see the map below but still, don’t forget to read this answer because it may open your eyes! (I’m not taking credit for this map - it’s not mine but from the website mentioned above)
Becoming a Full-Stack developer is easy. But being a superb Full-Stack developer is much harder than you think.
I see the same thing in every growing Web Developer. Everybody who’s just starting is rushing themselves to become a Full-Stack ASAP!
Wrong!
Wrong!
Wrong!
I called myself a Full-Stack Web Developer but if I had to put my knowledge to a percentage bar, it would be below 1%. There’s way more to learn than you think. What I did, is I started with the basics again. It’ll take you longer to learn each of the concepts of Web Development, but it will be worth it at the end.
There’s an interesting thing called The Dunning-Kruger Effect. At the beginning of any hobby/activity you think that you know everything but in reality, you know almost nothing. It’s great to be aware of this effect, that’s why I’m mentioning it here.
I’m currently working with the Front-End - the basic things like HTML, CSS or JS are well known, but have you learned something about reactive frameworks, service workers, indexedDB, NoSQL, …? It’s definitely worth learning.
Okay, let’s get back to your question before I’ll get lost. Let’s suppose that you’re still a student like me.
A day has got 24 hours. You sleep 7 hours. You’re in school for about 8 hours. After you come to school you’ll need to study for at least 3 hours. This means that you’re left with only 6 hours.
That’s great! You can keep learning. NO! You definitely won’t. I know this from personal experience. It will work for the first 2 weeks, but after some time you’ll start procrastinating. You’ll try to distract yourself.
Sometimes it’s way better to spend less time - I usually spent about 2 hours a day learning to code but these 2 hours were extremely productive. Try to keep yourself as productive as possible. This way you cannot only become a Full-Stack Web Developer but you’ll also become a good one!
This quote says it all! Be patient!
In theory, if you really had 7 hours a day of free time which you could spend productively learning to code, then you could become pretty proficient in about a year or two.
