this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
74 points (95.1% liked)
Programming
23529 readers
334 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the best way to get better at programming is to
If you like, you can also just read some books or scour some programming related communities for general info, without some specific goal. However, most people don't have the motivation to do that, because they don't know what that information is good for yet. That's why, for most people in my opinion, it's better to just try to do something and then learn (better) ways of doing what you want, because then you actually immediately get what it's good for and why you'd need it.
That #1 is crucial. I see a lot of people get stuck in tutorial hell or burn out from doing other people's projects. Some tutorials are okay if you're just starting out but at some point switching to your own projects and challenging yourself is necessary
And since OP mentioned being on/off, i would also just say be consistent. Dedicate some time to work on your own projects so you're not forgetting stuff before it really sticks
I disagree with your first point, when I started learning c++ I wanted to make an integral approximator, an approximator that takes any function and returns the approximate value. I already knew programming through java, and I'm not entirely used to the C++ syntax. Basically what I did to do my programming project that was "fun for me" was rush through the learning process, skipping detail of classes, inheritance, polymorphism, structs, linked lists, pointers and arrays, to get to lamda functions. Eventually I did get to learn c++ formally with my programming class, most of which I don't remember learning it during the summer. Its not that doing your own projects is bad, you just can't be overly ambitious on it.
It's almost like being overly ambitious is simply a bad thing, not being specific to programming or learning programming.