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?

  • railsdev@programming.dev
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’m willing to bet there’s a bit of a learning curve. I am a self-taught developer and my hours of free time in my youth gave me the time and lack of hurriedness in the beginning.

    I like studying (human) languages a lot and I go through a similar frustration with those. At first I have to keep studying because I forget all the grammar/vocabulary and get super frustrated at my lack of progress. Then one day it all clicks and the language becomes easy.

    I’m willing to bet that after some more time you’ll get the hang of it.

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’ve always read about that “clicks” thing for spoken languages. Programming has always made sense to me, it never needed to click. But I think I’m at the precipice of that click with Spanish. It’s more like… I understand it but have to translate it to English now in my lessons, whereas before I had to translate it to English to understand it.