Prioritize Technical Breadth over Depth

Check out this graphic. For every developer, there's a choice between technical depth and technical breadth.

Adapted from Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Mark Richards & Neal Ford (O'Reilly, 2020), Chapter 2.

If you're a junior dev, my advice is clear -- choose technical breadth. Why? Two main reasons.

1. Things are changing too fast. A 6-month-old GitHub repo with tens of thousands of stars can get archived in an instant (proof here).

2. As a junior, you don't know enough stuff to make an informed decision about "that one thing" you should focus on.

So, think of your learning as a pyramid -- instead of digging holes in the yellow area (increasing your technical depth), you increase the area of yellow stuff -- you do it by moving the line between the yellow and red areas down. That's your knowledge getting broader.

You may feel that you don't really know anything that way -- that's fine. Remember Socrates? "I know that I know nothing." That should be you -- know nothing about as many things as you possibly can.