Learn as you go

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Everyone is making it up to some extent. This is the secret I didn’t learn until years into my career. I often thought I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on, and was in awe of the geniuses always surrounding me…

… Often people are making things up as they go along. They’re not sure, things are undefined and squishy.

— Joshua Wold, Making it up

Thankfully, this is a secret I learned very early, and has steered me true in every stage of my career.

In high school, everyone thought I was a programming genius. In reality, my VisualBasic apps were mashups of code I found online, and my websites usually started by copying the source from another site I liked.

And then I realised, that’s what programming is.

Ask any senior software engineer. They’ll tell you that they started out by copying code (and probably still do).1

I walked into my first WordPress job interview without any experience writing WordPress themes. I fudged and exaggerated, and got the job. In the two weeks I had before the job started, I learned most of what I needed. The rest I figured out on the job.

I took that “fake it till you make it” mindset with me. Never lying outright, of course, but more than a little overconfident. The key is to trust in your ability to learn.

The principle of making it up as you go along is just a skeptical take on this true wisdom: become a lifelong learner. Rather than taking confidence in your capability for action, take confidence in your ability to learn.

If you can prove to yourself – really back yourself – that you’re able to learn any particular skill, all that matters is that you enjoy doing it.2

  1. That’s the thing about AI that people don’t realise. AI isn’t going to take programmer’s jobs. It’s just helping programmer’s do what they’ve always done, only faster: copy the code from someone else and adapt it to the requirements! ↩︎

  2. Herein lies a trap I’ve fallen in more than once. I can be confident in my ability to learn a particularly new skill, and that confidence will lead me to overestimate how much I’ll enjoy it. Then, when it comes time to actually do the job, I’m not motivated to learn. ↩︎