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!
Keep practicing.
Read other people’s code, for example open source project. Contributing to open source can be good practice also.
Find a mentor.
Pick a team at work that has the skills and culture+capacity to mentor you.
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.
BUILD SOMETHING.
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.
