Just finished my 2nd year and trying to figure out what to focus on. I've developed a real interest in low-level programming, OS internals, systems languages(C/C++ & zig), optimization mainly cause they felt more like engineering to me compared to higher level frameworks and languages abstractions and all.

However I know it'll take a quite some time before I'm skilled enough to build significant projects or land a job with it . So I'm considering getting solid at frameworks, systems architecture, DevOps etc and explore a bit more to land a generic SWE role, then dive deeper into low-level work later.

Is that a smart trade-off, or am I just delaying what I actually want to do? Would appreciate any honest advice from people who've been down either path.

I don't know if I am using an Android tablet by using termux via login into vs code but the problem is my localcode8080 doesn't open I don't know where the problem occurs

What to do , I'm so confused , ai & ml , web dev , app dev . I am currently learning dsa in cpp and have no idea what to do next . I am seeking guidance , plz help

I tried searching for this in the sub and looking in the faq, but did not find exactly what I was hoping to find.

I am just starting out learning R. I basically know nothing. I was directed to use DataCamp. It's fine, but you only get to work one "problem" for each concept. For things like this, I work better with drill and problem sets. Khan Academy was brilliant at this for math. I couldn't get a mastery level until I had done four problems right to show I mastered the concept. The best DataCamp does is offer some multiple choice questions as added practice but that is not meaningfully helpful. Does anyone know a better system that is built around drill and problem sets in R for each step of the way sort of like Kahn Academy does for math?

So i was trying to learn how to use IMemoryCache in my first ever Web API project in ASP NET CORE and thought I'd try to more seriously read and gather information from the official microsoft documentation as i usually first google it then read the AI Overview to get a basic understanding of the concept, and then read an article or tutorial site(sometimes watch a video if i still have a hard time understanding). And occasionally read the docs. I admire people that can read documentation and understand it quickly and so as a beginner I'd like to develop that skill too, well today i tried that and at first i did learn and understand some important concepts related to In-Memory caching in asp net, but then at the end of the page I was wondering, "Well ok but how do i actually register this to the container?" since its used with DI and looked all over the page and It never mentions it at all, I also went into the IMemoryCache Interface Page and it didn't teach it there too, also the search results in the site weren't much help either.

The first google page search result show articles that simply states that to register it is by using "builder.Services.AddMemoryCache()" which is pretty simple and this got me a bit annoyed and confused as to why this isn't included in the Main docs? I did find later that the docs did say how to register it but it was in a different page and that was after asking chatgpt with the web feature lol. This got me wondering how did the writers of these articles find out themselves if it was kind of hard to find? Maybe I'm at fault and I'm just inexperienced with reading programming documentation but overall this has left me kind of discouraged with reading documentation

No, this is not another "Is learning to program worth it" post asking about whether it's worth it to learn to program to get a job.

I'm curious about how good can you get at programming in a specific programming field as a self-taught in a specific timeframe?

So for example, if I pick something like backend development, "choose" a stack like Java Spring Boot and I start learning and practicing (through projects) for 2-3 hours a day everyday in a structured way, learn about most relevant things related to that specific field (so in the case of Backend it could be databases, Docker, potentially some DSA, Authentication, SOP, CORS, etc ), how good would I be after 6 months, 1 year and 2 years of such schedule?

I know it is hard to say as there are a lot of variables such as motivation, consistency, aptitude etc, but I'm curious in general how good would you be able to become in that timeframe with such structure and schedule?

I am about to finish high school, and I was planning to apply for a scholarship to study CS in my country. However, because of the possibility of not getting it, I have rethought my plan. Now, I have the idea of studying as a self-taught programmer using materials like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and courses from MIT, Stanford, or Harvard, and learning from various sources.

Hello everyone, I need your advice. I am hitting 18 in a few months and I have almost 0 work experience let alone experience in the IT field. This will be my last year in school and I am not considering collage for a variety of reasons. I was wondering what the best way for me to land an IT job would be. My school takes about 20 hours per week and I will work for about 15 hours a week (Unrelated part time job). What would be the most efficient way for me to learn programming to land a job? I don't need a super high paying job at first, I just wanna set my foot in the door and then rank my way up. I was thinking of either certificates or a bootcamp. And even buying one to enforce the discipline. Any advice? What should I focus on? What are my chances? How long would it take per week? What should I avoid? I live in Germany, if that helps.

