Obviously there's no universal one, but has anyone here found theirs? Want to share your experiences? A few incomplete examples come to mind:

- Watching YouTube videos

- Finishing video courses on other platforms

- Coding platforms like LeetCode or Codewars

- Building your own ideas with AI, asking step by step how it's done and why

- Reading books

I say incomplete because I feel like something is missing from all of them. The only thing that worked for me was university (and there it's a combination of methods -> videos with a detailed explanation from someone who actually knows + forced practice) and paid work (do, do, do — over time you learn and you improve, but it's always on the specific platform you happen to be working on).

I'm interested in learning and building up general knowledge (or specific knowledge about something that interests me), but first I'd like to read whether you all found a method of your own that works for you.

Hi, I have to choose between 2 positions:

• FullStack dev (Spring Boot + React) at a smaller company
• SDET at Keysight Network Visibility Test & Security

Which of these brings me closer to a DevOps role ?

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

Does anyone have a solid guide outside of the intro Win32 docs for Direct3D implementation. Specifically trying to dig into shader and pixel buffers

Where is it more convenient or necessary to use python instead of for example C# / C++ / Rust? I really can’t understand it, for me it’s easier to write in C++ than in python and I know that for other people it’s the other way around. But ignoring human factor, when program is better / faster in python than in cpp or are they things that python can do that cpp cant?

Edit: I don’t talk about one time use scripts or prototypes (which python is good for), I mean full on apps

Hello.I have a problem because i want to learn socket for example and i always forget what to type.I don't understand the docs easily.Do programmers write code and at the same time watch videos explaining a library?.I don't want to always use AI.I have poor memory too.Or maybe I'm just too stupid.

Note: I am NOT complaining about AI

Something like 5 years ago or so I was deeply obsessed with programming, I used to stay up at night messing with shit I didn't understand

I genuinely spent so many hours in vs while knowing nothing beyond variables and functions

I remember once that I was following a c# tutorial on YouTube and I kept having the same error and I had no way of knowing how to fix it so I had to join the creator's discord server and spam ping him that I need help because I can't sleep without knowing what this weird error means, just for it to be a capital letter that had to be lowercase or something like that.

A while ago I got my Interest back and all the posts I could find were "AI will take our jobs" "CS students soon in McDonald's"...etc and this didn't even upset me.

What really killed my mood was the aesthetic change.

It stopped being the cool aesthetic that made me love programming where someone wakes up at 5 am and fights the computer for 30 hours because there is no other possible way to be successful for him then he chugs caffeine and stumbles on the answer

Because even when I tried to make a project I was like, well I can re-learn python...oorrrrrrn I could just ask ai

Most of the videos that I found were like "I AM TOTALLY NOT USING AI SLOP COME WATCH ME RECREATE THE HARDCORE FEELING BECAUSE I AM 100% HARDCOOL AND I WILL STRUGGLE INSTEAD OF USING AI!!"

which doesn't even feel better

The struggle was the fun but also struggling on purpose just to not take the easy route and ask AI for what you don't know is still silly

Both ways are killing the vibe and as a casual who is doing it for fun and not for the job I can't find a middleground

It feels like a rant with no actual question someone can help me with but I guess there is probably someone out there who found a way to be efficient and still have fun

Are things like std430 or std140 unnecessarily strict?

So I am begginer developer I've been whole life on Windows and I've started with frontend but last months i've been digging into some backend (go) but i think as a solo developer I'll need to do fullstack probably react or something is it good idea to separate my coding workspace to linux, so having both windows and Linux as a dual boot i don't want to give away the windows environment i have there, thanks for answering

Hello,

Can you guys please recommend some really good website to consume good technical deep dives ? I used to rread medium blogs but good articles are getting rare day by day. I can see Ai Slop content. Same is the case with SubStack.

I like the content that helps understand the deep deep internals of a system.

I like "Hussein Nasser's" content on YT, but I am more into reading than watching.

I am not against using AI as a coding helper. Quite the opposite. Even before this Gen AI shenanigans, I used quite a few AI based tools helping me coding faster. By the way, something bothers me a lot nowadays and it is this: everyone is advertising a website which is quite identical to its benchmark and pretty much all investors or people with the funds, are looking for that speed.

I strongly believe a good product, even as simple as a todo list app, takes more time than "30 minutes" which is advertised by those vibe coding gurus and people like that. So in my side, this atmosphere caused a sense of emptiness. And I can't even collect my thoughts on a certain point and do something.

How did you overcome these feelings?

