The zone

There is good news though; if a student persists through the twilight zone of learning they will enter The Zone of the developer learning curve:

This zone is entered usually after around 1,000 hours of study and work. During this stage, developers have a wide range of features they can build without having to look up the documentation.

In this stage, when you visit Stack Overflow you'll be answering as many questions as you ask. And thankfully, learning new concepts will come easier. The reason why learning is easier at this stage is because you will have developed a mental model of development.

For example, I recently started working with the Scala programming language. I've been able to pick up on how to build applications in Scala dramatically faster than when I started learning C or PHP a decade ago. This is because I have a decade of knowledge in the development space that allows me to frame the new concepts. When I read the documentation and see what it says about data types, I don't have to wonder what a data type is. Instead I can skip ahead to learning the syntax.

As you'll notice in the developer learning curve, the growth pattern in this phase is less than the other two stages. As you've heard me say countless times, learning never ends for developers. However, learning does change. During this phase, a developer focuses on learning topics such as:

• Incremental performance improvements
• Building helper code libraries
• Refining how application code flows