“When completing a challenge, it’s easy to go on to the next, then the next, and then the next one after that.”

Good point. Also good points about practicing in Codepen.

My pride led me to blast through the challenges (I have years of previous infrastructure and systems programming experience), and I am now having to go through lots of other material to catch up to where I am in FCC (almost to the end of the intermediate JS algorithm scripting). I had to stop and dig deeper into the HTML and CSS (especially CSS!). I was trying to build my tribute and portfolio pages and falling over my non-understanding of Bootstrap and CSS and feeling stupid about it. I backtracked and have taken time to study them, and now am almost ready to dive back in. Knowing a bit about CSS helps to understand when Bootstrap doesn’t do what you expect it to, and to understand that page design has a different workflow to it than programming — there are similarities, but some things are vastly different.

There are a great many other benefits to knowing the underlying languages to the frameworks. Going from one career to a different one requires looking at it as a lifestyle change. A career in technology requires research, study and constant practice just to keep up and extra push (learning new languages, new technologies, etc.) to get on top.