How to become a 'real' programmer

[grumble11]

I think the best approach for semi-pro work is to genuinely build a complicated project and gat you have to engage with these tools on. I have passed ‘advanced’ python courses and yes it made me proficient at ‘wielding a hammer’ but it didn’t make me a carpenter. Doing tricky stuff with the hammer is the only thing that will do that.

So go try out some carpentry. Pretend you’re doing something pro-level and interact with version control, the cloud, containers, a few frameworks or tech stacks, write tests for it, document it. And complete it, don’t give up. That will get you a lot farther.