this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
2 points (66.7% liked)
Programming
16780 readers
103 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
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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I dropped out of school for a job so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Learning to program is more about learning to think in a specific kind of way. Datastructures, algorithms, and other math-y aspects of programming are incredibly unimportant in the day to day of the average programmer. BUT, and this is a big but, learning these things will give you a better understanding of how to think about programs like a programmer.
Learning to think like a programmer is the single most important skill a programmer has, and it is the most difficult to acquire. In essence thinking like a programmer just means thinking like an engineer or a scientist but with a few extra bits
Generally this style of thinking focuses on key aspects:
In general you'll need to develop a thick skin for that feeling of "I have no idea what I'm doing." Because it never goes away (I'm at 10 years as a hobbiest and 4 years professionally). Instead you should focus on the meta-process of developing your process for learning new things. At it's essence all engineering is learning to build tools that help you build other tools. Except right here and now the tool you are building is your mental process for problem solving
Stick with it. It does get easier
*There are other techniques as well but these are arguably the most fundamental