You're listening to the Call Kent podcast where Kent C. Dodds answers questions and gives insights to software engineers like you. Now let's hear the call.

Hi, Kent. Thank you for opening up the calls. I really appreciate this opportunity where, we can get answer and connect with you. I wanted to share a bit of background so my question would make sense. I started learning programming around two years ago and built a solid foundation in full stack concepts.

But when the AI space started to boom, I found an opportunity to build a career around it. I I realized I was good at this kind of work, and my technical foundation helped me grow it into a stable role. Most of what I do now involves production automations, integrations, APIs, workflows, and AI driven systems for business use. I generally enjoy the work, and it has given me financial stability in the process. At the same time, I have always wanted to become a full stack software engineer, and I do not want to abandon that goal.

The challenge is that after sidetracking, I feel unsure where to restart in a realistic way. I do find your courses helpful, and I understand that Epic Web is intentionally deep. But given the gap, I sometimes feel stuck before I even start. I find myself wondering whether I should I should already know TypeScript or learn React first. I understand core concepts, but but it's but it sometimes feels like I'm missing prerequisites, which creates this feeling of needing to prepare before preparing.

So my questions are, how do you suggest identifying what is truly required upfront versus what can be learned along the way? And I believe that there's strong overlap between the work I do now and the kind of software engineer I want to become. So do you have any suggestion on how to use your course in a way that builds on that overlap instead of treating this like a full reset? And finally, what advice would you give to people who found stability in their careers but still want to pursue a long term engineering goal without making reckless moves or losing what they already built? Thank you so much for your time, and I really appreciate any guidance you can share.

Thank you.

And that was the call. Here's what Kent had to say.

Hey, Jafet. Thank you for the question. That's very insightful and thoughtful question. And I wanna do, yeah, just do the best I can to answer. It's a, kind of a tough one.

So, I think, ultimately, goal is to or or you need to think about what your ultimate goal is in becoming a full stack engineer, working at a company, building a product or whatever the case may be, and then you work backward from there to identify the things that you need to learn. There is a prerequisite, like specifically for my course, I do have prerequisites on each individual workshop and even on the there's a frequently asked questions. I'll link that to you for that. But more generally, am I ready to learn this thing or accomplish this thing or whatever? I think that the best way to know that is to jump in and do it.

And sometimes, most of the time, the level of commitment is not so large that if you are in over your head, it's not a big deal. That really takes the pressure off. So if this is just a side project and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna build this thing, and then it turns out to be a little bit more than you bargained for, then it's not a big deal. Sometimes though, you make commitments, you get a job or you buy a course or you commit to speak at an event on a topic that is new to you. And now you're kind of under the gun to really just make it work.

And I'm not here to tell you to not make those commitments. In fact, so much of the things that I have been able to accomplish in my career are because I make commitments like that. And sometimes I pay for that by having to work a lot to make sure I can keep that commitment and do the very best that I can. So it's not always super. Yeah, you're gonna this is just a thing that you're going to have to deal with if you want to be a lifelong learner and high performer who is constantly accumulating new skills and knowledge, which I think is really critical for people in our industry.

And that you're going to have to just take a bit of a leap of faith. And once you get to a point where you're like, Ah, this is a little bit more than I'm ready for, that's when you stop and you go acquire the knowledge that you need to get to that point. And yeah, sure, it would be nice if you could know ahead of time what all of that knowledge would be And that's why I put in the frequently asked questions for my courses specifically, but you don't always get that. And sometimes it's just a bit of a leap of faith. And of course, sometimes you might make a commitment, you'd say, I'm gonna build this app for you for X number of dollars or whatever, and then you find out that you can't.

That's a lot harder situation. I've never been in that situation myself. I've always been able to figure it out and and keep the commitment that I made. But yeah. So you you wanna be careful when it comes down to money in particular.

You don't wanna commit on something that you really aren't sure you can do as far as that's concerned. But for most everything else, I think that jumping into something that you don't really have the prerequisite knowledge for is not terrible because you can kind of get that feeling, that sense that, oh, I'm not really ready for this. And the nice thing about that is now you kind of have a little bit of exposure to what the next level is and that can help you in your current level and at least acquiring the knowledge that you need for your current level. I really like to work backwards from, okay, ultimate goal is to be a tech lead at this company or whatever. What are the things that those people are doing?

Okay, what do I need to learn to be able to do those things? And how do I need What do I need to learn to be able to do those things? And then you just start from the beginning. And actually, I am kind of working my way backwards. In the next couple months, I'm going to be working on beginner TypeScript material to teach people all about the basics of programming.

Yes, know that's shocking in the day of AI where everybody's saying you don't need to know how to program, but I do think that there will actually be a lot of people who will really benefit from this. So anyway, I think that it's useful to work backwards. Hopefully that answers your questions, helps you a little bit. I think that, yeah, I agree with you. I think that a lot of your past experience is very applicable to the full stack engineering space.

And then on top of that, I would recommend that you get really good at using AI assistance to help you and get comfortable asking questions. And if there's something that you don't understand about the code that it generated, ask a question about it and, try to get a solid understanding. We've got these tutors who just can't get enough of us. It's amazing. So anyway, hopefully that's helpful.

I will leave a couple links in the notes for this episode. Thank you very much, and have a nice day.

This has been the Call Kent podcast. Learn more about Kent at kentcdodds.com and get your own questions answered at kentcdodds.com/calls.