If you don't like it, don't upvote. Some of us here have lives outside of your little box.

Cool.

Hey Weston. Like you I've been with DN since the very beginning and know what sort of community this is. I guess I figured that I wanted to see more variety here on DN.

There are all sorts of "design" and we've hyper focused on just one type. I think that "generalized" designers are better designers. We should poke pixels, but we should also paint and sculpt, program, be woodworkers, learn to weld, etc. It makes us more interesting people and I think that is part of growing as an individual.

Thanks for checking the article out. I appreciated it!

Agreed. There is definitely an iterative element that goes:

1. Don't know.
2. Find out what you don't know.
3. Try to implement goto 1.

That defines general learning curves until you have cherry-picked all the low hanging fruits of "don't know" and reach a place where mostly you know and succeed at #3.

Sorry, I had meant to delete the direct link to youtube. My mistake.

So this is something that I think about a lot, actually.

I'm probably in the "older" category already here on DN, at 38. You whippersnappers can take heed.

I started as a computer technician and QA engineer at 16, way back in 1996. That evolved to web design and graphic design during the first dot-com boom when they were desperate for people and would literally hire anyone. I spent a decade doing design and drifted more and more towards doing UX before finally giving that up almost entirely and diving headlong into development (Drupal, PHP, JS, Ruby, etc.)

During the past two decades I've also taught myself oil painting, car mechanics, woodworking (I wrote about this at length recently here), welding, and the culinary arts.

I think that self-learning is about two things: Immersion and Asking Questions.

Immersion

When I start learning something I just dive into and it becomes my world. I read everything I can on it. I watch videos, and I listen to lectures. I find podcasts. It fills up my time (well, whatever working and being a partner and parent leaves) completely. I found that what this process is actually doing is filling my head with all sorts of "component details" and "category specific vocabulary" which I need to know to be able to grok the topic I'm trying to learn. This was especially true for development and for woodworking because they are these esoteric fields which are so broad and so complex that without some sort of context it is easy to get lost in them.

Asking Questions

Being capable of formulating questions and finding answers is really about breaking ideas down into parts and finding the right place to get the knowledge to fill in the gaps. Often this is simply google. When it isn't, it can be specialty forums (reddit is great for this as they literally have a subreddit for everything under the sun) and old-style forums on the internet. Some knowledge is physical and you have to have someone show you. Welding is like this, in that you can watch videos and read manuals, but without a knowledgeable hand guiding you it will be a painful journey (seriously, get someone to show you).

Thanks for asking this question. I liked answering it.

Gardening has also been a great release for me. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for sharing your journey. I'm glad that you found something that fills the hole. I know that when kids are little it can turn your life into a mad rush which can be stressful and unfulfilling. It gets easier as the years tick by, but sometimes something inside is lost in the transition.

Alcohol itself was part of my problem in a physical sense: it alters your brain chemistry and in my case was part of the cause of the deep depressions that I was experiencing.

I very much agree with you that the feeling of sharing what you make is thrilling though. I wish you and your family the best!

Absolutely. Unless you are getting enormous amounts of traffic, which the vast majority of sites do not, then what you should be optimizing is different. I would say focusing on doing split traffic tests, focused on layouts and optimizing for flow is waaaaay more important than shaving 0.25s off your loading time.

I love that I can just scroll through. Don't make me work and click stuff. Let me be lazy. I love it.