Build for Mastery

I graduated from the University of Lethbridge, back in 2017, with a degree, a laptop, and a lot of ambition. What followed was years of grinding.

Learning at work. Udemy courses. YouTube videos. Books. Reading endless software documentation that nobody told you to read. Anything I could get my hands on. Continuous learning was not optional. Nobody wants to be left in the dust.

Vue and React were making lots of noise. Laravel was having its moment. I spent the better part of 2018 learning that framework inside and out.

You don't just use the tools. You understand them. You take apart the engine and put it back together, just to see how it all works together. Maybe you try to make it better.

As a young developer, you kind of walk around with this quiet confidence that you can do everything faster, cleaner, smarter... You see older code and think, "WTF is this? I could rebuild this better."

I also spent years in legacy codebases. ColdFusion. PHP. The kind of codebases that make a senior developer sigh. I loved that shit. I wanted to know how things worked at the seams, not just the surface. The plan was clear back then: specialize deeply, master the internals, build an online rep, and eventually own clients. Make the whole pie, not just a slice.

Fast-forward to 2026.

The external disruption is hard to ignore. Something shifted. The landscape looks nothing like it did when I mapped out my plan.

The job market. AI. The industry started valuing different things, almost overnight. The plan I laid out for myself doesn't quite fit the world anymore.

So now I'm rebuilding it.

Maybe the plan was never wrong. Maybe I just assumed the world would hold still long enough for me to execute.

It didn’t.

The tools got smarter. The timelines got shorter. The expectation shifted from “understand it” to “ship it.”

Watching an AI agent generate thousands of lines of code is undeniably impressive. Sometimes, I can’t believe this is the reality we live in.

If you're not careful, it can completely strip the magic out of learning to code. I can't imagine the position junior developers are in right now, with the pressure to lean on these tools greater than ever.

The question of how it works is getting quieter. Technical debt doesn't announce itself. It just quietly accumulates, until one day the whole thing becomes someone else's problem to untangle. Usually the engineer who actually understands the engine is the one stuck untangling it.

And somewhere in all that noise, you find yourself asking a question you didn't expect: Do you build for the algorithm, or do you build for mastery?

I'm still building for mastery.

The algorithm will change again. Depth won't.