I’ve been learning on and off about programming for 3 years now. Mostly front-end, html/css/js, for school projects. My degree isn’t in CS or IT, so projects that give the opportunity to code are scarce and often short. So I get that I may simply may not have enough hours in coding.
So I’m delighted to be taking CS50 as a Minor at the moment, this has given me the chance to sink a lot of hours in coding, and currently I am in week 5 Data Structures.
But every time I start on the problem sets, I feel overwhelmed and feel like I don’t understand anything. I have to Google/GPT the most basic of things. Even though I’ve been programming regularly the past 6 weeks, I don’t feel as if I have improved and I’m starting to doubt if this is a career for me.
In a year I would like to find a career in development. Have any of you felt this way? And what has helped you get rid of this imposter syndrome?
Lots of others have made good suggestions so far. The only one I’ll add is, do you have anyone you can work together with? Or alternately, any sort of teaching assistant or tutor programs? It helps a lot because there’s a lot of rote memorization when you’re starting out. There are a lot of annoying things like language syntax, error messages, etc. where it’s helpful to have a second set of eyes to help break through those mental blocks. Getting a quicker turnaround on these kinds of things will make the development process much more enjoyable.