Build technique, with skills.
There’s a lot of noise in tech.
Everyone’s chasing the latest framework, learning the hot new language, or finishing yet another Udemy course. It’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind if you’re not constantly adding new skills.
But here’s something that’s become clearer the longer I’ve been in this field:
Skills get you started. Technique keeps you growing.
Skills are useful. You need them. They’re what help you build, ship, and get things done.
These are all skills. You can learn them from a tutorial, a blog post, or even just by reading the docs.
They’re concrete. Task-based. Often easy to measure.
But here’s the catch: skills are replaceable. Today it’s Vue, tomorrow it’s Svelte. Today it’s Docker, next year it’s something else.
Technique is different. It’s not about which tool you use—it’s how you think when solving problems.
That’s not in any tutorial. It comes from shipping real stuff, hitting real problems, and making decisions under pressure.
It’s pattern recognition. Judgment. Tradeoff thinking.
And it’s the kind of thing that compounds over time.
Let’s put it this way:
Skill is knowing how to use the tool. Technique is knowing what to do when the tool breaks.
Or:
Skill is cooking with a recipe. Technique is making something edible when you’re out of half the ingredients.
You need both. But one makes you a pro.
If all you focus on is skill-building, you’ll always feel like you’re behind. There’s always more to learn. Always another course. Another shiny thing.
But if you start paying attention to technique—how you debug, how you make decisions, how you write code others can live with—then you’re building something much more valuable.
Technique is the stuff that stays with you, even as tools come and go.
Next time you’re learning something new, ask yourself:
“Am I adding a skill, or developing technique?”
Both matter. But if you want to grow, bet on technique.
It’s the stuff you can’t Google—but it’s also the stuff that makes you irreplaceable.