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Discussion on: You DON'T need these to be a web dev

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Nitzan Hen

A fair point!
Foundations are super important, and especially web development - where so many technologies eventually boil down to abstractions over JS, HTML and CSS - it's critical to have a firm grasp of them.
I think the event loop in Node.js is another good example for this: you could get around without understanding it for a while, but eventually you'll come across a bug that you simply cannot figure out without it (and not knowing what's causing the bug would make fixing it much much more difficult!)

In retrospect, perhaps it was better if I'd explicitly said this somewhere in the post itself. On the other hand, the importance of foundations deserves a whole piece of its own, so I might just do that! 😂

As for your last point, you're completely correct, and I'd like to add that it also applies for some of the most popular tools out there - some of them are so popular that devs learn them (and, in turn, use them) without the understanding of why (and when) they are important. And typically they are important, but it's just as important to know why and when!