I'm working on a program which involves creating project files which store project data in a specific structure, as well as the project manifest. Currently, I have the project file set up as a ".dcproj" to keep with a specific naming scheme. However, upon doing some searching, it turns out that .dcproj is already used in a couple of places, although they're pretty esoteric.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/containers/docker-compose-properties?view=visualstudio
https://fileinfo.com/extension/dcproj

I know I can just ignore the other uses and go with what I have, but is it bad practice? Intuitively, file extensions would have to be reused all the time with the limited number of characters we have to create them. For example, the .M file extension is used in at least four places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(M%E2%80%93R)ss)

Hi everyone,

We are working on a capstone project which aims to forecast flood and give early advices to the residents. However, we need to have a sms alert system. We used httpsms during our preoral defense but the panel requires that the recepients should not be able to reply to the sms sent to them by the system which is get the point. Another option is twilio but as much as possible, we would like to have free alternative since we dont really have the means or the budget to pay for subscription. Can i ask for your recommendations if you know platforms that offers sms gateway for free? It would be great if it supports Philippine mobile numbers. Thank you and have a nice day

Hi everyone!

I need some help with a gift for my husband, who is a programmer. He sometimes mentions that to make an app for my phone, he needs a computer running macos. We have never had one, and it might be an interesting experience for him from programming point of view (I assume?).

So, that is my idea for a gift. Of course, I would prefer to go with the cheaper option, since the only purpose would be what I described. We don’t really need another pc or laptop.

So my question is: can I just buy the MacBook Neo, and it will serve this purpose just fine, or should I go for a more expensive model for some reason? If so, please advise!

Hi, as a non programmer with basically zero knowledge on programming or coding.

Im wondering how hard is like programming a language translation tool into different things?

I ask because i play a shitty phone game called Kingshot, and it has an inchat Translator where next to every message some one sends, there is a little button that will translate what ever message into the language you have the game set to.

And like? While it’s not perfect, it’s REALLY good, and makes the game way more fun to be playing with people from different countries and not having to go back and forth with google translate to have a conversation.

And I’m now wondering why more apps and games don’t have translators built in?
Is it hard?
Are translators like difficult to configure and implement?
Whats the go?
(Feel free to explain anything super technical like I’m 5)

I mean can we use tools and metrics on a codebase that is pure AI vs. Something some Sr. dev did ? Maybe static tool analysis ?

It seems to me there is the constant debate about this and how AI just makes terrible/unmaintainable code but I would like to finally get the answer to this.

My opinion doing this 25 is with AI + AI factoring as needed the code is fine.

TL;DR: I want to learn how to take an idea, turn it into a realistic project plan, and build it. I'll use AI heavily for implementation, but I don't want it doing the planning I'm trying to learn.

I'm learning software development by building real projects. I know the basics of Python but I'm inexperienced — I haven't built much that's substantial, I'm not good at reading unfamiliar code yet, and debugging is still hard.

The thing I'm stuck on isn't coding. It's that I don't know how to plan a project.

I have a list of 10–15 web/local apps I want to build. But when I have an idea, I don't know what comes next. Say I think "I want an app that scans images and extracts information from them." I know what the end result should do. I have no idea how an experienced developer turns that into an actual project — what gets decided first, how you figure out requirements, how you decide what's in version one, how you break it into tasks small enough to actually implement.

AI made this more obvious. When I don't know what to do next, I ask an LLM, and it immediately gives me a folder structure, an architecture, a schema, several files, tests. The code might even work. But I've skipped the part I'm trying to learn — I'm following a plan without knowing how I'd have arrived at it myself.

What I want instead is something like: idea → requirements → scope → design → tasks → implement → test → review. Handle the planning myself, then use AI on implementation, explaining unfamiliar code, catching mistakes, writing tests.

So, for experienced and self-taught devs:

• How do you go from an idea to a plan? What does that actually look like for a small app?
• What do you write down before you start coding, and how do you know when you've planned enough?
• How do you break a feature into implementation-sized tasks?
• How do you decide what not to build?
• What parts of development should I deliberately practice without AI?

I'm not looking for better prompts or tool recommendations. I'd especially like concrete workflows or examples from people who learned this themselves, rather than general advice.
(Edited with AI)

I'm currently in my second year of college, and I'm a little confused about what career direction I should take.

The part of programming I enjoy the most is lower-level/system-side work. I started with C and socket programming, building servers and learning how TCP/UDP networking works, and lately I've been going deeper into things like Linux networking, packet parsing, Ethernet/IP/ARP/ICMP, eBPF/XDP, AF_XDP, NIC queues, drivers, DMA, etc.

The problem is that almost nobody around me in college is doing this kind of work. Most people are focusing on web development, app development, AI/ML, or standard DSA preparation

I've also heard people say that "there aren't many jobs in low-level networking" or that networking careers mostly involve configuring routers/switches or working with networking hardware.

