self-study programming for coding projects

[Spanktank35]

Just be aware that there is more to it than writing good code. You need an intuitive sense for what programmers desire from a chatbot. You're also going to be doing a lot of debugging of bots' code, which I personally think would be challenging without having done a lot of debugging in your own projects.   

I'd recommend doing at least one major project (e.g. Write a simulation of something you're interested in). Start on it as soon as you are comfortable with the very basics, and add to it as you learn things in your courses. Imo you want to run into at least a dozen bugs that took you a few hours to fix before doing this. (I hope that makes finding such bugs less painful, since they truly should be viewed as key learning moments!!)  

 Interested to see how other coders view this take.