[lucio]

Maybe you need to find a real-world problem to solve using code, instead of learning for the sake of learning. Maybe if you get a job? maybe an internship? or you can volunteer on a charitable organization to make/enhance their web site?

[throwaway_emb]

Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. During my dissertation, I _had_ to write code and I enjoyed it. And now I want to learn more, but not sure where I'd start.

The other problem is that I couldn't approach a charitable organisation and say "hey, I suck at coding and know almost nothing but I'd like to do your website". I lack self-confidence. Not sure how I build that up?

[xaa]

I work for a nonprofit medical research foundation in a lab that does bioinformatics, including some research on text mining information from biomedical journal articles, which might relate to your interest in linguistics.

If you're simply looking to learn, we could certainly use a volunteer, although I don't make hiring decisions for paid positions. It is possible but would be hard without practical experience. There is also a possibility to become a graduate student, although this is a health sciences center so the PhDs are in things like biochemistry, cell biology, etc, even though our lab's research is very computational.

My e-mail in base64 is: Z2lsZXNjQG9tcmYub3Jn

You can translate easily with: https://www.base64decode.org/ or your preferred method.

EDIT: Just to add a little more detail about the kinds of work and technologies. Broadly speaking, we try to mine information out of large biology-related datasets, including text and more numeric kinds of data, using machine learning technologies. Sometimes we put a web-based front end on things, but it is not our primary focus. So if you are more interested in web dev, there is a need for it, or if you'd rather get more into what is now called "data science", there is a lot of that as well. We primarily use Linux, Python, and some bash scripting.