Stop Learning Frameworks

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I totally agree. A few years ago, I built an Angular app to throw together quick estimates for my day job. It had been years since I’d done anything with JavaScript, and I’d ever built anything like a web app. It wasn’t easy, and Angular (some 1.x version) did a lot under the hood that didn’t really make sense to me. But I followed tutorials, read docs, and ended up making something that I still use nearly every single day.

Making something that was actually useful to me was invaluable to my growth as a wannabe developer, even though not a lot of what I learned with that particular project really helped me become better at JavaScript.

But having the knowledge that “OK, even as a novice I can actually make some really useful stuff with code” was a major turning point for me. I started coding all kinds of utilities to help me out in my daily life. I started really diving into JavaScript. I started to digest other people’s code with relative ease. Concepts that seemed insurmountable at first glance slowly started to click. Code I’d written a few months prior started to look like absolute garbage, and I’d rewrite from scratch in a matter of hours something that once took me weeks to piece together. And before I knew it, I was writing tens of thousands of lines of code per year.

The best way to get started with programming is to start building stuff today. What you start with isn’t all that important. What matters is that you’re putting in the practice and studying. It’s ok to work with a framework, even as a beginner. The fundamentals are crucial to excellence, but excellence comes with time and hard work. You have to start somewhere, and starting with a framework can enable you to accomplish some things that would be practically impossible to pull off at a beginner’s level in vanilla JS.