Keep at it. There’s plenty of stuff that I learned that never had any practical applications, but the handful of things that did have been very valuable.
Real world example: I was building an app for myself to scrape some websites and Twitter to aggregate stuff I might be interested in. I had built an MVP that I wanted to get up and running on a web host somewhere so that I could let it run for a bit and then iterate. I was annoyed though, because while I was comfortable setting up servers, I hated all of the repetitive tasks involved in getting everything set up the way it needed to be. I’d tried writing shell scripts, but as anyone who’s tried that can attest, they are fragile and end up being almost as frustrating as doing it by hand. I’d heard about this thing called Chef that people in the Ruby community had great things to say about, so I set out to learn that so I could use it to set up servers for me (and my local Vagrant setup). Long story short-ish: I never did get my app deployed to a server, it’s still sitting on my hard drive almost 10 years later. But my Chef skills turned into a bit of moonlighting to bring in some extra money, and then ultimately let me make a career change and get out of a job that had become toxic. I don’t do Chef any more, but I’m still in a job I enjoy and I make a lot more money than I did.
I’m still going to get back to that app though. One of these days.
Real world example: I was building an app for myself to scrape some websites and Twitter to aggregate stuff I might be interested in. I had built an MVP that I wanted to get up and running on a web host somewhere so that I could let it run for a bit and then iterate. I was annoyed though, because while I was comfortable setting up servers, I hated all of the repetitive tasks involved in getting everything set up the way it needed to be. I’d tried writing shell scripts, but as anyone who’s tried that can attest, they are fragile and end up being almost as frustrating as doing it by hand. I’d heard about this thing called Chef that people in the Ruby community had great things to say about, so I set out to learn that so I could use it to set up servers for me (and my local Vagrant setup). Long story short-ish: I never did get my app deployed to a server, it’s still sitting on my hard drive almost 10 years later. But my Chef skills turned into a bit of moonlighting to bring in some extra money, and then ultimately let me make a career change and get out of a job that had become toxic. I don’t do Chef any more, but I’m still in a job I enjoy and I make a lot more money than I did.
I’m still going to get back to that app though. One of these days.