Do roadmaps actually help people learn?
I am not sure.
Because the first time I saw one, it did the exact opposite.
I remember opening a DevOps roadmap at roadmap.sh and seeing Linux, Networking, AWS, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Security...
The list just kept going.
Instead of feeling motivated, I felt overwhelmed.
I closed all the tabs, shut down my laptop, and went to sleep.
I am serious.
It looked less like a learning path and more like a university degree.
What made it worse was that I went back the next day and tried again.
Same feeling.
Surely there had to be a simpler version somewhere.
So I did what most people do.
I went looking for a better roadmap.
Instead, I found more roadmaps with different layouts, orders, and opinions.
One said to learn Docker before Kubernetes.
Another said the opposite.
One started with Python.
Another skipped it entirely.
I kept searching for the version that would finally make sense.
What I found instead was more confusion.
At some point, I stopped and asked myself an honest question.
Was I actually learning anything?
The answer was no.
I was researching how to learn without doing any learning.
Collecting roadmaps as if they were going to do the learning for me.
That realisation was uncomfortable.
Because it meant the problem was not the roadmap.
It was what I expected the roadmap to do.
There are AWS concepts that took me weeks to understand.
There are things I thought I understood until I tried using them.
There are topics I ignored and had to come back to later.
None of that ever shows up on a roadmap.
The roadmap only shows the clean version of the story.
The finished version.
The version that makes sense after everything has already happened.
Roadmaps show what a field looks like when you zoom out.
They do not show what learning feels like when you are inside it.
I still visit roadmap.sh.
I still think roadmaps are useful.
But I no longer expect them to remove the messy part of learning.
This roadmap feels real to me.
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Top comments (13)
This is very realistic! You greatly emphasized that iterative learning with healthy breaks must be the actual roadmap.
I currently have 2 roadmaps which is basically one following a handbook and the other (roadmap.sh) as a checklist to verify along the way what I learnt :)
I really like that approach. Using roadmaps as a checklist instead of trying to follow them from top to bottom makes a lot of sense. I think that's probably the best way to use a roadmap.
Thank you for reading. 💖
Wow it was so good even design 😍💪🏻 let me follow you
Interesting
Thank you for reading. 💖
I am curious. Has a roadmap ever helped you, or did it make you feel more overwhelmed when you first saw it?
What is one topic you saw on a roadmap that made you think, "There is no way I am ever going to understand this"?
Did you follow a roadmap exactly, or did your learning end up taking a different path?
What is one thing you spent weeks avoiding on a roadmap, only to realize later it was not as scary as you thought?
Has a roadmap ever genuinely helped you, or did it mostly make you feel like there was more to learn?
I cannot be the only one who has downloaded multiple roadmaps and still felt confused.
How many roadmaps have you saved over the years?
One thing I did not include in the newsletter is how much time I spent looking for the "perfect" roadmap instead of just learning. Looking back, that probably slowed me down more than anything else.
The funny part is that every roadmap looks clean and organized. Real learning rarely feels that way.
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