On Learning Only What You Need
Last week, Stackery’s CTO Chase wrote about why you should stop YAML engineering, and I completely agree with his thesis, though for slightly different reasons. As a new developer, I’ve grasped that it’s crucial to learn just what you need and nothing more — at least when you’re just getting started in your career.
Now, I’m all about learning for learning’s sake — I have two now-useless liberal arts degrees that prove that. However, when it comes to starting out as a developer, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by all of the languages and frameworks out there, and get caught in paralysis as you jump from tutorial to tutorial and end up not learning anything very well. I’ve certainly been there — and then I decided to just get good at the tools I’m actually using for work, and learn everything else as I need it.
Which is what brings us to YAML — short for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language” (har har, YAML team, har har). I started out as a Python developer. When I needed to, I learned JavaScript. When my JavaScript needed some support, I learned a couple of front-end frameworks, and as much Node.js as I needed to write and understand what my serverless functions were doing. As I got deeper into serverless architecture, it seemed like learning YAML was the next step — but if it didn’t have to be, why learn it? If I didn’t have to pour through pages of (often outdated and overly confusing) AWS docs to learn how to optimize my permissions and configure my template.yaml file, could I spend that time on developing actual features?
If I can produce 200+ lines of working YAML without actually writing a single line of it, in much less time than it would take me to write it myself (not counting the hours it would take to learn a new markup language), then that seems like the obvious solution.
So if a tool allows me to develop serverless apps without having to learn YAML, I’m all for that. Luckily, that’s exactly what Stackery does — allowing me to learn to do things that are a lot more fun than learning YAML, such as making the video below:
