[dasil003]

I vividly remember the moment this clicked for me. I had spent the better part of a decade being interested in programming and essentially learning recipes. It wasn't until I was a couple years into a CS degree and starting to work professionally as a web developer, that I finally had an epiphany of what software actually was, and the degrees of freedom that it actually has. It's very hard to put into words because it was an internal phenomenon, but I can describe at a more visceral understanding of what is meant by "the map is not the territory", and "all models are wrong but some are useful". It's like, you can build anything in software, it's up to you to decide how to do it and make it relevant for a real world use case.

Of course I was still super junior and had so much to learn, but from that point I could at least interrogate any pattern or best practice to understand why it existed and where it should or should not be applied.

[genghisjahn]

I've had conversations with people who wanted to learn how to code. I found that teaching someone how to code is tedious experience. It's just a bunch of memorization and bafflement at how quickly someone else can do things at the keyboard. I've since come to realize that wanting to learn to code is NOT a good starting place. It's best to have a vision. What's the problem you are wanting to solve? If writing software is a way to solve that problem...well NOW we have something to learn around. We have a vision. We have a goal. And learning the syntax and cs concepts is no longer an end of itself, it's just an obstacle to get through to accomplish the vision. You bring enough of these visions to completion, you'll find you've cleared a LOT of obstacles and wow, you've gained a lot of software knowledge.