No Stupid Questions (Developer Edition)

It sounds like you have the mindset that you have to learn programming before you start doing it. Which is especially hard today as there's so much information, so much to learn, so many tutorials to watch. There's always something to learn. Don't expect to reach a point when you "know" programming.

Instead try this: Stop practicing and start programming. Start with a project that you want to do, for whatever reason. Some small utility, a really tiny game, a joke program, whatever that gets you to focus on creating something rather than learning something. You will learn the things you have to learn in order to progress on the project. This is completely normal, and a good skill to have, even for professional programmers.

Memorizing isn't a huge deal and will happen naturally as you use things more.

For instance I've been doing c# for almost 20 years and I still have to Google how to do a switch expression every time! It just doesn't stick haha

Once you do something for the 1000th or 10,00th time you won't need to look at your notes.

As your knowledge grows you'll find you actually have to look stuff up more.

It's an endless field and it's all out there so you don't need it in your head. It's better to learn how to find the info you need.

Dunno if this will help you feel any better or not, my field is finance so I learned VBA out of spite. There's notes in my subroutines, notes written down, websites bookmarked, all that. Sometimes I still have to google excel formulas just to make sure I'm doing them right.

I started looking at c# and python, and the only reason it even makes sense to me is because of vba. I feel like having a reason to use it and data to practice on helped a lot. And fuck, I googled for hours, upon hours, just to finally get something that I later found a much easier way for. Self learning is admirable af.

Oh, check archive.org for books on python. I find the for dummies series to be particularly helpful. I hate YouTube tutorials so I usually go for something published.

No one mentioned "imposter syndrome", so let me:

It somewhat sounds like imposter syndrome. The feeling that you don't really belong, because you feel you can barely keep up with your seniors.

I've had it before and it sucks, but you need to realise that most of us have felt this way - you are 100% not alone in this.

How to get rid of it? You HAVE to realize that most of us have no clue what to do and are just winging it too :p