In the course of your career as a software developer, you will be faced with a multitude of challenges and problems that will all require new and various skills or software to solve, and very often you won’t have the required skill set to solve it immediately. I’m quite sure most of us at one point or another have been told by someone that you will just ‘figure it out…’ and no doubt you have greeted that response with mild frustration like I have many times before.

As non-helpful a saying as that is, there is also a lot of truth behind it as well. It is all well and good to watch tutorial videos and do courses to learn a new skill set but until you actually get your hands on the problem and practice said skill, you will only ever be ‘observing’ it and not truly understanding it.

Sometimes diving straight into a new skill set with no prior instruction is the best teacher of all. I learnt that myself by having to very quickly lean how to use Azure Logic Apps and make it suit my needs. I am still learning how to use it and each time I go back, I learn something new that makes me want to go back to older projects and make adjustments.

By having to ‘figure it out’ as I went, I was forced to play and tinker with the program a hundred different ways and near enough investigate every aspect of the program to make sure it would help me achieve my goal. If I am perfectly honest, I believe I learnt more from ‘just figuring it out’ than if I were to do a proper course or watch an hour long video on YouTube of someone else explaining it all to me.

Now I am not saying that those options are not good, but by doing the digging yourself, you are able to really get deep into it and understand it in a way you never could otherwise. So sometimes the best option when faced with a new challenge is to just kick off your shoes and just dive right in and hope you float! You will learn and understand what it is you are building so much more than if you were to just copy someone elses’ work.