A year and a half ago I finished a program in Multimedia Design and Web Development at Humber College (in Toronto). My choice to pursue design and development came as a surprise to a lot of people. In university I studied comparative religion and environmental studies and focussed on fringe religious groups and environmental issues. I had the pleasure of learning about mystical yogi’s, mindfulness meditation, Kabbalah, the state of the food system, urban agriculture, and food security.

After four long years I had spent all my time learning about things but had no idea how to actually do anything.

It’s one thing to learn about yoga, but it’s another to move your body and pay attention to your breath. Sure, I learned a ton about farming, but I had almost no experience taking care of plants. I had spent time learning about tools instead of how to use them.

At the end of my degree I went on a long road trip and had some very convincing discussions with a friend of mine (who is in love with Bitcoin and Python), and decided it was time to acquire some hard skills. I wanted to be able to build something and I wanted to be gainfully employed, so I decided to learn how to code.

Setting off on my journey I quickly fell into the trap of learning about code and learning about the internet. I started listening to podcasts about web design and development, I started talking about the internet all the time, but at the end of the day I was putting off the part where you actually have to do write some lines of code. Being in a college program for the year forced me to complete projects and actually build things.

At the end of the year I was capable of writing HTML and CSS and felt pretty good about my abilities as a designer. That summer (after many, many interviews) I landed a job as a junior front end dev at a startup called ThinkData Works. I’ve been working there since.

It’s all about the tools

The problem with college programs in web development is that the wheels of bureaucracy turn too slowly to keep up with the tools. The computer labs were on lockdown so we were never allowed to install SCSS, Grunt, or even Git. We learned vanilla HTML and CSS and had to make sure we did a lot of saving. The rest of the industry was ‘npm installing’ out the wazoo but we weren’t able to use the tools that were available — the tools that are absolutely essential.

Like any new area of exploration there is a pretty steep learning curve and a long list of important acronyms to figure out (eg. HTML, CSS, JS, DOM, HTTP, SSL, SDK, API, SASS, SaaS, SCSS, MAMP, LAMP, MEAN, NPM, OY GEVALT). Overtime, the acronyms begin to make sense and you can learn which tool is for what. You’ll also realize that for every tool there is an equally viable alternative that is the talk of the town (eg. Grunt vs. Gulp, SASS vs. LESS).

It’s important to realize that collecting tools doesn’t make you the best at anything aside from collecting tools.

When you start hanging out with developers (either in real life or via podcasts) you quickly realize that to be a great developer means you have to have a handle on all the tools. You have to know about them, you have to talk about them, you have to keep an eye on them, you have to evaluate them and form opinions about them. Most importantly, YOU HAVE TO USE THEM.

The open source community is built on the principle that sharing tools will eventually make all the tools better. Sharing tools for the sake of more powerful tooling is a beautifully human idea and part of why the industry is full of such kind people. It’s hard to be a developer without taking advantage of free software that someone else built so that you could be better at your job.

But let’s stay focussed!

It’s easy to get distracted by all the shiny tools. iPads, iPods, iCloud, iMac iPhone, Android this, Android that, let’s use Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, inDesign, outDesign, Python, Ruby, SkyFonts, Google Fonts, Sublime, Atom, GitHub, Bitbucket, Grunt, Gulp, Bootstrap, Foundation. But at the end of the day the tools are for accomplishing something, for building something, for doing something that needs doing.

It’s important to remember that we don’t need to learn how to use every tool — we just have to use the ones that we need. Good luck trying to use a hammer like a screwdriver. The tools exist to help us achieve our goals, to help us delight each other, to help us change the world, and to help us make the tools we have — better at being tools.

I find it easy to get caught up in all the tooling. But hey, maybe there’s a tool for that too.