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Discussion on: I keep feeling demotivated when I realize how deficient my knowledge is.

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zenulabidin profile image
Ali Sherief

I also felt this way when coming to this site. I joined around the same time as you. I blog mostly about Python because that's what I know, but when I see articles about all the cool hipster tech you mentioned my head starts to spin and I think "How am I ever going to learn all this stuff?", because I also want to learn all these things too, I guess it's very tempting for a lot of people.

Basically, now I blog about stuff I don't know yet, not after I learned about them.

By doing that, I discovered that this is a very effective way to learn these things. Because by the time you publish your blog post you mastered everything you wrote about, just by writing about it.

For example, if (hypothetically) DEV suddenly begins to clamor about Unicode, I wrote an article about it. Before I did I hardly knew anything about Unicode, it was because to blog about this topic I was forced to google it and look it up on Wikipedia.

One day I'm going to blog about React, another technology that I'm clueless about, because it sounds exciting and I want to build my website with it. As you can see, my website is currently empty 😁

So when you see something that intimidates you, you should blog about it here on DEV, which will take about a week to do because you will have to search google for information about it. The summary and tl;dr stuff comes from Wikipedia and the meat of the sandwich will be found on blogs in other people's websites. But all this will pay off and you will master the topic that is intimidating you, one at a time. The ride goes slowly but you'll get there eventually.

Sometimes we encounter topic so vast like React that it's easier to break it down and blog about part of it per week.

P.S. Don't worry about Stack Overflow. People go there to show off their reputation after they learned all this stuff (or at least that's what I like to say 🙂). For the record I only wrote two questions (and answered one of them myself) and still have 1 rep but it's not something I worry about. It's highly likely you'll find a job before you finish blogging about all the stuff you want to learn, when recruiters see your blog they will know you're experienced in these things.

I wish you best of luck in your blogging. 🙂