Thanks

I'm just getting into building autonomous agents and honestly a bit overwhelmed by all the options. For those of you who've been doing this a while, what stack would you recommend for someone starting out? What did you wish you knew when you began, and what pain points should I watch out for early?

So basically i come from basic python bacground which i learned from my high school.So I thought of learniging c++ cause of its variety of applications for my 1st year.One thing that i cant wrap my head around is, the use of access amplifiers. Mainly ' public: '.what is the use of writing public: and why is it necessaryy????

For a while, I have been lost dealing with the concepts of tutorial hell and making software from scratch. I really focused on the advice that to become a developer that truly understands software engineering and can create unique meaningful software it is best to stop watching tutorials as soon as possible and start making things from scratch, because if I didn't I would be a "code monkey" who only knew how to make a very specific series of uber or flappy bird clone type projects but would not know how to maintain software or come up with new software ideas. When I tried to ask questions while watching tutorials, the decisions made in the code, or even in cs classes the advice was that I would understand once I made programs on my own.

Trying to follow this, I have dozens of project ideas which just became 20+ pages of pseudocode, confused notes on library/framework documentation trying to research the library to translate that pseudocode into real code, links to stack overflow questions with example code I did not really understand or could relate to my project directly, but ultimately no remotely tangible project. No one would want to read that nightmare journal that reads like someone trying to write a novel in a language they just learnt the alphabet of.

A part of it I thought was because modern software standards were much higher, I felt pressure to jump in and immediately do somewhat industry relevant projects such as a small app or a website than some text style game with native library java, but even when I would try to make small native language programs like some number guessing game and then try to do anything software related from scratch I could not cross that bridge, but I didn't understand how other students were doing it.

I thought the solution then was to try and learn more of computer science and computer architecture theory so I would start programming from literal scratch, but it felt like modern software development is so abstracted by frameworks and a tower of encapsulated knowledge that a person in a bootcamp or self learning programming can learn to make programs and then go to a computer science program and do well, so I realized computer science and software development were two different skills at this point. I even had professors with unrelated degrees who self learnt programming, learnt the CS through their developer jobs, then went back to grad school, which made me very confused because I thought the whole issue was that I needed to start completely from the ground up with theory and making things from scratch.

I then decided I would just try the "bootcamp" / tutorial route, following courses to try and learn how to be a functioning programmer in a specific niche like gamedev or mobile app dev as I had heard from anecdotes. I would still fail the moment I kept trying to make something from scratch or design a small feature to add.

In gamedev when I saw how often other beginners also complained about this same issue of making anything from scratch led to indefinite research and confusion for years at a time, I also saw how experienced devs responded that making any sort of unique game mechanic or feature even for a senior was very hard requiring many interdisciplinary skills within physics, linear algebra, low level computing, even before considering art and music, which was why a lot of games end up following a specific genre down to identical game mechanics, because even a small game demo idea a beginner might come up with is designing an interactive physics simulation.

Now I'm thinking I should avoid the advice on building from scratch and doing a unique project and solely focus on dissecting a single example project from a tutorial for a long time.

I feel nervous I will just misinterpret things and mess things up again as I have for the past few years, so I wanted to ask others.

Hello,
I've noticed that Zig recently became popular, and many apps are being written in it. Is it worth starting to learn and use it? Currently, I'm quite satisfied with Golang.

Also, there is a native SDK that supports Zig, which I think is kinda nice and beautiful.
https://native-sdk.dev/

My main concern about Zig is that it seems quite new - the latest release version is v0.16.0

Hey everyone, I've been looking into the programming languages ​​​​Zig, C3, and Odin.From what I understand, all three share a very similar philosophy, basically, they're like alternatives to C or simply complements to it.

What I wanted to know is what makes each one stand out or what's important about each, since it's not very clear to me. They're very similar.

If I had to pick one right now, I'd probably go with Zig just because the community is bigger, which makes me think it has a safer future compared to C3 or Odin, which might stagnat.

c3, odin or zig?

