I always jump in first without fundamental knowledge and circle back to fill in those gaps, and that's how I mentor juniors.
I don't think either approach is better than the other.
If you spend too much time on the fundamentals you are not being productive.
If you spend too much time on being productive you are going to have long terms problems.
I think as mentors its easy for us to look back at our journey and say this is what works for me and since its producing positive results when I mentor others it must be the true path.
I think people need to find the mentor they'll stick with no matter the methodology until they can walk on their own.
I agree with the meat of your reply. Definitely if you spend too much time learning the fundamentals without any way to apply them, it's a waste. In the same way, if you spend too much time trying to brute force building something in a framework when you don't understand the underpinnings, a lot of that time is wasted. I think there's a nice balance where you're switching back and forth between the two approaches.
Learning jQuery before understanding Javascript first did work for me, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I can see lots of places where I struggled that I wouldn't have had to and where finding the solution didn't lead to much learning because my mental model had so many gaps.
The secret is to scale back what you want to build for your first few builds and fit it into vanilla JS. That way, you're not just learning vanilla JS for the sake of it. You've got a way to start applying it immediately. Graduate to your framework and the bigger app once you've built a couple in that space.
Not to suggest you can't still succeed by flipping this method on its head. That's what I originally did and it worked out fine in the end.
Thanks for reading and taking time to share your thoughts, Andrew.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I always jump in first without fundamental knowledge and circle back to fill in those gaps, and that's how I mentor juniors.
I don't think either approach is better than the other.
I think as mentors its easy for us to look back at our journey and say this is what works for me and since its producing positive results when I mentor others it must be the true path.
I think people need to find the mentor they'll stick with no matter the methodology until they can walk on their own.
I agree with the meat of your reply. Definitely if you spend too much time learning the fundamentals without any way to apply them, it's a waste. In the same way, if you spend too much time trying to brute force building something in a framework when you don't understand the underpinnings, a lot of that time is wasted. I think there's a nice balance where you're switching back and forth between the two approaches.
Learning jQuery before understanding Javascript first did work for me, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I can see lots of places where I struggled that I wouldn't have had to and where finding the solution didn't lead to much learning because my mental model had so many gaps.
The secret is to scale back what you want to build for your first few builds and fit it into vanilla JS. That way, you're not just learning vanilla JS for the sake of it. You've got a way to start applying it immediately. Graduate to your framework and the bigger app once you've built a couple in that space.
Not to suggest you can't still succeed by flipping this method on its head. That's what I originally did and it worked out fine in the end.
Thanks for reading and taking time to share your thoughts, Andrew.