I’ve been learning Python by myself for about 3 years now and I can say that I know quite a lot but I don’t really feel confident in my own programming skills and always after a while of practicing or reviewing I end up quitting because I feel exactly this.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I really feel like I’m in a cycle repeating the same noob exercises over and over again.
For example, lately I have been practicing a lot PyQt but I really feel that I am wasting time when I don’t learn a new concept or I don’t memorize something and I need to look at my notes to remember how to do it, and also that practicing with online courses, especially with Youtube is often a challenge because the authors do things differently and I get confused by that. And when I want to learn something new the amount of information overwhelms me and I feel tired because of that.
As a Linux user I know that what I just said is stupid, because for example it is impossible to learn all the commands in the world, you just really learn the ones you use most regularly but in programming I feel that for example asking ChatGPT (or any ChatBot) counts as cheating for some reason, I don’t know how to explain it.
I really consider this probably a mentality problem more than a skill problem because honestly even though I know I can I don’t feel sure how to program, many times I even doubt the name of my variables or my functions.
Thanks for reading my silly post!
what do you enjoy? whatever that is find a problem you want solved and try to solve that problem watch videos when you can and look up information but most likely there wont be any info on exactly what you want to do otherwise it probably already would have been done and you wouldn’t want it fixed, if someone has done it before exactly then for educational purposes I would try to make it first then look at there solution afterward. for me when I did this I went down a parsing and reverse engineering rabbit hole, this helped me build confidence because regardless of how good the documentation is, regardless if someone else has done it before I can figure it out I know I dont need anyone to tell me how to solve the problem, then when I can find documentation on top of this skill the documentation becomes 10 times more useful. I cant guarantee this will help you as much as it did me, I did this for a long time before I started programming as the game I played in my spare time had very little documentation and I was forced to do the same process and just figure it out.