How to become a competent coder? - I was advised to cross post here. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24857168

I would like to code for a living and to contribute to open source projects and things, but my coding skills are absolute shit after taking online courses and watching video tutorials. How can I learn to code for real?

What I would like to learn is algorithms, web development ("full stack"), how layouts work (both in like kotlin compose and HTML) and how to read other peoples code. Maybe thats more than I can chew, but its probably good for me to try out many things before getting settled on one.

Now I have been coding for a while already (~ 4 years), but I kind of feel like I need more guidance to be able to actually create code that works as intended intentionally, and not through trial and error / stack overflow. As for what level i am at, CS50 is probably my only qualification, I have played around with APIs (I.E. making discord bots), and made some html "apps" (horribly made, but things like the "genius" game and a calculator) and "prototype" react websites (as in, really bare bones, barely working).

I do plan on taking CS or something similar, but i'm not yet in college, and I would like to have a good head start before getting there.

Sorry for my bad English, and any help is appreciated.

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[-] Solemarc@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

The best way to learn is to just do it! When I'm starting out with something I generally have a few ideas of basic things I could do with it, generally that's making simple CRUD apps (when I started using Axum I made a simple API that returns json from a file directory as long as the directory is formatted as: /type/name. Then I went and made a website using vanilla js/html/CSS and made everything run using the backend).

This second project is great because there's always something else I could do like auth, like not doing a post and redirect to the same page for updates, like creating dynamic client & employee pages, like using an actual db instead of a script to make CSV files as a db. IMO, THIS is where you learn things.

this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025

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