cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24857168

I would like to code for a living and to contribute to open source projects and things, but my coding skills are absolute shit after taking online courses and watching video tutorials. How can I learn to code for real?

What I would like to learn is algorithms, web development (“full stack”), how layouts work (both in like kotlin compose and HTML) and how to read other peoples code. Maybe thats more than I can chew, but its probably good for me to try out many things before getting settled on one.

Now I have been coding for a while already (~ 4 years), but I kind of feel like I need more guidance to be able to actually create code that works as intended intentionally, and not through trial and error / stack overflow. As for what level i am at, CS50 is probably my only qualification, I have played around with APIs (I.E. making discord bots), and made some html “apps” (horribly made, but things like the “genius” game and a calculator) and “prototype” react websites (as in, really bare bones, barely working).

I do plan on taking CS or something similar, but i’m not yet in college, and I would like to have a good head start before getting there.

Sorry for my bad English, and any help is appreciated.

  • model_tar_gz@lemmy.world
    43·
    1 day ago

    Chill, hatred is too strong for this. Jokes are rooted in reality but that doesn’t mean that they describe the full reality.

    I’ve been programming and tinkering with computing systems for a long time. Every time I start a new project with some new tech, I end up with 1000 tabs open in various mixtures of docs, AI, stackoverflow, reddit; and discord, slack; etc. hunting for answers or resolutions to similar situation to some particular nuanced problem I’m experiencing. It doesn’t mean that I’m an idiot just that I’m trying to do something that I haven’t done before.

    It’s taken me many cycles to break myself out of the samsara loops of “I don’t know how to do this so I suck.” Imposter Syndrome is real but eventually we work through it to a healthy perspective of “I don’t know how to do this… yet, but I’m going to have to struggle through it to earn this knowledge.”