Because of travel, I spent four weeks in August to September almost entirely without touching the IDE.
There were times when I missed this mildly: there is an almost meditative quality to sitting down and wrangling with the computer. But all in all, the time flew by with festivities and friends.
When I came back, I was surprised by how much I forgot and how much I remembered:
The project structure had left my mind almost completely. I had to hunt for the file I wanted to through a few directories: almost had to run a “grep” command to find code I had written myself.
But luckily, for the higher level concepts, I remembered more than I thought. I knew how to jump between App Router and Pages Router materials (for Next.js).
In fact, my overall experience has been better than before the break. Forgetting the details was a sobering experience: my memory is definitely not as good as I thought.
Moreover, my forgetting the details also betray my not grokking some basic starting points. For example, more than once my Vercel deployed website failed simply because I did not upload the relevant environment variables. This would not have happened if my mental model of the difference between local machine and Vercel deployment is firmly in place.
I used to think that when I was reading the documentation, I was fully immersed and really taking everything in. But no: like most people I was just skimming to do what I immediately wanted to do. The deeper concepts passed by like water off a duck’s back: I had to do this a few times (across a period) for the concepts to really sink in.