How The Best Software Engineers Learn A Tech Stack - The Lego Model

• "The Lego Model" is a way to view the world and understand your learning journey as a software engineer.
  • Technical components (e.g. rendering a list of items) are the individual legos
  • Complete products (e.g. a food delivery app) are the full lego creations
• There are 3 axes to evaluate your legos:
  • Quantity: How many you have
  • Quality: How good and sturdy your legos are
  • Commonality: How "in demand" your legos are (i.e. how many creations they can fit into)
• Most earlier-in-career engineers understand the 1st axis of quantity and incorrectly spend a lot of time learning different tech stacks and frameworks.
• Those same engineers often don't even realize the 2nd and 3rd axes exist:
  • When they learn a component, they will build it out with very low quality.
  • They will learn "flashier" components that aren't even used by most products/companies.

For examples on how to excel at the 2nd and 3rd axes, check out the related resources below!

Related resources:

• [Masterclass] How To Learn Quickly In Tech - The full video this clip came from
• This Is How Software Engineers Should Initially Learn
• Building Software For Optimal Learning Example - Login Flow