6
PEPZ
8y

!rant

I'm a rather young developer, self-learned everything and started when I was 13 (now 20) but I still feel like I'm a total beginner since I have not yet mastered the things I am OK at.

Php (laravel, since it makes things much easier), js (jquery, bad at vanilla, have used angular and ember but not mastered), node, linux, html, css, photoshop, illustrator, sql, mongo and windows servers

I know little about many things, can create things that are asked of me but the methods I use are rather bad imo.. ex: I finish coding a section of a site, but when I need to add a new feature I find myself rewriting most of the stuff to add the new feature and in the end still feeling like the code could be optimized further, even though I have no idea how.

TL;DR I write bad code, but things work as long as I am monitoring them. I know little about alot of stuff but mastered none of them.

What should I do? Go to school for programming?

Comments
  • 4
    photoshop and illustrator is not developing tools.
    More like designing tools. Big difference
  • 3
    And yes, take a course or 5 in development / designing. Your knowledge will explode :)
  • 1
    @Linux I know, but I have had to use them a lot in my previous job, also make macros for them to help frontend development.
  • 0
    The good thing is that I am a quick learner if I have example codes in front of me, but I get bored once I have to learn things that I will probably never/rarely use but could help me in the long run. That may be the cause of me writing semi-bad code. Plus there are not a lot of up to date docs/tutorials in my native language.
  • 0
    @Letmecode Thanks! I studied a bit of IT but it was more about hardware, networks and databases. I feel like schools themselves teach outdated methods and practices. Probably reading well documented source code would be best when trying to learn new stuff in my opinion, but finding a cool project for me to crawl through is hard because I mainly create gaming or Steam related projects :/
  • 0
    Interesting that you'd start with laravel and jquery, I feel like if I master the basics (php or js) these frameworks get easier to work with.
  • 1
    @LucaScorpion At first I did learn PHP but got thrown away because my code was pretty much a mess, no structure at all. Laravel helped me get my code organized and structured, plus it does most of the hard work for you. The thing with jQuery though is that it makes life much easier, as a beginner it's easier to start making things with jquery than vanilla js.
  • 1
    Reading well documented code is one way, but I've found I've learned much more from the exact opposite! Figuring out how it works and how to refactor, test and maintain a complete mess of a system calls for a lot of research and hands-on practice. Beyond that, it's motivated me to look for ways to prevent this happening in future projects..
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