Learning alone is hard! Agree? Disagree? Let's hear your thoughts!

Hey everyone, I've been trying to learn full-stack Javascript for a while now. I've been following the free course at theodinproject.com, which I believe is really good for beginners. At first I learned for some months, then I quit and now I've renewed my efforts. I definitely want to finish the course, but the comments here have encouraged me to try and work on a real project as well. I'll probably try and tackle a basic app for bookkeeping, because I really hate to search and sort all the receipts.

Learning alone can be hard because you don't have a physical teacher to guide you

It will be hard just to keep learning; it will be fun if you put what you learned to the test. A couple of years back, I was interested in Behavioural economics and Psychology. I wanted to learn as much as possible in this field. However, I noticed that I started to forget the concepts I learned without practice. So I started testing these concepts in my work and communicating with people. I have also published quite a bit of articles on this topic. The topics I forgot earlier stuck in my memory because I put the lessons I learned into practice. The human mind will remember things if we can make as much as elaborate. So if you don't want to forget an important concept you learned. Write a program, make it elaborate as possible and try using it at work / for fun. You will never forget, and You won't find it Hard. I hope this helps!

For me, college was a complete waste of time from a curriculum perspective. The only value I got was 1) learning to live somewhat independently, 2) the credentialing it provided (which for me made college worthwhile). Almost none of what I learned was useful for the next 22 years of my professional life or for being an indiehacker.

You may want to try other modes of learning besides online courses. I've always found online university courses and moocs to be insanely boring (I'm sure others have too, hence the abysmally low completion rate). More modern courses (like those on Udemy) are hit or miss but I still find the pacing slow and therefore boring, even at 2x playback speed.

For me, the best way to learn code is to build stuff that you want to build and learning along the way. I'm a big fan of "just in time" learning. Most of what I learned, I learned after college and learned from a combination of books, articles/references/blog posts online, and youtube videos. And lots of StackOverflow.

When you say "most of my courses are focused on math which is essential" that's a big red flag for me. Obviously some coding is math intensive, but for 99% of coding out there I don't think you need more than basic math.

Hope that helps and good luck!

Even universities taught the best, you'd end up with the same diploma as hundreds more. And thousands from different universities. That's not gonna help you to lend a job or become one step ahead of others.

Universities offers more than classes, you can start or join a CS club, experiment leadership, improve your communication skills. Join or host hackathons, win some awards, expand your network.

80% of the courses are visual representations of documentations. One will teach you how to code tinder other one is instagram. You won't get an opinion on how to implement one feature to other. With strong CS fundamentals, it'd become obvious all of them are simple crud applications. User follows other user; add user_id to users following list. User uploads a photo; add photo_url to feed list. Fetch last 20 when requested and display.

You'll only learn optimization when you hit 10K active users. You'll learn to cut the costs only when you start losing money. You'll learn lot more when you are doing something. If I were you I'd find a few friends with similar mindset and work on a dream startup.

Someone who learned Angular 5 years ago would have difficult time these days. There is not much guarantee that React will be around when you grad. If I were you I'd learn a low-level language and grasp all the fundamentals. I've met many developers, who know C usually knows react, laravel, flask or any other framework on top of a high-level language. It's not the same way around.

I never went to University, I wasn’t particularly academic so went and started work at 16. Changed career in my early 20’s to Software Development and have been doing it professionally for 6 years now. From what I’ve heard, University will give you a high level overview of the concepts but the majority of your learning is self study.

It sounds to me like you’re stuck in “tutorial hell” and the problem with the tutorials is that they never go into the detail you want because how to code and how to structure code comes with experience.

My advice, stop with the tutorials and build something, get something out there and build a mini portfolio. The more you code and the more you build the better you’ll get. Find a mentor if you can or try to pair program with others on your university course.

I’d also recommend the Robert Martin book “clean architecture” to give you a deeper understanding on architectural concepts etc.

Good luck!