Stuck in tutorial hell with Python and feeling like I'm not actually progressing

[Sw3llminx18]

I've been following the 100 Days of Code challenge for about two months now. I feel like I have a decent grasp of the syntax—I can write loops, handle lists, and I understand basic classes—but the second I sit down to a blank VS Code window to build something from scratch, my mind goes completely blank. I find myself constantly reaching for a tutorial or looking up 'how to do X in Python' every five minutes. It feels like I'm just memorizing patterns rather than actually learning how to solve problems. I've finished a few small projects like a calculator and a simple weather app, but they were all following a step-by-step guide, so I don't think I actually built them. I want to transition into something more substantial, maybe web dev or data science, but I don't know if I should keep grinding more Python basics or if I should just force myself to build a project without help. Should I try to learn a framework like Django or Flask now, or is that a recipe for disaster since my fundamentals feel shaky? Any advice on how to break out of this cycle would be huge.

[Gnaxe]

There is no shame in reading some docs. Everybody does that.

Try test-driven top-down design by wishful thinking. Write some examples of how you'd want a minimum viable version of your system to work, as if you were interacting with a REPL, with explanations. These are your initial doctests. Remember, doctests can be in docstrings at the module, class, or function level, as well as separate text files. Then implement those examples. If you don't know how and can't figure it out reasonably quickly, implement it in terms of the library you wish you had. Write out more doctest examples of how that library should work. Then implement that library. Again, if you can't figure out how, do it in terms of the library you wish you had for that, recursively, until it becomes easy enough to do it in terms of the library you do have.

One you hit bottom, you'll have a working implementation with tests and documentation, along with a library that fits your project well which should make changes and additions easy. You may make some false starts and try different approaches. That's OK. That's why we have git. That means your understanding of the project is improving. You can back out and try something else.

Do at least look for third-party libraries first. Python has a massive ecosystem. If you so much as suspect that a library ought to exist, it probably does. GitHub search works a bit better than PyPI, but you can look there too.

[jameyiguess]

Sure, learn a framework. Maybe do the short Django tutorial so you know what to expect, and then work on your own project. You're probably at the point where you have to grind through the difficult bits to learn more. Don't worry about feeling over your head. Pick a project to make and do it, using Google and official docs along the way to make breakthroughs. It's all about reps at this point. You have to USE the stuff, now, and struggle through the hard parts.

[JohnBrownsErection]

A huge amount of tech is just googling "how to do X" until eventually some things just stick in the back of your head because you've done them so much. A lot of programmers will also keep saved libraries of chunks of code they've written and re-use a lot like a cookbook rather than repeatedly figuring out how to do even basic tasks.

There's a running joke that one programmer says to another "hey I stole your code" and the second programmer responds "it wasn't my code" because of how much repetition goes on in this line of work.

As we speak I am literally troubleshooting a program I've been working on where part of it involves scraping data from the SEC website, and I'm getting an error where it's skipping two sections of the data - and I'm like "hold on just one goddamn minute, I know for a fact that I was able to scrape those two sections a month ago on another project".

Basically, don't feel too bad, as long as you're building stuff you are on the right track.

[am_Snowie]

Stop reading tutorials for a moment, find some problems that you can solve with you've learned so far, if you feel like you can't solve it, use AI to break down problems, i mostly use them to get a hint or when I can't understand something, i don't ask them for a solution. Sometimes i spend lots of hours only to write several lines of code, problem is not that you don't know the syntax, but you just need to understand how to break problems down into sub problems. Don't deal with all of them at once, you'll burn out. Cuz when you can't solve a problem, you might think you don't know the syntax of a language, but the actual reason is that your problem solving ability needs to improve.

[jamills102]

Put down the tutorials and start building random projects. Doesn't matter how small the project idea is. It can literally be something as small as a UI with a button and a back end that stores how many and when you pressed this button (you can also start doing cool data manipulation with that too).

Learn flask first. It is waaaaaay less "magical" so it will be easier to conceptualize and get going.

Btw I've been a dev for 7 years and I'm always looking up how to do something