I created a fancy new react website as a learning experience, so now what do I do? I don't know if this is a common feeling for anyone else learning new things, but it seems that every time I take a new educational or occupational journey, I always seem to hit this point sooner or later. For months, or even years, you may have had a clear trajectory, a list of key things to learn, and once that list is exhausted and you start looking toward creating a new list...it can feel a bit challenging to find your footing.

from web dev basics to advancement

Started from the bottom now we here...

I started my quest into the world of development with considerations about the future of my career at the forefront of my mind. I laid out a pretty standard path for myself that really only included the basics, as that is all I really knew at the time. My focus was going to be on HTML first, then CSS and then Javascript and a framework/library or two. That was literally the entirety of my list. Inevitably though, I learned that there is much more to web design and software development than I had initially considered.

I think naivety is common for most people starting something new. We think we know what sort of experiences we will have and what sort of challenges we will face. But in my experience, the actuality of any new endeavor is that the journey is not a fixed path or stable target, but a fluid one. A sort of stream that can meander into many different avenues along the way to the desired end goal. For a hyper planner, this may be a daunting, if not frightening, revelation, but if you keep your mind open, it really is incredible to see which of these avenues or paths hit and which don't.

So back to the question at hand. I spent the last three months building this journal from the ground up. Is it perfect? Nope. But does it work well and did it accomplish for me what I hoped it would? You bet. The problem now is that I need to use it, fill it with relevant content based on my journey thus far and the rest of my journey to come. I am excited at the prospect of this but currently, I don't really know where to go next. The process of building Drucial opened up my eyes to how diverse and many the opportunities for skills and education there are in the world of development. But therein lies the rub, how does one decide what rabbit hole to go down next.

educational paths in web development

A few different avenues I am considering are:

- Mobile app development

- API development

- More frontend frameworks

- Digging deeper into Node and focusing on backend education

All of these things, save mobile app development, weren't even on my radar before I started building Drucial. That's the beauty of education I think. The further you dig into a given subject, the more offshoots and nuance you discover. And for software and web development, that trove of wormholes is seemingly limitless.

I am really considering rounding out my current understanding with some more education on the backend of things. I'm not sure if that is driven by the coveted title of "Full-stack Developer" or if it's because that is what currently feels like my weak link. I don't even really know how to talk in that language enough to carry on a basic conversation and it feels like I really need to correct that.

On the other hand, as I have been digging more and more into API's as projects ideas come to me, I feel like that may hold my attention a bit steadier at the present time. Either way, the journey continues and I am stoked for the next adventure already.

Have you ever experienced the dead zone between levels of progression? How do you make it past that analysis paralysis?

Cheers,

Drew