How do you self-teach yourself more complex software dev skills>
What advice would you give to someone who is trying to teach themselves software development skills? I'm doing that right now, and I'm finding it easy to understand, yet difficult to implement in computer code. I want to move onto more advanced stuff, but I feel that I don't have enough experience quite yet.
What skills/courses would you recommend I take? How did you get better on your coding journey? Any tips to make the process go faster?
Thanks in advance!
Like others have said, practice is key, however I'd like to add that you should not feel too discouraged if it feels like you're making no progress. You're probably making more headroom than you realize. At least personally in programming more than anything else I have occasionally only seen results after I came back to a concept I gave up on learning.
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Do be aware of getting stuck in local minimum though. I know it probably feels like bad advice but I figured I'd give it since it helped me personally, so maybe it might help someone else.
Learning concepts without the ability to apply them are essentially useless.
Get your hands dirty and build something that would be valuable to you and solve a problem for yourself.
Don't get hung up on doing it "right". Focus on making it work. Don't worry about how it'll work for a million users. Right now your focus is on making it work for one user.
As you go you'll hit walls. Research how to get past them and keep going. Again, you're going to make mistakes. DO NOT GET HUNG UP ON THIS.
Making mistakes is part of the journey. Even the best software engineers in the world rarely get things right their first try. It's part of the process.
Open source contribution can be really great. I started contributing to a Python project that I have used extensively and it 100% improved my coding. It also can allow for you to interact with more experienced devs (depending on the project) and allows for you to get feedback.
First focus on working on projects instead of improving your skills. The concepts you learn are usually a solution to some problem. Things are easier if you first encounter the problem yourself and then learn the solution, than if you do it in reverse. It is ok to do things poorly when you are starting out.
One thing i undervalued for most of my career was just reading code.
Get into the habit of digging into open source repos that catch your curiousity, and try to grok the way the project is layed out, what namespaces/files exist, what some of the core functions are, where the complexity is housed.
It’s all about getting exposure to patterns, especially if there aren’t other people to work with in your day to day.
Software has to model the real world, and the real world is complex. Not to mention that software is not a perfect abstraction, you will have to solve hard problems such as scaling.
Software complexity is unavoidable, how you reduce and control the impacts of that complexity is how you build maintainable software.
Are you sure you should be answering questions here?🤔
Yes, some things need optimization but most don't. Today, there is unnecessary complication by having a billion dependencies and using autocode generators which generate 10k lines of code from 100 lines.