The progression of technology.

In recent years, more than ever, technology has been progressing at lightning speeds. With the coming alive of new programming languages, new versions of libraries and frameworks stretching the possibilities further than the imagination can see, and so much more. It's safe to say there’s a lot that’s constantly changing in the tech industry.

Lately, we’ve seen the progression of Web3, React 18, and the growing world of no-code and low-code tools, that’s just to name a few things… But with all this change it's more important than ever to never stop learning new things!

A week of learning...

I’ve spent a week learning React - It’s true that learning is an empowering activity! Taking this time to thoroughly study something new it’s allowed me to absorb the knowledge but also to reflect on it and consider the real benefits of learning new things.

Learning React has been a massive jump in ability, for me - from building with PHP and building basic static sites, it’s opened up a whole new world of employable skills in me as a developer, but this isn’t the only good thing I’ve taken from learning something new.

From taking a week to mainly focus on learning something new I have realised and recognised why learning new things is so important and more specifically why continuing to learn those things is even more important. Take React for example - I’ve taken Scrimba’s course to learn it. The course was written and recorded back in 2021, just one year ago, but since, it’s had small interruptive edits to explain breaking changes that have occurred just between then and now - 12 months later. This is just how fast things change between two concurrent versions.

You never know everything.

Whether you’ve been writing code since computers were first made or you’ve just started, no matter how hard you study you’ll never learn everything. I guarantee that. Everyone looks back at the documentation. Everyone has to google their struggles away. After all, things are always changing. With learning, however, you get better at problem-solving and thus it’s easier to debug and understand your mistakes next time. It's perfectly acceptable to grab some code from stack overflow to make something work - but who’s it helping if you don’t understand it? Even if you don’t know how to do something, when you find your solution it's important to understand how that solution helps, this is why learning is so necessary.

Here today gone tomorrow...

Ok, sometimes we are just left with no choice but to learn something new. I made the great decision on May 4th 2021 to learn bootstrap 4, and level up what at the time was my non-existent CSS skills. Well, what other than Bootstrap 5 launched on May 5th?

Part of me was disappointed, part of me was proud…

The point is though no matter what you’re learning, the learning can extend at any moment, no matter how this sounds, it shouldn’t be off-putting. Being fresh in the world of bootstrap it was motivational seeing the movement and progression, I had a newfound skill that was only growing and becoming more valuable. I learned more and more and became better and better at using what is one of the world’s most used CSS frameworks. This then leads me to better understand how CSS works and how to design better without a framework.

The reason you should learn more.

There are so many reasons to keep learning more. But more importantly than anything else, learning allows you to progress. Even if you progress slower than others around you, or if you progress slower than the technology you use, progression is only ever a good thing in learned skills.

From being able to keep up with modern development trends, to be more likely to land your dream job, and simply to better yourself as a developer, learning is one thing you should simply never stop.

If that wasn’t enough to encourage you to keep learning take a look at why other people in the tech space never stop learning!

Never stop learning new things, whether its simply a concept, a framework or even another language.