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Yo, I provide some backstory on my coding journey, you can skip this to the very end. I just wanna know what to do from now on. Now I don't expect to find the fully complete answer here, but hey who dislikes, free, good advice from genius hackers. I started coding, nah, writing markup and stylesheets when I was 10 or something with NetBeans which was weird but it was the IDE that the tutorial guy used, hoping to learn how to make a website, make money then buy a good computer so I can run a proper 3D game engine (instead of construct which I didn't like) and make games. While at first I just wanted to make money, It felt good. It went like this for a year and I didn't make any money. And I think I stopped programming or more precisely did much less programming than before for some reason I don't remember. After a year I started again, by then I had learned that I don't have to use NetBeans and I can use notepad++ which was smoother on my 1GB-ram-mobile-chipset-broken-keyboard-black-monitor-tochpad-burnt-connected-to-TV-via-HDMI Acer laptop. And yeah my neck hurt looking at the TV from close distance. I switched to English learning sources, primarily w3schools. And It went on like this, I learned some JS. I bought a course with info I already knew, but it filled some holes on basic things, for example I didn't know what a title tag is. I completed the freecodecamp.org courses even though I knew most of the stuff, until the JS part. I didn't know what functional programming, OOP, and mutation mean. I was told to not change a variable, I didn't, I passed. I didn't understand. I was hoping to get a job with getting a freecodecamp certificate. Then I went to get the React certificate, I hadn't worked with React before or any other framework. I learnt why frameworks are cool. I participated in some middle-school competition, I chose the software topic for some reason and made a timer with C# and it got rejected. Next year same story with Game topic, I don't know if I even made anything. Then next year I made a question generator with js and it was rejected. I got accepted to "shining talents" school, and people got surprised because unlike others I studied while I programmed and watched movies and played games, even in finals. People were very smarter than me and I found out I was a big frog in a small pond. But many of them didn't program. So I was mostly studying, but then after the first term exams, there was a golden time, when I only programmed and studied, mostly programmed and didn't play any games. Not because I forced myself to, because programming was much much more enjoyable than games to me. That time passed, and not only I programmed less than the peak, I programmed less than ever. By the way, for 2 years, I would do 6 months of web dev, get bored then switch to game dev. And I participated in GMTK game jam every year. I made no interesting projects. Not even boring completed projects. Of course I completed a game once a year at the jam and that was it. There was more studying, and then AI hype. Before AI hype I didn't like the way things went, I had to search simple things simple as loop syntax in JS (I kept forgetting syntax). Also I was only learning frameworks and making nothing. I was learning svelte at the time. After AI hype, I wrote literally no code. Sometimes I opened a HTML to program without AI, then I would just set up the basic stuff like fonts etc and then closing it. Even with AI I made nothing. My friend told me to participate in national AI Olympiad. I got a national gold medal. And it was good because I felt even though my programming journey wasn't perfect, it has helped me, as I was saved by my practical score and became 1st practical. But I don't know what to do from now on. I don't seem to like AI. Even not sure if I like game dev anymore. Please help. |
There's a few main subjects, where it would be nice if you could elaborate, and/or get it (more) clear for yourself, then summarize to what conclusions you've come.
1. Skills. What programming languages have you worked with? What tools you know well? What are you good at, generally? What do you like doing? Can you remember moments where you were in a "flow"? (like where you felt like the Zen master of pancake-baking). Have you completed courses / read (e)books on fundamentals like advanced math, computer architecture, data structures, algorithms & the like?
2. Motivation. What do you hope to get out of it? Expand your knowledge? (if so: in which fields / subjects). A well-paying job? Start your own business? Help your home country (or local community) move forward? Contribute to Open Source projects? "Be where all the excitement happens"? Become that specialist with super-rare skillset? What provided most satisfaction on past projects?
3. Long-term goals. Where do you want to see yourself in 5..10y from now? Achieve x, y or z? [insert bucket list here]. Have you considered getting into a different line of work? (embedded systems, robotics, education, industrial machinery (PLCs, sensors etc), graphics design, ....).
Please just pick & choose questions from above whose answers are most clear to you. Or anything else you'd like to add.