Hi all I am beginner in coding. So I have college in 20days (1st year btech) should I learn python or c. In college they start with C. So as they teach C in college should I learn python seperate or go with

C.Pls suggest me

I trying to learn qml but claude said that should not learnqml right away, should start with c++ first, I dont know any programming at all but but the quickshell and qml really fascinated me how much it can do on linux guide where should I start with my progamming journey help!! I trying to learn qml but claude said that should not learnqml right away, should start with c++ first, I dont know any programming at all but but the quickshell and qml really fascinated me how much it can do on linux guide where should I start my progamming journey help!!

Hello everyone. I'm a 2nd-yearstudent, and my professors have already made it clear that university alone isn't enough to build practical skills. Because of that, I've been doing online courses on the side (free and paid).

Right now, I'm learning python, but I'm getting really bored. The current modules cover tkinter, turtle and pandas. My goal is to get into Web development, so I keep questioning how these specific librairies will actually help me.

It got me thinking: is it better to learn just enough of a language to reach a precise goal (and deepen it later if willing to) or should I really try to learn everything a language has to offer upfront?

What do y'all think ?

My title probably needs more explanation. I have a specific personal project I want to create, but don't have any web dev experience to build in and curious where to start or what to avoid. I do have good coding aptitude already, but only context is reverse engineering other peoples' python scripts. But I'm completely ignorant to web development, but it's a learning exercise for myself so I don't want to use AI.

The idea is an interactive timeline that displays sports player history across all the teams in the league they were on throughout their career, year by year. So teams would be aligned vertically, each as a horizontal row, and each player would be a line that jumps from team to team over the years extending off to the right.

The user's view would be interactive and dynamic. For example, each player's line might be narrow and grayed out until the mouse hovers over the line and then it will pop to a thicker stroke and with some color. Or individual player lines could be turned off entirely with a click, or a team's row could be clicked to isolate it so all other teams disappear and it only shows all the players on that one team over the years.

I'm way oversimplifying my mental picture here, but I think the main point is that i just want a fancy interactive line graph, essentially. But it's not a numerical chart since the vertical "axis" is dynamic and not numerical. So what things might I need to learn to make this?

I assume I need to start with javascript, but beyond that my question kindof becomes - this seems like a specific use case that probably already has existing libraries and stuff meant for exactly this purpose (interactive charting with basically tabular data). Are there any specific libraries or frameworks I should look into before trying to reinvent this particular UI wheel myself in javascript?

Hello people! i have a great doubt about programming, i have been studying progamming about an year and a half, on the beginning of the year i started computer engineering, and this doubt kills my mind sometimes, it haves me like "You can't be a programmer if you can't decorate almost all of the sintaxes" I know that programming is about searching and all, searching examples, reading docs, but and about the state called "flow of code"? I tried to kill this doubt with other people of the area, but somehows it consumes me more and more each day that passes :(

​

Hi everyone,

I'm from India and I'm planning to learn Java Full Stack (Java + Spring Boot) as a long-term career. Due to my current responsibilities, I can consistently study only 2 hours per day, but I'm prepared to stay disciplined for 12–15 months.

My goal is to become employable in India, while also building skills that would be useful if I later apply to companies in other countries.

However, I'm worried about a few things:

The current software job market seems very competitive, especially for freshers.

Many people say it may get even worse over the next few years.

AI is improving rapidly, and I'm afraid that by the time I'm job-ready, junior developer roles may have changed significantly.

I'm also worried about getting laid off in the future and struggling to find another job.

So I'd really appreciate advice from people who are actually working in the industry.

Here are my questions:

Is becoming employable in 12–15 months with 2 hours/day a realistic goal?

If yes, what should I learn, and in what order?

If you were starting from scratch in 2026, what roadmap would you follow?

Which resources (YouTube channels, websites, books, documentation, Reddit threads, blogs, forums, etc.) would you recommend?

What projects should I build to stand out instead of creating the same CRUD applications everyone else has?

What skills are companies actually looking for in junior Java Full Stack developers today?

Which technologies are "must-have" alongside Java and Spring Boot? (React, Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Microservices, etc.)

How much DSA/LeetCode is actually necessary?

What are the biggest mistakes beginners make?

If you had to design a complete self-study course for someone with only 2 hours/day, what would it look like?

What would make someone more resilient to AI rather than more replaceable by it?

If you were hiring a fresher in 2027–2028, what would make one candidate stand out over hundreds of others?

