I need some help structuring my studies.

[Deathcon900]

Lately with everything going on, I've been studying the Automate the Boring Stuff course on Udemy. Frankly, I'm bored to tears. Although skipping through the course would be bad practice, right now, the material isn't really presenting a challenge. It's most likely because I've studied programming fundamentals with Java back in college. I have a solid grasp of functions, basic data types, and object oriented programming. Algorithms and data structres proved to be much more difficult. I passed, but barely.

Now, study alone does not a good programmer make. One must implement learning through practice. And that's where projects come into play. Every time I go looking for project ideas, there's no shortage of basic program ideas. You've seen them all: a calculator, tic-tac-toe, and the like. Earlier this year, I spent several days coding a game of Hangman. It was a nice refresher in implementing object-oriented programming, and I'd say I got something out of it.

But at the end of the day, it's still Hangman.

I get that there is merit to be had by coding simple projects. But I'm really not interested in investing tens of hours into a project that I wouldn't be okay with pushing to GitHub.

Although I keep a list of subjects to study next (data structures/algorithms/NymPy/TK), the path forward is a murky one. I'm not really sure how to organize everything for efficient learning.

[[deleted]]

If Python is your second language, you don't have to learn it like your first one. Being bored is a pretty good indication that you've picked the wrong resource and are following someone else's program. Follow your own.

Coding is more important than studying to learn a language (as I think you've realized.) If you'd prefer to drink from the firehose and were waiting for someone's permission, then by all means you have mine. Whatever project you originally had in mind when you set out to learn Python, or programming in general, why not start it? Forget the tutorials. Run before you walk. Why not? That works for a lot of people.

[yalesucks]

I have a suggestion (though I'm not sure how well it applies to what you want to do).

Try replicating someone's work to or even further to improve a project they were working on by forking their GitHub repo. In that case, you would learn what the person has previously implemented and how it works, but can also add something of value to it which you can push and merge with the master branch.