{"id":296,"date":"2008-06-21T11:19:56","date_gmt":"2008-06-21T16:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/you-cant-know-it-all\/"},"modified":"2008-10-19T13:51:08","modified_gmt":"2008-10-19T18:51:08","slug":"you-cant-know-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/you-cant-know-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Nerds &#8211; you can&#8217;t know it all."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a professional nerd for many years now, and over that time I&#8217;ve learned to use many different technologies including 8-9 programming languages, a few operating systems and a whole bunch of frameworks, database programs etc &#8230; <\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8230; The sad truth<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Recently, I was challenged with some tech problem, and to be honest about it, I forgot the specific steps to solve it!!<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n<p>This always bothers me &#8211; when you forget how to do something you once knew so well. <\/p>\n<p>I am now resigned to the fact that I&#8217;ve probably forgotten more than I now remember. I guess there is only so much room in your brain ..?<\/p>\n<p><strong>You can&#8217;t know it all<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This brings me to my larger point: as a professional nerd, it is not realistic to think you will learn everything that is out there. There is simply too much and you have to pick your battles. <\/p>\n<p>That said, that doesn&#8217;t mean you should learn one or two things and then just rest on your laurels. No, you have to keep learning otherwise you will fall behind and you won&#8217;t stay competitive. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Focus on your specialty<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It is wise to decide where you want to go in your nerd career, and then focus in that area. <\/p>\n<p>For instance, if you want to be a web designer (I&#8217;m talking design centric stuff) you should learn all that you can about the front-end of web design:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>HTML<\/li>\n<li>CSS<\/li>\n<li>Basic design principles<\/li>\n<li>A touch of PHP &#8230; just a touch!<\/li>\n<li>Javascript<\/li>\n<li>Maybe some Flash<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You probably shouldn&#8217;t be so concerned about learning how to set up Apache or how to configure a Linux server. These skills may come in handy once in a while, but these really are the skills that system administrators should worry about.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Play to your strengths<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Just because you like something, or are attracted to it, it doesn&#8217;t mean you will be any good at it! <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Although sometimes, what you like is often what you will be good at.<\/p>\n<p>What works out for me, is to forget about the things I suck at and instead, concentrate on my talents. <\/p>\n<p>I (for example) am at best a moderate designer. Sure, I can build a professional looking website, but it ain&#8217;t going to win any awards! Instead, I rely on the skills of the truly talented web designers (using web templates or simply hire them) and then concentrate on those things that I can do pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n<p>www.killersites.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a professional nerd for many years now, and over that time I&#8217;ve learned to use many different technologies including 8-9 programming languages, a few operating systems and a whole bunch of frameworks, database programs etc &#8230; &#8230; The sad truth Recently, I was challenged with some tech problem, and to be honest about &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,103,40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}