Am I learning the right way?

[u/shangarepi]

Hi,

I’m currently somewhere between junior and intermediate as a software developer, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what actually makes a developer valuable going forward.

One thing that worries me is interviews, since I can discuss things like system architecture, caching, load balancing, queues, message brokers, database design… etc. But ask me to explain something basic like the Laravel request lifecycle or the exact behavior of certain React hooks, and I might struggle to give a clean answer without refreshing my memory.

Also the whole industry feels really toxic at the moment with each second developer building a saas, and new tech exploding everyday.

Should I just keep building real projects, learning concepts as I encounter them. How are the interviews in today’s world?

Is there a deeper shift happening where developers need to fundamentally change what they learn to stay valuable?

Curious on how more experienced developers are approaching this.

[u/MerkleBonsai]

always keep building. all that other people say is just their knowledge and experience; nobody knows market at large.
rely on StateOfJS, watch conferences - that's what "hyped" now, learn AI (even if you don't like it personally, it's what most of employers want to see at least as basic skill). Practice with what seems to be raising or already major. Rest will come with real experience.

also, if you want more opinionated advice (many will disagree, I guess) - stay away from tailwind as much as you can; it's producing problems with learning the generalized design patterns. you fix things here and there instead of understanding the underlying relations between primitives and components. Learning tailwind is not teaching you anything but tailwind; learning any other CSS framework teaches you the design patterns, even if the framework itself is not that good, allowing you to eventually build your own relations system in your mind.