| I observed that many people are really afraid even of basic things. "I don't want to click here because I don't know what it does. Maybe it breaks my computer or deletes all my stuff." Maybe it's because I started using computers as a child (~9 years old or so) but I always had the mindset to just try things out. You cannot really break the computer or delete stuff. Every tool will always put a very clear warning before you do sth stupid. And if you are really unsure with some action, just make a backup before. Reinstalling Windows every so often was anyway the norm in my youth. And just trying things out, clicking through the menu, through the actions, just playing around, make some dummy playground, this is often how I discovered the functionality of most tools. This is a very effective way to get familiar with most tools. But others, when they say they don't know how to do X in tool Y, they never have just tried around. And when I ask them why they have not, they tell me that they are afraid of breaking or deleting sth. With coding, it's very much the same. And now that we have Git, with some backup somewhere remote, and hopefully a test suite, maybe even with CI, it's even much less of an issue if you break sth because it always can be undone and you normally should notice with the tests (or if you don't, you can blame the incomplete tests). Btw, regarding reading other code bases: I very much can recommend that. You will most likely learn a lot. And there are many great open source projects where you can just dive in. |
The real skill lies in trying things systematically, carefully, querying your mental model of the system and invalidating hypotheses along the way.