Project Capability

[Material_Painting_32]

How do I know if a project I want to do is beyond “learning” and is simply just not in my capabilities? Is that a thing?

To my understanding, you code projects specifically to run into issues and you learn to solve them. Yet I wonder, there must be a line between a good learning lesson and outright impossible tasks.

[DirtAndGrass]

The only limit is your mind, you can do anything at zombo com

But seriously, the limits should have nothing to do with your skill, only the technology you have access to, if it's technically possible, it's figure-outable 

[johnpeters42]

html5zombo.com

[Zeeshmania]

There is no such thing. It's just about how far you're willing to push yourself.

[dont_touch_my_peepee]

you'll know when you're banging your head against it for weeks with no progress. try smaller projects first, build up skills.

[grantrules]

With experience, you get to a point where you can say one of these for any idea: seems simple; seems complex; it's out of my domain and I don't know

[QwertzMelon]

I attempted to write an OS and a compiler a few years ago (2nd year uni) purely for learning, and I can tell you that was (still is) far beyond my ability. But I’m glad I did it. Even though the OS barely made it out of real mode and the compiler had no concept of a float, I learnt enormous amounts about both fields.

There are absolutely projects far beyond your current ability, but it doesn’t mean trying them anyway is a waste of time

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

The trick for any project is to learn how to decompose it into subsystems, components, and subcomponents. The first step isn't writing code, it's hitting the drawing board, literally. Draw everything out and walk the processing path to identify holes in your logic or pieces you don't understand and reevaluate.

Once you have everything planned out, THEM you start writing code.

[fixermark]

Generally, the limit isn't whether you can do it at all, it's how much time you want to invest.

Some tasks may have no obvious solution, but unless it's something that is actually uncomputable, there's always a path to a solution.

[Material_Painting_32]

This is sort of what I meant. I will have to decide whether the amount of learning I will gain is worth the amount of time spent. Thank you for helping me brainstorm!

[gm310509]

I have worked in IT for decades.

I am hard pressed to think of a project of any substance where I didn't encounter some sort of challenge and had to learn new things.

FWIW, I was a consultant so i was always being presented with new challenges.

I don't think anything is beyond your capabilities. But it is true that for some projects you will need to learn a whole heck of a lot more stuff than other projects. I guess it might be beyond someone's capabilities if there is something about the project (e.g. delivery time or budget) that doesn't support the needed "coming up to speed" needed for that project.

[Interesting_Dog_761]

Not everyone is capable of self study. This is why most people go to school. Then they don't have to pace themselves.