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?

  • RockyBass@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 months ago

    Those cs50 courses are not particularly easy and the problem sets are designed to push you.

    You’ll always need to quick reference basic things, so don’t worry about that, and ChatGPT is great for ‘dumb’ questions.

    As far figuring out how to tackle a problem, remember to break things down into smaller problems and work with those. Each small problem should have it’s own function and then test each function on its own to ensure you get the results you want.

    Data structures and algorithms are not easy. While cs50 does a great job explaining things, look at other sources too for concepts your having trouble with to get a different perspective. While your doing that, experiment with the concept and play around with it in code.