Deliberate Ignorance

The tech landscape is vast. You can't deeply know Docker, and Kubernetes, and every cloud service, and five frontend frameworks, and database internals, and distributed systems theory, and compiler design. Nobody can. Yet imposter syndrome whispers that you should.

Dan Abramov, creator of Redux, once published a list of things he didn't know — Unix commands, DNS internals, algorithms. Here was one of the most influential developers in the JavaScript ecosystem, admitting public ignorance. If someone at that level doesn't know everything, knowing everything was never the job.

What actually happens as you gain experience isn't that your knowledge expands to cover more ground. It's that your focus narrows. You learn the areas that matter for your work deeply, and everything else moves into a deliberate "I'll learn it when I need it" category. Expertise requires neglect — you can't go deep on everything, so you choose.

The shift from junior to senior is less about accumulating more facts and more about developing the judgment to know when a gap actually matters, and the confidence to sit with uncertainty until it does.

One practical tool: maintain a list of known unknowns — things you're aware you don't understand yet. It turns vague anxiety into something you can actually manage. The list makes the edges of your knowledge visible, which is the first step to doing something about them.

Ignorance is only a problem when you mistake it for incompetence.