Biggest mistake I made learning to code

Ank Dev — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:20:15 +0000

You decided to learn how to code and get a job as soon as possible.

You do a quick search online and find a React tutorial where you learn JavaScript and React in 10 hours, then build an e-commerce website.
You watch the tutorial, "understand" everything, and build an amazing project. It feels really good... until you decide to build a project of your own, trying to learn a new framework or read the documentation of a third-party service.

You suddenly start seeing things like "server side rendering, hydration, streaming" — and you realize how much you don't know. You don't understand why Next.js does all the things it does.

You realize you don't even have the fundamental knowledge of how a server and client interact. How does your browser load a page? What actually happens under the hood?
Your knowledge is surface level.

You realize that by "going fast" you actually wasted a lot of time — and now you have to go back and spend the same amount of time learning things the right way.

You also lost confidence in your ability to learn. But let's be honest — you didn't really learn or understand how things work behind the scenes in the first place.

It feels like the more code you output, the more you learn. That's not the case.

Once you start learning the fundamentals properly, you'll realize it becomes easier to pick up new things — frameworks, concepts, patterns — all of it clicks faster.

Go slow at the start, that is okay. You'll go faster in the long run.

DEV Community: Ank Dev

Biggest mistake I made learning to code