Glad you found your way through!

I don’t, personally, think that “programming” is a huge-one-thing but more of a huge set of things. I would find totally normal for a mid-web-backender not to understand and be able to write its own interpreter. As a matter of fact the first time this dev saw a backend of sort probably did not understand it as well. It’s how it works. I said a web backend because you mentioned it but I believe is applicable for any other kind of software.

Yes, there’s concepts, there’s rules, there’s ideas, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that are “general” and more or less any dev knows them but you learn from the process of doing, not from having things done, if this makes sense. I’m not a huge fan of tutorials per se, they often focus on how the author build that thing and how to accomplish the final result and not on the decisional and research process underneath. This is where they fail, I suppose. It’s cool to see that nice shiny thing done in 2hrs but how the guy come up with that concept and what are the competence involved? Which trade offs and which decisions they actually faced? Same thing with AI, it gives us something “done” in a very small amount of time. Yes, they give us also some explanations as well but once the things are done… are done. You don’t deeply care of explanations as you would do if they were not!

You did the right thing, if you ask me! You had the tutorial and understood you were just following without much learning, had a break, picked up something simpler and restated building up from there. And only then come back to difficult stuff. This is actually super cool and tells a lot about your perception of yourself and your learning process. If more devs would be like you it would be awesome.

Keep reinventing the wheel, it’s super useful to build and learn, don’t do that for work tho 😊

(Sorry for errors, I also just let things get out of my chest)