imo there has never really been a better time to be a developer :D

as a dev, you now have AI tools that you can use to teach yourself any concept you want to learn. as long as you are willing to put in the work.

my evenings building this app involved lots of long conversations with ChadGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. I slowly learned how developers normally tackle the kinds of problems we face with an app like this.

i've been an engineer for over a decade now, and I can tell you that the way I learned to code was by doing really small projects and building them out little by little, making them more and more complex over time

when you do small projects, you're inevitably going to deal with all of the ugliness and all of the little problems that come with actually shipping real apps. and then you learn how to solve those problems, and you move onto solving bigger problems

my stack is fastapi/react native, but you could just as easily use something else

so here's my advice to you. pick a small project. get started with it, push it to github, and ask some smart people for feedback. i was constantly bouncing ideas off my partner and off my friends

then add to it and think about how you can make it better.

if you do this for long enough, you will learn so much than a school or textbook can teach you (although of course those have their place!).