It's slurry season here in Northern Ireland.
That means that farmers, up and down the country, are busy fertilising their lush green fields with a fresh layer of pungent animal waste - sheep and cow manure, or shite as it is more commonly known.
In the village I live, it's about as welcome as punch in the nuts. It stinks out the place, and hangs in the air for days like a undercover fart.
In my fledgling software development career, I've been exposed to some toxic fumes, namely on YouTube, my platform of choice for learning new coding concepts.
What with the coronavirus 'pandemic' (airquotes intentional), many YouTubers are peddling courses to the unemployed masses at breakneck speed, suggesting that you can learn software development in a matter of months, if not weeks.
I worked in sales and marketing for years, and these claims aren't just false. Like the slurry, they can be toxic and downright dangerous if you get too close. There's no hope like false hope.
My formal education in software development was a year-long full-stack software developer certification which barely scratched the surface. I'm learning more outside of that course, than I did in it. The rabbit hole goes pretty damn deep.
Learning requires hard work, discipline and ass-numbing levels of patience.
You won't get that education in four weeks. Even if you did commit 12 hours a day to learning the concepts, it isn't going to stick.
The cold hard truth is this.
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right. That takes time. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Enough of the shit talk.