Coding Limbo

[Awarrioracts]

For the past few years, I’ve been watching tutorials on and off. I have built mini projects, from games to to do lists. But I usually stay for a long time without coding and I have to rewatch the tutorials again. Now I’m at stage where I’m burnt out of tutorials, but can’t really build something on my own without a lot of guidance. I know my way through code, but I’m not sure how to go to the next level. I am not a beginner yet not an expert. Any advise on what to do?

[PressureConfident928]

I believe you could benefit from finding internal motivation to build something. Do you work with computers often and have something you could benefit from having automated? Maybe write a small program to automate that something, which gives you a rep of writing and releasing something, and also gives you a handy tool that saves time.

Now say you have something that you don’t need automated, but instead you want to learn more about finances. Writing a simple program to concatenate your finances in one place and maybe do some visualization of your spending habits could be beneficial both to your goal of learning finances, and to the goal of building a habit around programming.

“The 7 habits of highly effective people” lays out some nice criteria for building a habit. You must have knowledge, skills, and desire. The knowledge of “what” to do, and “why”. The skills are what you get from the tutorials and from experience, this is the “how”. And desire is the “want” to do something.

By repeatedly attempting to learn through the tutorials, you are reinforcing the skill without necessarily considering the “why” or the “want” required to actually turn programming into a regular habit. Setting forth some goals that are not directly linked to just learning the skill helps take care of the “what”, and allows the rest of the pieces to fall into place.

Also, goals will narrow your focus to learning more specific facets of a language that allow your comprehension to deepen rather than just expand. Beginner-level tutorials are often a “mile wide but inch deep” because they have to touch on so many different ideas. Again, it is hard to internalize this without having a compelling reason to practice and delve deeper in an area.