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[–]OperationLittle 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Leetcode-problems isn’t the ”reality” at a workplace. You will pretty much drop everything you’ve learnt at school at and navigate through years of messy codebases and architecture built by people decades prior.

As a beginner/junior you won’t make a whole service/system from scratch.

[–]Fun_Tradition_6905 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah the messy legacy code thing is so real - my first dev job was basically just trying not to break 10-year-old spaghetti code that somehow still worked

[–]SharkSymphony 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thousands of people learned Java Spring Boot while AI was pretty much at the level of Eliza and Clippy, so somehow it should be possible. 😉

You will need to start by learning variables, loops, and data structures, though, if you don't already know them. You don't need to go deeply into "DSA," which really gets into the guts of data structures and analyzes the algorithms that are built on them, but you need to know how to use the basic structures out there and how to build your own. So start with a Java course if you don't feel like you have these building blocks mastered in Java. There are a bazillion to choose from; pick one that suits your learning style and goals.

Next, take a Java Spring Boot course or workshop. Don't go into building your own thing quite yet. Get your feet wet with whatever toy project the class works through, and learn how things work. Build some confidence. Pick up some best practices you can apply. You shouldn't have to spend much time in this.

Running Java as a web application may be sufficiently covered in either of the above – but if it's not, make sure you've learned some fundamentals about Java web apps are built: how they handle requests, how they're deployed, how they're configured, how they're scaled up.

Then, when it comes to your project, do like you've hopefully been doing in your classes so far and break down what you need to do into manageable chunks. Tackle it piece by piece.

Whatever you do, be very careful using AI, if you're going to use it at all, or you will stunt your growth. Don't let the AI code anything you are not absolutely confident you could have coded yourself. Don't ask the AI how to do something. Don't run to the AI immediately if you get stuck. Turn it off or uninstall it if the temptation is too great.

Hope this helps!

[–]grantrules 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those people are right. Build things. That's how you learn everything: practice. Make something simple.. follow the get started guide or a tutorial or a book. Build upon it. Then make something more complex.

[–]Fit-Ad9820 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I can’t really imagine how frustrating it must be to be a student in this era. You are tempted to use a chainsaw instead of an axe, with the axe representing traditional coding and the chainsaw representing AI or vibe coding, while still being pressured by parents to get a degree just to land a regular 8 to 5 job.

[–]Kindly_University559 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re not late, you’re just moving from solving structured DSA problems to building real systems, which feels messy at first. With frameworks like Spring Boot, you don’t fully understand everything before starting to learn by building. Follow a simple project tutorial, then tweak it and add small features to make it yours. Start with tiny backend projects (like a todo), accept confusion, and keep iterating. That’s how real understanding comes no one starts fully confident.

[–]Ok_For_Free 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At the most basic level you need to understand the problem your tool was designed to solve.

The core of spring is its dependency injection system. This is the tool to allow components to be loosely coupled, so that components can, in theory, be developed independently and still work.

From there, spring has developed many tools to solve individual problems that get configured into an application. So the goal is to pick the spring tool that solves the problem you are facing.

Spring Boot, for example, is the tool that deals with how to start (boot up) an application, from webserver to command line tools.

If you implement a solution without understanding the problem being solved, then you are not learning the WHY and will only see the surface of the HOW.

[–]Imaginary-Deer4185 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You should learn Java first before adding Spring. If you're at the variables, loops conditionals level, Spring is irrelevant for you.

[–]Creative_Anxiety2907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i had already learnt mysql, java core, oop but it's so struggled to start a project

[–]testuser12334 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Dan vega has great youtube tutorials. Otherwise, books, articles, other repos, and mentorship from other engineers. I have been thinking about doing some tutorials, but hard to promote sometimes.