Let me say this; I’ve been enjoying my current journey!
I’m happy that I can wake up everyday and feel excited about building web-pages.
With that being said, I want to be realistic about what I should study and how much time I should dedicate to studying. I’ve learned that it’s important to at least understand fundamentals and learn how to research concepts you don’t fully understand. However, my issues is that I feel like I don’t know enough. There’s so much synthax you have to learn in html, css and js. Gitbash and Github is still frustrating to learn, too, because you have to deal with a lot of trial-and-error.
I’ve heard that it’s unreasonable to expect a developer to remember everything, but I still feel like I have to learn so much more. It also doesn’t help that job posting would post unrealistic qualifications for those looking to get hired. It makes newbies like me wonder what technologies we have to study in order to add to our resumes.
Realistically, how much should a developer know off the bat once they land their first job, and what material can a developer research on the job? The last thing I want do is burnout from studying too much.
That is a really hard question to answer, as it will be different for each person and each job.
I would focus on having a good conceptual understanding of programming and the area you want to work in. You can search for details, but you need a big picture to help you contextualize the information and to know what to search for in the first place.
As Jeremy said, there isn’t a straightforward answer to your question.
When the subject of “how much should I know by heart” question comes up, I use mathematics as an analogy. Math was hard to learn. Back in our primary school days we had to count on our fingers, refer to multiplication tables, use physical objects to work out arithmetic problems. Now, simple arithmetic is so much a part of our daily lives that we don’t even notice how often we add, subtract, multiply, divide. Then there came algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. Those subjects were hard to learn because they were more abstract and complex. Once we learned the core concepts though, individual formulae were fairly straightforward to use. Depending on what we do, some of those may still be easy to access in our memory, but most of them we’ve forgotten. I doubt I could recite the Quadratic Equation if you put a gun to my head, but a couple seconds with Google and I could find it and use it without problem. If you ever took higher level math classes that let you take a notecard of formulas into an exam, that’s more or less like using documentation for quick reference while you’re developing.
I’m pretty sure that every JavaScript developer googles “slice vs splice” every time, even if it’s just to double-check that they remember which is which. The key is that what we are looking up isn’t really disrupting our workflow.
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Okay, I understand! Thank you!