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Not quite a rant, but looking for opinion/advice.

I have been programming for a little over a year now, excluding those cringy Lua scripting days with if statement hell. I'm pretty far ahead most of the people in my course (1st year Software Engineering), but I'm at this awkward point where I know quite a bit but not enough. All of my projects so far have been small 1-2 source file programs, mostly in javascript although Python is my main hoe. At the moment I'm reading a book on machine learning and I feel like I'm doing fine, not struggling too much with it, but I don't feel confident at all in my abilities. I had two programming internship interviews half a year ago, both of which I wasn't accepted in. I've been thinking of contributing to an open source project lately to get some "real world" experience but I can't find a good project to start with and just don't feel like I'm good enough. There are also a lot of small things I come across such as async and coroutines in Python which I'm not familiar with yet and they make my confidence drop even lower. I'm guessing most of you have been in a similar position. Would you have any advice for me? Should I search for a project or should I keep on studying with books?

Comments
  • 2
    I was in a similar situation that you are in about 6 months ago. My advice would be is to do both. Im 19 now and never went to college and got a degree, I had taught myself everything I know, or the internet did at least. So the experience with git and helping with open source projects is always good, and try to make some projects at home which then you can show to interviewers to show your hard working passionate and keen. Then some one, some day will give you a chance.
  • 0
    I was in a similar situation a few months back. I've done a few of projects in NNs since then. If any advice I can give, I'd suggest implementing something, a paper on a network(in a domain of your choice) which can fit in your gpu. (you will face a million errors along the way, they help in learning, so that's ok). Along the way you are going to learn enough to contribute in some sense to any open source project online cos that's gonna give you a good base.
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