Before I started taking software development seriously, I remember I had some conflicting thoughts on this. On the one hand, I felt the one way to learn something was to sit down, take courses and maybe get a certificate before I could allow myself to use the technology productively. But then when a project came around that excited me where I could put for example VBA to good use, I'd just start hacking away, googling syntax as I needed it, and poof, a useful macro would come out that was of value to others.
Same now that I do this for a living. Several months ago I got hung up on what language to learn next, but when I finally decided I just wanted to learn some Go, it took 3 days to start doing something significant in it. At the end of the day, there's so much conceptual overlap between stacks and technologies that it really shouldn't matter that much what stack you have experience in, as long as any experience is there.
Before I started taking software development seriously, I remember I had some conflicting thoughts on this. On the one hand, I felt the one way to learn something was to sit down, take courses and maybe get a certificate before I could allow myself to use the technology productively. But then when a project came around that excited me where I could put for example VBA to good use, I'd just start hacking away, googling syntax as I needed it, and poof, a useful macro would come out that was of value to others.
Same now that I do this for a living. Several months ago I got hung up on what language to learn next, but when I finally decided I just wanted to learn some Go, it took 3 days to start doing something significant in it. At the end of the day, there's so much conceptual overlap between stacks and technologies that it really shouldn't matter that much what stack you have experience in, as long as any experience is there.
I'd be interested to hear more about your experience with go. It took me no time to learn the syntax. But it feels like I'm writing code from the 70s.