Foundations are everything.
At my gym ( Carlson Gracie London ) you are free to take any class you want at any level. Even if you are a white belt, brand new, you can hit Wilson Juniors intermediate class on on a Thursday night. Its gonna be fast and you’re gonna get thrown around by some blue belts, but its an open invitation and no one is turned away. Your belt colour doesn’t restrict you to a particular timetable or class.
Its recommended that you attend the beginners classes, because there you are going to learn the foundations of Jiu Jitsu, but it shouldn’t stop you from going to as many classes as possible and learning from the wider array of instructors and fellow team mates as possible. Don’t restrict yourself to just the 2 classes per week, but you should always try to get one in at least. As you progress and strip yourself of that white belt, you will find yourself in more and more of the advanced classes and your performance there will be down to the time you spent working on the foundations.
I’ve spent over a year attending the beginners class and for the most part its the EXACT same class every week. Sure, a few differences are thrown in here and there, but its generally the same. Over that year I’ve drilled the same guard pass maybe a few hundred times and now its just second nature, a simple pass that I can always try. I’ve drilled it so much its my default go-to when everything else is failing. Try, Fail, Reset, Try again.
As Developers we need to do this more. Over and over again I get the chance to meet new developers or to someone who is just trying out a bit of coding and they start telling me about React and Vue, oh how great they are, and over and over again I tell them that, whilst it’s great that they are excited about making things and learning to code, it’s important that they start thinking about learning the bits behind the framework too, in these cases, Javascript.
Im not saying “DONT USE REACT” or “VUE IS GARBAGE”, What I am saying is that these tools are great, scrap that, they are fantastic. They give us a lot of things out of the box so that we can build better things, faster and with less overhead, so that we can think about the bigger picture rather than faffing around with YABS ( Yet Another Build Script ). However, once in a while, write a little bit of un-frameworked JavaScript ( AKA Vanilla JS — so tasty). It really helps when you are debugging a problem that no one on Stack Overflow has the answer for.
Foundations are everything.
Foundations will help you find a way out when it seems like you’re stuck somewhere too long.
Foundations will help you remain calm in a high-pressure situation.
You need foundations in order to build something that will last for a long time. Its great to use something new and a lot of the time the new things that you learn will drive you forward, re-ignite the passion and help you re-discover something that excites you, but its great to once in a while have something to lean back on when the new thing doesn’t quiet live up to the hype.
Being stuck on a problem is a little bit like being stuck in side-control and not knowing where to go or how to progress. Its moments like this when you can go back to the basics. Break down the problem into its most basic components and find a way to move forward and if you really can’t find a way to progress, then take a step back to a place where you are comfortable. In engineering this can be anything from explaining the problem to a colleague or maybe a rubber duck, to just walking through the problem from the beginning in as small steps as possible.
This is by no-means saying that you have to start at the beginning, that you can’t learn something like React or Express or anything else before you learn the basics — hell, for many years my JavaScript knowledge was pretty much tied up in jQuery and I managed to get by for a pretty long time before even having to know what it did under the hood, but it wasn’t until I started learning some basics of JavaScript that I really felt like I began to grow as a programmer and slowly started moving away from always using “*-by-default’ and more into a realm of ‘*-when-needed”. As I started learning more and more about the foundations of JavaScript, I got a little more confident and began taking on new programming languages such as Ruby and Python and again, by picking up some of the foundations early on, I was able to accelerate my understanding of these.
If you are new to programming, maybe you’re looking at some framework or tool that is helping you move quickly, and that’s great — don’t be discouraged with how fast things seem to move. Don’t look at other developers around you that seem to be doing better or moving faster and think that you have to keep up with them. Don’t feel like you’re falling behind the curve because you have nothing to write in the Hacker News comments section about some new framework because on the surface of it, it just seems to be the same as the other two that we released last week. Don’t be afraid to ask what tree-shaking is. Focus on you and your development. You will soon be the person that new developers look at and feel the same way as you did.
My book — “Armbars are for suckers : A developers tale” is never coming out because I just made it up…but it sounded cool.
