#58 Shortcuts are good as long as they work

Most of us don’t know how auth works exactly. We have a rough idea and more than often, code samples we found in the docs help us through our work.

The same goes for regex or anything else that you don’t quite understand but use in your job. As long as things work, there is no need to dig deeper and waste time understanding how it works. It works and you move on to the next task. Until it doesn’t.

This applies not only to the code samples you look up on the internet but also tools you use, libraries, SDKs, everything that abstracts away how things work internally.

When the shortcut you’ve taken stops working, you end up frustrated. You feel stuck and helpless. And now you have two options. Will you go looking for another shortcut or will you invest the time to truly understand how things work?

Using shortcuts is not bad. But shortcuts are no excuse to not learn.

What shortcuts do you use? What will you learn next?

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash