I’m working as a programmer since 1 year and a half, but lately the more i try to understand the more i get confused by the load of things there are and i question myself “why all of these? How can i improve knowing i’ll never use these things on my own projects?”.

In this 1,5 year i worked in two companies: -one used old school programming: html+css+js+php all in the same file, no versioning, programming in production, no IDE and the client was at european level -the second was hyper modern: python django+vue+hg+ide+ci/cd+super abstraction+proprietary models+docker+staging/prod and different servers

The first one was hard because it was difficult to find what to do and where, lost in 3/4k rows of files with everything mixed together.

But the second one is even harder because the abstraction level is so high that there is a model that does what you must do, but it’s hidden somewhere in a combination of hundreds of imports and files everywhere and if you don’t know these proprietary models you’ll never understand what they do.

And this means zero creativity, everything is so abstract that even the smallest fix requires many steps of integration and you may miss something in the process..

So i’m here spending hours or even days to try to understand the flow, knowing that outside the work i cannot study these things and while i’m at work these things may be upgraded.. so everytime i program i feel like i’m moving super slowly, even the smallest fix requires hours and hours and without the certainity to do that right..

What should i do? Thanks