Author Topic: Learning new things is hard.  (Read 4647 times)

micah

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Learning new things is hard.
« on: June 08, 2018, 07:37:50 PM »
So I wrapped up my first week at the new job today.  Holy cow am I in over my head.  They seem to have great confidence in my ability to quickly learn their tech stack. I don't seem to have the same faith in myself.

Everything is in TypeScript and VueJS. I think I have a handle on Vue and could learn it pretty quickly if I could just following the normal tutorials and examples all over the Internet for using it.  But this damn TypeScript stuff, I just can't wrap my head around it all.  I'm starting to get used to the strict paradigm, where every variable is declared with a type and every object has an interface (which was a new concept to me.)  I'm still not sure I get the point of DTOs verse just passing an array of data to your function and that's making it tricky for me to see the big picture and learn all the syntax.  It doesn't help that there are barely ANY helpful links on the Internet of people using typescript with vue.  Its like nobody is silly enough to do that :)

I *think* I'll get there eventually, but I'm not making progress very fast.  And while my boss instilled great faith in my ability to learn, he also gave me 2 days to build a feature using what I've learned and those 2 days have now come and gone with the work only barely half finished.  I'm kinda freaking out that I'm not going to get it fast enough.  I really like the potential for this job but man do I have a lot to learn and its not coming easy.
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hans

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Re: Learning new things is hard.
« Reply #1 on: June 12, 2018, 02:39:46 PM »
So how's it going a few days later?
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micah

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Re: Learning new things is hard.
« Reply #2 on: June 12, 2018, 07:47:21 PM »
I've learned a lot in the past few days but boy is my brain hurting :)  everytime I think I've learned something new, there's an onslaught of additional gotchas.  Part of me feels really dumb for going around thinking I was a good programmer all this time but I didn't even know what an event bus was.  Plus, I don't talk "computer science" language; just about everything I've learned has been by seeing how other people did something and then figuring out how it works. So there are things I know and have done a dozen times before but when someone uses the correct terminology I just stare at them like a deer in headlights.

I'll get there and I really appreciate my bosses patience and confidence in me. I just feel like a neewbie junior programmer getting paid to be a senior/lead developer.  Its humbling and frustrating.
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.  I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."

hans

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Re: Learning new things is hard.
« Reply #3 on: June 12, 2018, 11:24:26 PM »
Good to hear. I'm glad they're taking things well and giving you the time to get up to speed, that's a good sign. I figure it usually takes a good couple months to start settling in to anything new.

And feeling dumb never stops happening. I made a couple "rookie" mistakes over the last week; one today where I could not figure out why something wasn't working right and after spending far too much time updating things and modifying config files finally realized I had something in my bash config causing my "problem". The other guy helping me figure things out had a good laugh when it finally struck me why things were wonky. At least I could provide some entertainment for the end of the day.
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