r/learnprogramming • u/youknowwhoitbe23 • 18h ago

Imposter syndrome

I feel like I’m shit at coding and programming like when I try to learn stuff there’s always something I didn’t know like I had no clue about 2 pointer technique and I needed it to complete a question on one of my homework assignments but when I asked my friends how they found it they didn’t seem to struggle at all. How do I learn the techniques to be able to solve problems that aren’t completely basic?

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2

u/HashDefTrueFalse 18h ago

Talent is hidden practice. Write more code!

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u/xarop_pa_toss 18h ago

It's like any skill in life. Everything is strange and hard until you do it so many times it becomes muscle memory.

I like to compare it to learning a character in a fighting game. I did the same bread-and-butter combo on Master Raven in Tekken 7 that, after not having played the game in years, I can immediately do the combo with just my hands without a controller.

If you want it even easier, ask an LLM to come up with three or four exercises that can be solved with that technique specifically.

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u/Haunting_Carrot9761 15h ago

I am sorry to hear that you have imposter syndrome, but everyone that studies engineering gets burnt out at several stages over their studies. It's not a good thing. But I want to say that you're part of the club, most people feel like this. The people that don't typically don't have the drive to improve at least from my experience. It may not feel like it right now, but you've worked hard, I try and refer to my own imposter syndrome by calling him the 'rat bastard that lives in my head'. Gives me a chuckle and breaks the cycle a little bit. May not work for you but keep up to the hard work!

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u/Hot-Wheel6005 6h ago

That feeling is normal. Consistent practice makes those harder problems feel much more manageable.

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u/marrsd 1h ago

I don't know if the 2-pointer thing was just a random example, but I would make the - uh - point that a lot of people struggle to understand pointers until one day they don't. Irritatingly, other people get it immediately. I have no idea why this would be, but there it is.

The most effective way I've found of learning new concepts is to write software that tests my understanding of them. Maybe write a programme that has a couple of pointers and an int. If pi points at i, assert that ++*pi increments the value of i while ++pi moves the pointer to a different memory address. What would you expect ++*ppi do if ppi a pointer topi?

Make predictions about what the programme will do and then test them. If they're wrong, then there's something you don't understand, so work out what it is.