_diyu

I have one client right now who pays me out of pocket, but the work he's asking is beyond my understanding. It's dealing with a new system that has a lot of parts. It's well documented, but when I read the documentation, it's just not sinking in, I'm not "getting it". My eyes just gloss over and I re-read the same sentence over and over for 3 minutes without any progress. This is the same thing that happened when I tried to learn Rails about 8 years ago.

Is it possible to push past this and force my mind to learn new things? Is being 32 years old and in very poor health a show-stopper for learning new complex concepts?

My first thought is to just get another job, one that I already know how to do. But that's outside of my control, this is my only client and will be for a few months.

Any advice is appreciated.

It's really hard to keep up, they're changing and coming and going all the time. Between now and the time I last looked into the latest frameworks, Angular has jumped from 1 to 2 to 4 and now I think it doesn't even have a version number? And React blew up but Vue is keeping up, Rails seems to be losing traction, ClojureScript and Elm seem to have had a brief spike in popularity, then there's Ember, and in general I'm very confused.

In particular I don't have a lot of particulars. I plan to deploy to EC2 and there is a need for a little bit of JS on the front-end for some stuff that can't be done server-side, but other than that it's all a very standard web app.

Comparison articles come out all the time but it's really hard to judge the competency or bias of the author. So I'm turning to you HN considering your reputation for being at the front of the game.