Learning a new coding language or API is not easy – some you can naturally gravitate towards, especially if that API or framework has an interface for your favourite language du jour.
And it is always frustrating because despite all of our knowledge and experience we are starting at the same old examples to get up and running quickly.
“Hello World”
It can be deflating and demoralizing – you have built such wondrous inventions on C# now must go work on Ruby Rails, or the PHP machine must now do some defunct ASP programming on a legacy application.
It has happened to all of us.
What I am constantly shocked and surprised by, is the general lack of understanding of the platform people are building solutions on have in general. If you are building a solution on AWS, it will help you to understand how AWS works, if you are building a phone connector to Asterisk, it will help you to understand how Asterisk makes calls, if you are integrating your conferencing with Skype For Business it will help to know how conferencing MCUs work in Skype For Business, etc, etc
If you want to become really good at something, learn the platform you are coding on, understand the why things happen when your code run as opposed to the – “I don’t know how it works” – if you can, go and install it, fight that battle of getting it up and running.
It might not feel like it on Day 1, but in the long run, you’ll have learned a ton more that will make you that much more of a stronger Developer.
