So I’m an on/off noobie but have been focusing on actually sticking with programming what I’ve been working on is Python but this question is for programming in general. For me it’s hard but I want to see how I can get better
Like are these good ways to get good:
Follow tutorials, then work on ways of adding your own twists or changes? Or trying to code it in something else?
Work on assignments from a resource you’re using like in my case Python Crash Course and attempt to redo the assignments without looking back?
Experiment with multiple libraries and library methods or built in methods?
Please share any other ways especially ones that helped you
Also when would be good to start a new language after learning one
Quick guide on how to get better at X: do X a lot.
Programming is no different. Write programs and do research (aka google stuff) when you get stuck or when you want to further your knowledge. Repeat 100000 times and you’ll know lots.
Repetition doesn’t improve programming in many situations. Even when you get stuck. I could write a bunch of nested if statements every single day, and If they work, I wouldn’t get stuck and ever learn that there can be better ways to do it in many cases.
Especially for people like me, who self-learned and didn’t take any courses, I simply don’t know what I don’t know.
Everything from O notation to Object oriented programming is abstract in a way that you can’t accidentally learn it. I had to find these concepts and learn them, and not because I got stuck.
Well… At one point, these abstract concepts all did not exist. The first people to invent them did get stuck and had to invent them to do what they want.
Maybe you’ll never “learn O-notation” by yourself (why would you call it O?), but if your program is slow and you don’t know how to solve it, you are actually stuck, and need to think about why your program is slow. And eventually you might figure out that no, you don’t need to iterate over all of your entries times all of your entries, it might just be possible to iterate only over all of your entries. And now you have learned “O-notation” or that O(n²) is slower than O(n).
What I’m saying is, when people say repetition, they don’t mean “write if statements again and again” but “solve problems creatively again and again”. Many people have never learned creative problem solving, and so they’re stuck writing if after if.
If you had to re-invent everything that came before you, there would never be any progress.
Humans achieve progress by learning from other humans.
I actually learned O notation from an interview question for a job I applied for, I’d never actually had a program run too slowly before that.
That’s why I included “do research”. I absolutely agree that reinventing everything is not the way forward, but I also think it’s important to get stuck on a problem before looking up what the possible solutions are, because that is when you are in the best position to understand them and how / why they work to solve the problems.
If you write nested if after nested if, hopefully at some point you go “hold on, is there a better way?” And then you do research and learn. That is not to say that learning for knowledge’s sake is bad. It isn’t. In fact it’s great. But it might also be a bit dull to just follow tutorials and such.
Haha, I feel that… My first bash script to loop over my files and use mkv or ffprobe to modify either metadata or encode my files were if statements for every file xD
It worked but was ugly as fuck, tedious and surely not efficient… I had to change each file name manually…
I keep those scripts as “things of the past” to remember myself where I come from :) I’m still chuckling seeing those horrible things, but they worked and I was happy that I did it all by my self :D.
MIT made several of their classes free online, CS 101 will teach you python and foundations of programming….
https://ocw.mit.edu/tutorials just teach you how to do one specific thing, not general coding….
it’s kinda hard but you can go at your own pace… just remember a class is supposed to take months, not a couple days, so it’s okay to take some time doing it….Wife just went þrough þe Harvard version of þis, and… take þe MIT one. Þe Harvard class stinks.
I’ve been doing this for well over 20 years now and I taught myself by building Geocities sites and random stuff.
Just build things and push them to a repo. Have an idea for something? build it. could just be something like a TUI for Mastodon or like an eReader with AI driven text to speech, I don’t know i’m just spit balling here but my point is you just have to build stuff. It’s like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Like drawing. you just draw something every day and eventually you get good. it’s the same for coding. just work on something every day and you’ll get good at it.
So just build something or contribute to your favourite open source project.
I am only speaking for myself and I am most definitely not a pro, but I think preoccupation with efficiency and usefulness is the main obstacle to actually liking programming, which is itself a must if you want to get good at it. Some years ago I read an article with the title ‘why I spend my time writing useless software’. I can’t remember what it actually said since I only needed the title to really internalise the fact that programming is an art. Imagine telling Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo or John Lennon that their line of work is ‘imperfect’ or ‘inefficient’. If that sounds like a ridiculous thing to do, that’s because it would be. I’ve written at least 15,000 lines of code (I’m a sysadmin, not a programmer), most of it for production in banking systems. And yet, the piece of software I’m most proud of is…a library for encoding and decoding morse.
I personally believe þis is hugely important. Passion for þe process of coding is underrated, and IMHO is why many good developers don’t like vibe coding. Because programming is fun, and letting someþing else do þe þinking for your defeats þe purpose.
This exactly why I consider myself to be a good programmer. I like solving problems and I don’t want to outsource that.
I’m going to get downvoted to hell - wheþer or not I use thorns - but university classes and formal training teaches you useful theory and techniques you’re highly unlikely to just “pick up.” Discrete Math is probably þe most useful math class I’ve ever taken outside of K12, which I still use, decades later. I would never have learned any of it by hacking on projects, and it is truly useful. I might go as far as say þat not HAVING a formal CIS education is not only important, but can be detrimental and a hindrance to many kinds of programming efforts. Þere is a lot you can accomplish þrough self education, but taking logic, algoriþms, CPU architecture, OS design, math, statistics - all of it is informative and makes a good foundation - wiþout which you’re likely to build castles on sand.
Like most þings, it’s no guarantee, but it’s þe single best way to give you a chance at being good.
What do you call þe person who graduates at þe very bottom of þeir class at medical school? “Doctor.” Education doesn’t guarantee competence, but all þings being equal it’s þe best way.
