This post was originally published on July 17, 2020 on my blog.

Happy Friday to all who celebrate it! Despite it being a very short week, I feel like I've gotten a good number of things accomplished, which feels nice.

Something I'm thinking about for the moment is how important it is to give yourself ample time to learn something.

More specifically, I'm looking back to when I first started teaching myself how to code and imagining that I'd be ready for professional-level stuff at the end of a couple of months.

I'm sure that, in some cases, it does actually work out like that and then people just end up learning a ton on the job, etc - but as I've been learning/teaching myself for the past 7.5 months now (!!), I'm realizing having that much time has been instrumental in truly dialing in the fundamentals and making sense of so much that I've been learning since the beginning.

Let's take React (a JavaScript framework), for example. When I first started dabbling in learning JavaScript, I also had a crash course on learning React at the same time.

It was all fine and good as I was learning, but once I started to do projects on my own, I realized I really didn't know anything at all.

As I'm slowly but surely getting further and further along with learning the true ins and outs of JavaScript, I'm discovering that so much of what I thought was the React framework is actually just native to the JavaScript language itself.

I recently responded to a post on Twitter where someone mentioned that they'd been learning JavaScript for the past 3 weeks and it just wasn't sticking, and they asked if they should stick with it.

Well, I'm here to say - 1000% yes because I've been with it for seven and a half months and some things are just now starting to stick that I wouldn't have even been capable of understanding at just a few weeks in.

Thanks so much for reading along! Now let's be friends over on Twitter >>

P.S. Did you know I have a podcast with new episodes each Wednesday? Go listen right over here >>