My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills. I have none, by the way, and I don’t even know where to start.
Some of the usual responses when I state this:
“Automate your work” - I work in Salesforce. Have you seen Salesforce? I’m not a multi faceted systems administrator constantly updating DNS records or working in Active Directory.
“Write a cool app” - What cool app? What is “cool”?
“Open dev tools and look around” - Why? Specifically, why?
Also, learning programming is BORING. Most of the courses I’ve tried are so so stale and they aaallll end up explaining concepts in the same way.
“This is a fleeble and it holds the sping, the sping tells the plus plus that it must do what the herbug says”.
My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills.
Honestly, why learn programming then?
I’m asking this as a programmer myself. I’m not trying to discourage you from learning it by any means, if that’s what you want to do. I’m just asking because it doesn’t sound as if you actually want to do it.
You’ve already tried learning it, and it’s a slog (whereas for me, I was immediately fascinated by it when I was introduced to it as a teenager, even though I was horrible at it). You don’t have any burning desires to create apps (whereas for me, there are so many ideas I want to explore, so many things I want to create that don’t exist yet, but alas I don’t have enough time or energy to work on it all). You don’t even have the desire to do it for purely career-related purposes, which is what I’d imagine drives most of the rest of people learning programming without enjoying it at all.
So why bother with learning something you neither enjoy nor have strong motivations to do?
Then it’s not for you. No shame in that. I don’t understand the notion that everyone is supposed to be a coder now.
If anything, the low-level coding part is something AI models may well make obsolete relatively soon. Unlike any craftsmanship - why not learn masonry or carpentry instead?
I learned more by just taking the Doom source code and messing with it than I did from reading books. The main thing every language shares is the logic. Once you figure out how to translate your problem and solution into logical terms, using any language is rather easy; only the function names and syntax changes.
I’ve never written anything in Python, for example, but I am pretty confident that if I spent a day or so reading up on the syntax and functions and looking at some example snippets, I could port anything I’ve written in C, Java or Basic to Python.
I agree that books are dry as fuck and hard to keep up with as they tend to make a person fall asleep. But so much more learning can be done by examining others’ code that does the things you’re trying to do.
I did laugh at the Salesforce quip. I have seen it. It’s a fucking mess lol
I’m somewhat of a programmer, but there’s ideas everywhere in life. My bank came out with an API so I built an app that pulls it all down, stores it in a database, and makes some pretty graphs. Had no experience in fullstack or backend development before (I’m a sysadmin/cloud engineer), so it took me a really long time and I was following a course but adapting it to my project for a lot of it.
The other day I picked up an old game (Mu online) that is soooo grindy it even gives you an in-game bot to play for you, but if you die you just respawn in a safe zone. So I’ve started writing a script that reads the screen (character position is shown in x, y coordinates on screen), and those coordinates are within a given area (the safe zone) it will alert me. Again, had no experience with any of the window controls or image to text conversion (tesseract), but got chatgpt to help me a bit. Will it save me time? Maybe a little. Will I stop playing this game in a month? More than likely. Did I learn something? Absolutely.
I’m self taught but working in tech there’s obviously more work related use cases to actually start learning, but there’s every-day stuff you can do too.
Damn, a bank with an accessible API? I would be so happy if mine did this, they don’t even have a way to export transactions into a sane format like CSV…
Write a stupid little app if you have no cool ideas! The journey is the goal here. like, write a fart button app, make a clone of flappy bird, or whatever
My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills
Maybe some dumb little games? If you aren’t interested in 3D gaming you can do 2D platformers, top-down Rogue-likes, or Zork-style interactive fiction (text) games (from scratch instead of with a Z-Machine).
As a self-taught developer, when I was learning I found it a lot more useful to just go code stuff, and then when I found something that seemed hard or ugly, I could go look for solutions to that kind of problem, which was much more interesting than just reading about various techniques. (Well, I was learning well before normal people had internet, so mostly I invented some shit to fix my own problem, but it got easier/faster after the internet became available).