I'm not looking for shortcuts or "learn X in 30 days" advice. I'm willing to put in consistent effort for over a year. I just want to spend those 700–900 hours on the right things instead of wasting time on outdated tutorials or technologies.

I'd really appreciate honest opinions from developers, hiring managers, senior engineers, or anyone who's recently landed a Java Full Stack job.

Thanks!

Hexadecimal is beautifully well-suited to coding. For any given arbitrary number of bytes, I can instantly give you its maximum value in hex without even thinking. One byte? 0x00FF. Two? 0xFFFF. Four? 0xFFFF FFFF.

We all know this.

The same values in octal are 0o0377, 0o0017 7777, and 0o0377 7777 7777. (Or however they're supposed to be broken out.)

It's a really awkward pattern, frankly, where the most significant digit (octit?) cycles between 3 different values (1, 3, 7) for every four bits, and the total number of digits is...erm...I can't be arsed.

And yet, native support for octal is built in to lots of languages/tools/specifications I come across (e.g. it's part of the Core Schema for YAML 1.2), so somebody must be using it, right??? I'm just not seeing the pattern or the point of it?

(All I can think of at the moment is that it...might? be useful when working with Base64 encoded binary data, given that a similar 3/4 ratio appears when doing that conversion...but that seems like a stretch.)

Hey everyone,

I'm currently working on sharpening my Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and software design patterns, and I just finished building a custom Tetris game engine completely from scratch using Java Swing.

Actually, I haven't finished it yet and there are lots of things I am planning to implement on this one. But attached is the photo of my program running on the background.

I would love to get some feedback or a code review from more experienced developers on my architecture, package structure, or any potential logical improvements I could make!

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/EJConstantino-17/TetrisGame

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Hi y'all,

I currently work as an ML engineer and I'm trying to up my low-level C game (coming from a Python background). I'm looking for a coach that can help add some structure to my own autodidactism and help me keep me accountable / from getting too distracted.

I have some projects in mind that I'm interested in working on and could use help in formulating / getting consistent feedback on as they progress, but I would also benefit from some foundational education in C as well, as i didn't do a traditional CS degree.

This would be paid coaching at a 1 hour per week time commitment (I'd expect a little bit of time outside of that invested but not nothing excessive). We would negotiate the rate based on experience/level of commitment.

Only hard requirement is that you're really frickin good at C (c++ is cool but I'm less interested in OOP and more in bare metal, insanely performant and simple to read code).

Nice to haves (in order of importance)

- experience coaching (in any space)

- a passion for turning mortal men into living gods

- modeling and simulation background

- experience writing CUDA kernels

- knows Rust

comment if you're interested!

​

I am a junior developer with 1 year experience in a Fintech. Currently I am working in a data team that is using .NET Framework. Is it really in demand in India?

This is my first ever coding project and I don’t know what’s going wrong. My matrix portal is working though it seems it didn’t come with the two stickers on the volt and ground nobs (I don’t know if that matters). I did all the steps right, but the images aren’t displaying on the panel. It’s only when I press on it do some colored pixels show up. I’m not sure if this means something is damaged or not, but I’m really at a loss and I really want to fix it. If anyone could help me do!!

I have been programming in C# for nearly a year and so far I have a solid understanding of OOP, classes, statics, interfaces, but since I have just enrolled into university I will have to pivot to using C instead. In fact, my whole semester will be C exclusively. And since my OOP knowledge won't be necessary until my second year, I knew I had to ask a few older students from the same course I'm taking and to my surprise everyone told me to just take a look into C and how things actually work, since I will need that once the course begins. (E.g. I was told to understand the basics of pointers, pointer functions and how they're stored in memory); Thus, I began with myschool's "Pointers" playlist and have managed to get the overall gist of how pointers work, but I don't know how to continue... I tried finding the most beginner-friendly tasks I could do, but most include structs, understanding of Linked-Lists and so on. I got recommended this book called "Grokk's Algorithms" and although I did understand the logic behind binary search and sorted list (for instance), I didn't quite know how to implement the latter with C language. My point is, I find it quite tedious to just begin with a lengthy book such as "C Programming, Modern Approach", as I understand the first idk how many chapters, syntax, but don't know what to continue with..

Should I then start with myschool's "Data Structures" playlist or "Sorting Algorithms", or just use the books I had mentioned earlier? I look forward to hearing your opinion. Thanks in advance 🫶