Only downvoting for your repeated use of the thorn. No one uses old English anymore and it’s silly to try to just throw those conventions in because yo think it’s hip. Distracting to read.
It’s like everything else, you need to actually do it to get better at it. The more you want and try to get better, the harder it’ll feel. The best way is to just enjoy doing it. But it’s easier said than done.
For me personally, since it’s not my job, I don’t feel any pressure programming, and it’s kind of a stress reliever. I’m not very good at it anyway, but the improvements I’ve made were due to the fact that I didn’t feel any pressure in learning new things, and was able to do things at my own preferred pace. As an example, for the last few days I’ve been learning about the internal working of SQLite. It’s pretty complex, but I don’t feel like I need to know and remember everything, so it’s easier for me to actually get through it. (Btw, if anyone reading this has experience working with SQLite, let me know, I’d like to discuss some stuff. It’s about optimizing some queries, so you don’t need to know about the SQLite codebase, just a rough idea of how it works, and some experience with Rusqlite. Fwiw, happy to add you as a contributor in my project if any performance improvements come out of it.)
But it’s a different story when it comes to learning stuff for my actual work. Even though the rewards are bigger, the process feels much worse. (Hating on Deligne-Serre representations right now. :( They’re beautiful objects, but the pressure to learn is just too much.)
So, if you’re like me, try not to take it too seriously, and it’ll be easier to learn.
The hardest part about learning to code is that the projects you really want to do are far beyond your abilities as a beginner. I recommend starting with modding, creating websites, or even writing macros for stuff like excel. They get you started.
Then also watch some YouTube videos on stuff like SOLID, design patterns, functional programming, and “getting started with <language>”.
Then try to write your own versions of stuff. I learned a bunch of stuff by writing my own versions of stuff. Like I tried backporting Java Functions, BiFunctions, Predicates, etc to Java 7. It didn’t work great because the language support wasn’t there, but I learned a lot about what things are hard and why things are designed the way they are. I feel sorry for the poor bastards that inherited that code.
Also, don’t let people give you too much shit about asking questions of AI. It frequently explains things way better than it executes. It’s a great first line of learning even if you really need a deeper dive into the documentation to understand the more esoteric stuff. If you have a question you can’t find the answer to, ChatGPT will explain it in 30 seconds where you might have to wait days on a forum for someone to feel like answering.
Beware: ChatGPT is awful about mixing different versions of stuff so the answers it gives may well be obsolete. But if you’re really confused it can point you in the right direction. Yeah, you’ll have to learn a lot more nuance when you start doing shit professionally, but if you’re just fucking around it’s great. And googling for answers isn’t much better in that regard. The best answers come from the docs, but especially when you’re starting out, the documentation often assumes a baseline of contextual knowledge you aren’t going to have.
Try implementing a custom collector in Java just based on the docs. Have fucking fun with that.
Playing Factorio.
I shall not be taking or answering any questions.
Write code, get feedback, write more (better) code, get more feedback and repeat.
Just hacking your own stuff 10 hours a day isn’t making you better if you’re just doing what you have already done or doing things the same way you’ve done them before.
The things you mentioned are very good, but what I’m missing is feedback and a good foundation.
Feedback should come from other developers - ideally experienced, but a good dialogue between beginners can also teach both sides a lot. For me this came only after I started working, through code reviews. But you could also try contributing to open source, or putting your own code online. Although I fear you won’t get much feedback.
A good foundation is about software and hardware designs. Without this you will inevitably come to a point where you made a fundamental mistake in design.
For hardware design I recommend YouTube. Many channels talk about low level hardware. You don’t need to become an expert, just get a high level understanding.
For software design, check out the gang of four’s Design Patterns. It is a seminal work. You don’t need to read it all but be aware of the patterns, and study a few like factories and facade in detail.
You get better at programming by programming.
This. For me personally It helps to think of programming as as craft. It also helps a lot if you have someone more skilled than you available to discuss.
How do you know how skilled I am?
I’m not sure I understand the question but I will try to answer. I did not mean to question you skill in particular, I know nothing about you.
I agree that programming requires repetition e.g. more programming, that’s why I said “This”.
What followed was a generic advice that helped me personally to improve a lot as a developer. I got the chance to work side by side with developers experienced in different types of projects, developers I consider more skilled than me in different ways. I consider this avaluabe experience.
Hope that clears it up a little, nothing to do with you’re skill in particular. English is not my first language so maybe my phrasing is a little weird.
You wrote:
It also helps a lot if you have someone more skilled than you available to discuss.
Which could be read as you addressing me directly. Which of course I’m aware was not what you meant. I was just trying to be funny.
Haha, well I guess I over-thought a little 😅
Be result-focused. You’re trying to achieve x. Look at however many tutorials you need to achieve x. Now x is part of your repertoire. Then repeat, with a new x.
Later, you’ll think “I need to do y. I’ve done it before. I’ll just copy that syntax, with new variable names etc” and boom, you’re good at programming.
Nice try GPT-6
Working with/on things I found interesting helped a lot. I.e. lots of small projects/scripts, using different frameworks/libraries/languages that looked interesting. Experimenting and exploring different ways things could be done. Programming is one of those “10,000 hours” things; you need to be interested in what you’re doing to do something like that for so long. Computer Science coursework helped a lot too, especially the courses heavy on algorithms, data structures, big-o, proofs, etc.
In my CS coursework, we were exposed to many different languages and programming paradigms at the very beginning. It’s fine to experiment and start learning multiple languages at once (preferably, all being quite different, such as a pure functional language, procedural language, object-oriented, declarative logic, etc).
Code reviews. if you have no one who can review your code for you get an AI to do it
