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Micah Lewis
Micah Lewis

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Learning NOT from the Ground Up

Hi, my name is Micah, and I've got a bit of a weird journey into programming. I used to spend a lot of time on trains for work, and so over the course of 3 years, riding the rails, I managed to teach myself enough to get a job as a junior software developer at a small company here in Tokyo.

Over the course of 3 years, I basically became the frontend developer here at my job, specializing in React. I've done it to the point where I feel confident in wielding it in most situations, which is nice, but also a really scary thought in my opinion. I don't want to become a developer who knows how to do 1 thing, so I've recently thought about broadening my horizons and learning a different language outside of the JavaScript ecosystem, which brings me to my current conundrum:

When I was first learning to code, I started from 0. Learning anything was a good use of my time, but now that I have a general grasp on coding concepts, how should I learn?.

Given that I'm no longer a complete beginner, I don't think it's a good use of time to sit and do tutorials that teach me how to initialize a variable. But then in that case, how should I go about learning something new, now that I have a foundation?

Has anyone else ever had a similar problem? What did you do? I'd love to get some feedback or wisdom here to help steer me in the right direction.

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