Programming

17432 readers

215 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How should I continue learning? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I begun learning programming a few years ago, and it feels like I barely progressed. I know the basics and a bit of advanced python(I have learnt to use a few libraries), html and css plus a tiny bit of c++, but not much outside of those. I enjoy programming and solving problems using code, and it’s an enjoyable hobby of mine. But I feel like all I do is extremely basic and I want to advance but it feels overwhelming seeing the countless of things I could learn.

I wanna know what are ways I can actually apply the things I have learnt/will learn on somewhat worthwhile things, because the main problem right now is that I don’t really have anything to do with the things I’ve learnt other than silly projects that don’t really last more than a day and aren’t that complex. I also want to advance my knowledge as previously stated since I feel like I know too little for the amount of time I’ve been learning to program.

For context I’m still in school but not too far off from higher ed, and I have a decent amount of free time on most days(~2-4 hrs).

Thanks if you reply

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

This consternation is definitely common. It's hard to apply skills to something with no long term impact of benefit. I've improved my skills by finding stuff I can help on in the communities I participate in.

It's natural to be overwhelmed, so deciding on a project does scope what you can learn, but a hard part is architecting the foundation of that project.

Introducing new features to an existing project is a great way to get your feet wet - it has multiple benefits, for one of you do take a position as a developer in the future, you likely won't be architecting anything initially, primarily improving on existing projects. So participating in OSS projects is a similar mechanism to that - you have to learn their codebase to a degree, you have to learn their style and requirements, etc.

Even if you don't ultimately contribute, it's still a learning experience.