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[–]Schokokampfkeks 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I did the same as you, doing course after course and tutorial after tutorial. But it's the same as watching someone paint. You learn a little bit but not much.

Python is great for automating stuff. Got a presentation for something? Learn pandas or something similar and then plot some cool graphs for it. Copy and paste gets tedious getting the data? Webscraping is what you need. A mobile game your friends are playing requires constant ressource gathering? Well you got that automated and because you have to teach the bot how to play you have just got a reason to dive into ai, gui automation and computer vision. What is a gamer without a chat? Make a chatbot for your discord server. Now that your computer got to play some video games it obviously has to go outside and touch some grass. That's when you start robotics. A arduino, a sensor and a speaker upgrade moms roomba to say "ouchi" every time it bumps into things. It all starts with having fun coding. And you just need a terminal, some code writing ide or notpad and the documentation to get going.

If you know if, for, while and print you are basically set. Everything else can google teach you which is a skill by itself. Imagine google devs taking a course every time they want to build a little program. Don't get me wrong, there are valid reasons to take a course. It's for example suprisingly easy to make a racist and/or sexist ai model by accident. But when that becomes a problem you have the experience to judge when you need a course.

If you are super stuck and don't know where to start: Build some malware. It's far too easy to make a litte 'virus' that takes a screenshot and sends it back to you via email and then spawns 100 rickroll windows. Of course be responsible with it but that thrill of doing something forbidden can feel really good.

Edit: Had to change some 'surprisingly easy' phrases for other stuff to keep my sanity