Feeling overwhelmed at the beginning is totally normal in tech. Probably in most fields, but especially in tech. The field is vast, the jargon heavy, and the languages written in rigid logic suitable for machines to read and understand, not humans.

I'm less than a year into my tech journey. I really didn't even start going at it hard until about 6 months ago. So I can vividly remember what it was like to start, and not really having any idea what the hell was going on.

I'm writing this because when I started, I don't recall any of the tutorials telling me that feeling overwhelmed is just a part of the process. Sure, they told me to not give up, that it was normal to struggle at first, to keep practicing, etc. But they didn't explicitly acknowledge just the sheer vastness of the tech world.

There are so many different avenues of tech - coding, networking, security, hardware, software, cloud, databases, machine learning, front end, back end - and tons more I either don't know about or can't remember off the top of my head. And each of these fields is deep and vast - you can spend your whole career studying and practicing, and by the end you still wouldn't know everything there is to know - just in one field!

Now, a part of this is because I don't have a computer science degree. No doubt that background would help at least getting the lay of the land, if not with any real depth of knowledge. But even so, the tech world is insanely vast.

And so, whether you're someone with a background in tech or no background at all, it's completely alright and normal to feel massively overwhelmed by everything at the start. It will get better, I promise. Eventually you'll start seeing some of the same things being repeated. They'll stick. The documentation, which at the beginning is basically just a foreign language, will start to make some sense as you get more experience. You'll see a term over and over and not know what it means, and then have it explained to you in a way that makes everything clear, and makes a few other things slide into place on top of it.

And that's the game. You just keep doing this, and you learn more, so you can understand more, which helps you learn more, and on and on. You can probably deduce from this pattern that your knowledge will start to grow at accelerating rates. At the beginning, when you hardly know anything, you won't have the bearings to really relate anything together. Think of it like a darkened room - at first, you have no idea what's around you. But as your eyes get used to the dark, and the little lantern you have gets slowly brighter, you're able to see the shapes, the patterns. You know about where the walls are, the paths through the furniture. You don't know everything, but day by day you're getting a better idea.

I'm always going to be learning. There will never come a day when I'll say "I've learned it all" (and if there is, it'll be time for me to go). Feeling overwhelmed at the start is normal. I sure as hell did. I couldn't even tell you what the cloud was, much less how it worked. But slowly, day by day, I kept at it, and now I know a tiny little bit. Enough where it makes just a little bit of sense.

Keep at it, and you'll rise out of the darkness too.