Here’s a list of the things that I’d like to learn about and have chosen not to specialize in (yet), as of 2026.

I believe that there’s value in exposing one’s ignorance, or “Wearing the white belt” as it’s described in Apprenticeship Patterns. Seniority isn’t about accumulating all the skills. It’s about being an expert where needed, dangerous everywhere else, relentlessly curious, and able to learn quickly.

This is a list of things that I don’t know as of 2026. A caveat is that I know something about most things on this list. I can tell you what excellence looks like and identify it in others.

I’d like to say thanks to Dan Abramov, whose post on this subject prompted this one.

Things I Don’t Know As of 2026

  • AI server design, besides MCP: I’ve built a few MCP servers, but never at production scale.
  • Agentic programming: I use LLM’s daily, but I’m not using them as agents in my codebase.
  • Docker: Containerization is something I understand well enough to get work done, and not more.
  • Feature flagging: I’ve never implemented a feature-flag solution or worked on one that does the things feature flags are meant to solve.
  • GraphQL: Beyond a few tutorials when it first came out, I’ve barely used GraphQL or any API technology besides REST.
  • Incident response: I’ve led a few of these, but my process is homegrown and could be improved.
  • JS package managers: I haven’t explored these tools and am currently camped out in my (not that comfortable) NPM comfort zone.
  • JS dependency management: I don’t fully understand how a production JavaScript dependency manifest stays up-to-date over a long-running project.
  • JavaScript APIs: I’m a React dev, I live in that limited API, and don’t do much straight-up JavaScript programming. Part of organizing Maine JS is my attempt to fortify this.
  • Modern E2E testing: I’m familiar with the industry leaders in this space, but I haven’t yet worked on a team where such tests are really implemented since my Ruby days.
  • Modern Rails: I’m a couple of years behind on Ruby on Rails.
  • Modern Responsive Design: besides familiarity with flexbox and mobile-first, I don’t think responsively and have gotten comfortable by working on a few projects in a row that don’t prioritize responsiveness.
  • Organizational laws and their application: I feel happy when I can brandish Conway’s Law in a conversation. But, there are more great mental models like these, and I don’t know them all. Engineers who know these cold have a set of mental tools that I admire.
  • Tech hiring: I had the opportunity to hire this year, and after some missteps, it turned out great. But, I feel I have a lot to learn about it.
  • Text editors, besides Tmux + Vim: I locked into this workflow a decade ago and love it. I know there are features in a text editor like VSCode that I don’t have, that would be difficult to set up in Vim, and would likely improve my code-writing ability.

Takeaway

I hope that someone reading this comes away thinking:

  • Even senior contributors don’t know everything.
  • Everyone can get better.
  • It’s cool to be able to say “I don’t know.”
  • Even more cool: adding “But I’d like to learn about it.”

Pledge

I wrote a similar post like this a few years ago, and I seem to have removed it! I pledge to keep this one on the internet as a testament to what I don’t know today, and what I’d like to learn in the future.