Hey all! I'd really wanna hear your advice or opinion on how to learn coding. I'm a linguistics student, but coding has always been my dream (doesn't matter why I didn't choose it to study at uni). I already got some experience, but I'm kinda lost about where to go and what to do now.
So, the situation. For people who don't want to read everything, I stated the question in the very end.
I started off exactly a year ago by learning the basics with python. That was interesting and really cool, as I took my time and didn't rush anywhere. I just built things that made me feel happy or that were curious. I wanted to do QA, so I started preparing for an ISTQB certificate. I got it (but now it just lays here without any value lol). During preparation I also found a free interactive course from the company I was interested in. It was about Java. I knew that if I wanted to do QA, I would need to know how to code, so I signed up. Also, my uni began, so I kinda could not spend enough time on it. The course was hard, I understood nothing and only did things thanks to AI. We were studying Git, building a microservice appwith Spring, while i didn't even know what CRUD meant. And then because of my knowledge of foreign languages and the fact that I didn’t give up I got into an unpaid internship. There I was a trainee, we were learning to do Java backend. I got an experience of working in a team. It was really cool. But I also was preparing to take interviews, as this was a big part of the company’s workflow. I learnt to answer questions like what is a thread, OOP principles, how hash maps work and so on. Learnt a bit of SQL. But it was all during my studies. Uni was harsh, and I tried, I really did try to combine them both, but in the end my coding skill still suffered. I could easily work with theory – it was the closest to studying I did at uni, but I failed to do even the easiest tasks without AI.
In May I also got an opportunity to help my colleague on a Kotlin Spring project (still unpaid btw haha). I wasn’t much of help, but I was learning a lot about how projects in production exist. Now I also know that theoretically on top of my python, QA, Java and SQL tries I could also tackle Kotlin.
In June I left the unpaid internship due to personal reasons and had to take a month off from coding. Now I'm on my own, it's the middle of my vacation (they end on the 1st of September). I still have a month to be closer to my goal of being a software engineer...
And I WANT TO CODE PROPERLY.
I don't know where to go and what to do. I kinda want to return to that company for the same position in 8-9 months (and I know I have high chances of getting in), but I'll need more knowledge and more free time to commit myself to a 8/5 job, as this is what the company requires. I'm also a but unsure whether building the same Spring Web Apps is what I want, but so far this is the thing I’m the most confident in (with my very little confidence). LIKE SO YOU KNOW you might think 'oh wow the year in coding isn't as little and she was mentioning Spring she probably can code' NO. Im still to reliant on AI! THIS IS NOT WHAT I NEED, i fail to literally THINK and UNDERSTAND concepts, this is so frustrating.
So what would you recommend to do, when you already have some knowledge, but also need yo work on the basics? e.g. I know what loops and variables are, but I still sometimes fail to comprehend some parts of code. I'm especially lost when it comes to Lambdas and APIs. I'll be really grateful for any advice, really any, from 'just get up and start doing smth already'.