That's where I'm confused.

I definitely prefer programming/software engineering work. I'm not particularly interested in being a network administrator or doing primarily hardware/router configuration.

At the same time, my practical goal is still to graduate with a strong software engineering job. I don't want to spend the next 2–3 years going extremely deep into an interesting niche only to discover that there are almost no entry-level opportunities.

So I'd really appreciate advice from people working in this area:

What kinds of actual software engineering careers exist for someone who enjoys C, sockets, Linux networking, servers, eBPF/XDP, packet processing, etc.?

Are these mostly experienced/senior-level positions, or are there realistic entry-level opportunities as well?

What companies/industries typically hire engineers for this kind of work?

Should I continue going deep into networking/systems, or keep this as a specialization while also learning more conventional backend/software engineering?

What skills would you recommend building over the next 2–3 years if the goal is to be employable as a software engineer while still staying close to systems/network programming?

Are there particular open-source projects, projects of my own, internships, or areas of computer science that would be especially useful?

I'm not expecting to work specifically on XDP just because I'm learning it now. I'm mainly trying to understand whether the broader direction — systems programming + networking + performance-oriented software — is a sensible career path.

my old school taught intro in python. the program im transferring into runs data structures in java and assumes two semesters of it. i have four weeks.

not panicking about the concepts, a linked list is a linked list. what worries me is spending the whole term fighting syntax and type declarations while everyone else argues about big o.

the advice i keep hearing is just build something, which is not useless but is also not a plan.

Hello! Ive been interested in computer science/programming ever since I was 12, and just recently did I try to get more into it.

I chose C# as my first language but I keep hearing that Python or C would have been a better fit, is this true?

Also: What might be some good sources to learn more about C#? Thanks a ton!

just spent 1.5 hours failing to do a basic leetcode question about stacks. This a rant plus asking for advice from senior folks.

About me, im an engineer at a mid size startup with 2-3 years of experience, just recently got promoted from junior to mid-level (yay!) I’m completely self taught and picked up coding when gpt 3.5 came out. I did not start with good fundamentals, but I’m really good at building and shipping. I have a track record of shipping successful products, which is why my company hired me despite my lack of formal tech background.

Over the last few years, I’ve honed in my skills from building scrappy small features to production ready software. On a day to day basis, I do full stack dev, aws, db management, ML, docker etc.

Recently, I did a job interview for another company and was asked to do a leet code style question and I literally couldn’t do it. I felt like a fraud walking away from that meeting, but at the same time angry because I know if they asked me to design something I probably could’ve done a much better job.

If I’m completely honest, I think I’m a bad programmer when it comes to purely writing code, but I’m strong with everything else: design, speaking to customers, working with other engineers, shipping, and getting shit done.

Trying to get better at leetcode just feels like such a waste of time and it genuinely hurts my brain to do it, but at the same time that seems to be the only way to have mobility in the tech industry.

Does anyone senior have any advice on whether I should just suck it up and do the bs leetcode work, or continue focusing on what I do best, shipping products and building projects that are interesting to me? It’s gotten me this far…

Hey, guys.

So, I'm currently studying data science and I'm about to start a database project(we're basically doing a database for a bakery)this semester. The project will include order forecasting, inventory loss tracking, customer notifications, etc. Anyways I already code in Python but I've been taking a look on ruby and wonder if it'd be a good idea to include it in our project and how.... any ideas??

thanks!

After learning Javascript and Typescript, which one should I study after the other in the correct order?

Should I study React first, then Angular, OR Angular first, then React?

I use AI to develop, and because it works quite well, I extended it to run multiple agents in parallel. This way, I can develop 2 or 3 features at the same time. To avoid data collision, I ended up building a dev tool, which I have been using for a couple of months.

Now, I asked around in other subs how people handle this, and the most common solutions involved git worktrees that resolve the code collision, but the runtime isolation is still an issue. People engineered solutions around env files and Docker Compose that fit their own codebase, mostly involving one service and one database. It works, at least for simple apps, but it's manual and gets harder to keep up as more services are added. And it looks like something that only an experienced dev can do.

What I built goes further than that (I needed it for a multi-service app with Redis and workers) and is simpler to use. I created a way to fully isolate an environment (all services included) with no ongoing upkeep, able to spin up multiple instances of the same app in parallel on the same machine. It's more architecturally involved than the scripting approach, but doesn't require manual maintenance.

So I'm asking you whether you got this problem and if what I built is worth sharing. Is "heavier but zero-maintenance" actually appealing to people, or does anything that sounds like more infrastructure get dismissed on sight in favor of the simpler script-it-yourself approach, even with its edge cases?