Interesting. Were you watching streams or YouTube? And were you doing other chess improvement work?
I’m at the same chesscom rating as you and have watched a bit of Hikaru content but somehow felt like I was procrastinating on “real chess study”. Your comment has given me an excuse to try again!
I think there is a spectrum Of skills with programming at one extreme and visual design at the other. Even within “front end” you tend to have JS experts and CSS/design/UX experts. Some people can do both.
When you consider UX, accessibility, progressive enhancement, cross browser and cross device support - there’s plenty to know. And unlike programming, it doesn’t all flow logically. Some stuff is subjective, other stuff requires specific knowledge of browser quirks etc.
The only site that helped me gain some _understanding_ of CSS (as opposed to knowledge, tricks and hacks) was this one http://learnlayout.com
It’s a bit dated now - Flexbox is mentioned at the end and CSS Grid is entirely absent - but still important if you’re supporting older browsers.
But CSS has never “clicked” for me. For a start the whole idea of cascade is based on inheritance and I generally prefer composition. I like designing UIs and it’s quite a satisfying challenge to match a wireframe to the pixel. But overall, I’d rather be writing application code.
If users could just read JSON everything would be a lot easier...
If I understand your question, the answer might be something to do with what happened in humans; we developed brains large enough to be able to recognise patterns in our own behaviour and abstract those across all aspects of life.
Having said that, the long term stability of that path is definitely debatable!
I think they could be included by allowing for evolutionary dead ends. That is, if mutations are random, not all will be successful long term (though pecularities in their specific environment may enable their survival for some time).
Interesting. My experience was similar when, after years of playing competitively at club level, I decided to give up because I felt I couldn't progress further without devoting several hours a day.
For me it was more because I found chess to be such a demanding game. One can play well for hours (in a serious match) making many good moves only to have it all thrown away by one slip of concentration.
I’m at the same chesscom rating as you and have watched a bit of Hikaru content but somehow felt like I was procrastinating on “real chess study”. Your comment has given me an excuse to try again!