Go deep to go high
You need to build a foundation. An overused analogy if you ask me, yet somehow overwhelmingly relevant in almost all aspects of life. I listened to an anecdote the other day about a gentleman who was watching contractors install a new fence in his backyard. They went many feet down into the ground to install a 6' fence post. This is because without a sturdy foundation for the fence post to be grounded in, the fence itself would not be stable.
This is true with literally anything you try to do. Before you spend money on a gym membership, do pushups and pullups at a local park. If that’s hard for you, there’s really no point in going to a gym. Do that for a month, and once you can do 200 pushups and 50 pullups with no problem, then go get that gym membership. Having trouble building a full stack Next.js app? That’s because Next makes use of 100 different technologies, and if you’re not familiar with how the internet works, it’s all going to seem very complicated. Imagine if they just placed the 6-foot fence post two inches in the ground? It would fall over as soon as other fence links were added to it.
You don’t see the foundation when walking by. You don’t know that the fence post goes two feet into the ground. You don’t know all the work that went into that entrepreneur’s journey. You don’t know how long that programmer spent learning about the internet before he was able to launch that web app. All we see is the 6-foot fence post, not the foundation below it. But the foundation below it is what makes it all possible.
The foundation isn’t the sexy part. Oftentimes, it’s not even the part that people see and comment on. But it is the part that matters the most. Without it, nothing else can stand. So start at the bottom, start learning HTML, CSS, and JS because that’s what the web was built on. Set up an HTML web server, understand a basic POST and GET request. Get a feel for developing software that is actually your own before you build off of what everyone else does. Abstractions make sense, but only if you know why you are using them.
The work you do in the shadows will prepare you for your time in the light. So lean into the shadows, learn to be comfortable there. That way, when your creations finally reach the light, you're not left with an ugly lopsided fence that's destined to fall over.