Easy Is The New Difficult

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When you start in tech, there’s this unspoken hierarchy of skills. Some are seen as “real” skills; programming languages, advanced frameworks, cloud architectures.

Others are dismissed as “easy.”

And here’s the dangerous part: you’ll be told to skip the easy stuff.

That happened to me when I started. And it is starting to happen to me now. I am learning CI/CD at work with Github Actions and people are telling me to skip reading and learning YAML. YAML, the basic building block of building workflows and yet people are telling me its “easy” and you will pick it up as you go along.

The thing is I don’t want to stumble my way into learning such an important skill just because it’s easy. I want to actually make a plan to learn the in and outs because it is a foundational skill.

But here’s the truth: just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should abandon it Skipping foundational skills is like building a skyscraper without bothering to pour concrete for the base. Sure, you might get a few floors up, but the whole thing will collapse under pressure.

The “easy” skills are deceptive. They’re not just syntax or buzz words. They’re where you learn how the ecosystem works. They’re where you start to understand patterns, logic, and the cause-and-effect relationships you’ll depend on later.

HTML taught me structure. CSS taught me adaptability. Those lessons carried over into JavaScript, even when I didn’t realize it. And learning YAML will offer me the same discipline.

If I had skipped them, I wouldn’t have just missed out on learning, I would have missed the context that made the harder concepts click.

So next time someone tells you to skip ahead, ask yourself:
Do I want to look like I know what I’m doing, or actually know what I’m doing?

The “easy” stuff is where you quietly become dangerous.

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