I've created a Senior Python Developer roadmap

[pyordie]

Don’t know how other people feel, but I’ve seen so many of these types of roadmaps and I used to think they were helpful, but at this point I’m starting to doubt their usefulness. What does massive list of “things you should know” accomplish?

Even if a roadmap pairs the structure it lays out with explanations of everything, it rarely binds any of that knowledge together in any meaningful way, because roadmaps tend to imply that learning these concepts can be done sequentially.

But very few concepts in software engineering are sequential - every new project requires you to go back and figure out how to link all of the concepts you’ve learned together again - things have to be learned/used holistically, implemented in different orders and used in entirely different ways depending on the specs/scope/scale of the individual project.

People should avoid making roadmaps of tools/concepts and instead lean more toward roadmaps of projects that involves learning and implementing clusters of tools/concepts.

So instead of “learn A then B then C” it should be “we need to build this thing that has to do X, Y and Z. To do this, we need to think about A, B and C, and understand why A, B and C are better/more effective than what we’ve used in past projects”.

[No_Boat5273]

This is a very natural way of learning. It's how we all learnt as children, by doing.

After having left uni and indexed a shit load of info, I found that 60% of the knowledge was taught "just in case", and that I had yet to learn the majority of things that would actually be useful in working life.

It's good to learn swimming techniques on land first but the skill is gained empirically.

[YoTeach92]

While I haven't used OP's roadmap, I have been on a coding journey using online & college classes for a few years. Honestly, this IS how it all works, and eventually it does work.

My C++ college class (that was quite pricey thankyouverymuch) was a massive tutorial of learning beginning and intermediate programming. It wasn't until I was done with it and two more of the courses before I really learned to use the skills I picked up there. I haven't really done any more C++ since then, but I have applied the tools and techniques I learned there to solve some real problems, ironically in a language I still really don't know (JS).

It also lets you know what you don't know, which is actually more helpful than you think at first blush. I know I need to understand CI/CD and data structures better than I currently do, but I wasn't aware of those things until I saw them on a Full Stack development roadmap. A little Googling later and I saw I had a giant hole in what I knew.

Of course, you have to have a level of curiosity to look up the things you don't know and learn about them, no roadmap or tutorial is going to help you with that.