Early on in my career as a developer, I overestimated the value of knowing things and underestimated the value of practice.
I would download and save assets, bookmark libraries, save articles and tutorials. Anything that could help me with doing a better job.
I thought I was being resourceful, but I think it came from a place of fear. I wasn’t confident in my skills and would collect anything that might help compensate for that. I don’t think it did.
I don’t remember a single time when was able to solve a problem at work by digging into my collection of resources.
What did help was building things and getting more practice under my belt. Every time I solved a new problem, it gave me a mental model to approach a category of similar problems. (See also: pattern matching)
The more I practiced, the better I got at pattern matching. And more importantly, I grew more confident in my ability to solve new problems that I haven’t come across yet.
Now with a few years under my belt, I’ve declared bankruptcy on my reading list and open tabs. I still read a lot, I just don’t read an article that isn’t relevant to the work I’m doing right now, and I most definitely don’t save it for later.
Know less, do more.
Further reading:
This is backed by science! Consuming a bunch of unrelated resources slows down the learning process. Inversely, only allowing your brain access to the same concept in different forms makes useful connections. Read more: Neurons that fire together, wire together.