HACKER Q&A
📣 unlimitedpower

How to Improve as an Expert Beginner?


I have started and stopped using countless programming languages but I'm not an expert in anything. I find the beginner courses very boring and usually drop out.

Are there any courses for an expert beginner? Maybe intermediary stuff?


  👤 Jugurtha Accepted Answer ✓
To improve your programming requires that you keep at it; keeping at it is facilitated and fueled with your interest in that which you are trying to accomplish using programming.

The big wood logs are not burning yet and the fire still relies on tinder.

In other words, learning programming in an of itself usually yields poor results and abandonment. Using programming to do something you are interested in yields better results because the interest fuels your effort, and improving programming skills is a side effect.

This is a hack, similar to putting medicine in a steak and giving it to a dog: the medicine (programming) is sneaked into something yummy/fuel/interest (steak), or giving medicine and chocolate milk to a child with a bitter pill.

I think you will learn so much more if you had an actual project for something that truly interests you, or trying to solve an actual painful problem. I'm not talking about working on portfolio projects; those are useless in my opinion, but working on something truly useful.

This is also used in the acquisition of natural languages, not only programming languages: people who watch shows they like, read forums they're interested by, and do activities in their target languages fare better than people who try and study the language itself, especially in the early stages where we have not yet learned to appreciate the intrinsic beauty and subtlety of something, most likely because we are not good at it yet, and still need some sweet to cover the bitterness the pill.


👤 jstx1
Cut down on the courses, increase the amount of actual work. There was an article about this on the front page just yesterday -

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-to-learn-stuff-quickly/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29116026