Asklemmy

43965 readers

1674 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

121

what is a skill you wish you had, and why? (feddit.nl)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ok, I might as well go first: I wish I could draw. Not at the level where I could make photorealistic portraits, but I've always been envious of those who are able to scetch something together in a few minutes that perfectly captures what they want to convey. Sometimes words aren't enough to express what I want to say, and for those situations I would love to have a simple drawing do the talking for me.

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm a hobbyist programmer myself. I've picked up a few languages along the way, and by far the best approach I have found to learning is a simple but real practical use case. Find the smallest task you want your program to do, break it down into even smaller subsections, and then start to figure out how to transform it into code. It usually takes less code and knowledge about a language than you think.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A few years back I got really into Python for a few months as a complete newbie. One day, when I felt ready, I told myself I would put all the python skills I picked up and build a small program that would generate random, solvable sudoko puzzles. After a few weeks trying everything and not getting anywhere, I gave up programming.

Moral of the story is I probably that I should have taken it a bit slower I guess

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

To be fair, I'm a decent programmer: I spend a significant portion of my workdays programming all kinds of things. Writing a program to generate sudoku's with a unique solution, without copy pasting a bunch of algorithms, but actually making it all up yourself definitely sounds non-trivial to me.

(Read: That sounds like a really hard beginner project, and you should be proud for even trying, and you shouldn't give up :) )

[–] big_slap 4 points 11 months ago

this is exactly how I started. I looked at my job to see what I can do to solve an issue we were having using python and, even though my final script was a complete mess, it worked. learned SO much along the way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Here’s another quick tip to get anyone started: Find some code written by someone else, and modify it.

Depending on the language, you might be able to just read what it says and experiment with what happens when you change some details here and there. If the code does something that you’re interested in, you’ll also have the motivation to spend a few hours tweaking the code, or even reading the documentation.

Also, nowadays you can ask GPT what different parts of the code does. You can drill down with follow up questions until you understand how a specific detail works in the language you’re working with.