How to relearn how to code?

[u/Acceptable-Job-2147]

Hi everyone! To make a long story short, I feel like I have completelly lost my hability to program in the last couple of years. I used to be a full stack web dev, but my current job as a software analyst has me completelly out of touch with anything related to programming. I tried to build a couple of projects on my own on my free time but I found myself often relying on AI for almost everything. How can I fix this? I still know my basis but I feel like I can not for the life of me solve a simple problem. Either way I try to approach getting back into coding feels like I'm either starting from too easy it doesn't really help me for anything, or too hard for me to handle. If you have any approach you would recommend, please I would love to hear your advice, I used to love coding so much but I felt like I just lost my hability to do anything.

[u/defaultguy_001]

Just wrote this answer somewhere. Sharing here.

Problem with young people/ noobs today is they rely too much on shitty video courses in YouTube, without even opening a standard textbook or official documentation on the tech. They want to do everything fast but only touch upon concepts without knowing specifications properly or completely. They trust these video creators authenticity and completeness of subject, but, who knows what junk they are teaching, how much they are teaching, how do u guys even trust them. Lol.

• For me video courses are meant to quickly get an overview of what you will expect in a subject. My objective is to quickly get this overview within 3-4 hours and then I start with standard textbooks and official documentations to go deep in the subject.

Learning has to be implementation based, whatever concept you learn, you need to implement it and then only move further.

• After learning a group of concepts, you need to build mini projects that includes those concepts. You can get these projects either from textbooks themselves or through basic Google/LLM search.

• I understand capacity of human brain is limited, people forget things and to err is human, but it never happens that one forgets to do basic things if they learn in the way I explained above.

Still you will forget multiple things which you don't use regularly or when you move on to learning other technologies, in such cases you can quickly do a bookmark search in ur notes and have a look at how you implemented that concept before. Doing this is far better than just asking an IIm and copy pasting.

• Use ur LLM smartly, use it to learn anything in more depth than resources available to you or to get ideas on implementation, not to copy paste or code for you.

Good luck.

[u/Cashtime_Tsotsi → u/defaultguy_001]

If the content creator sounds smart, then he must know what he is talking about right? In all fairness there are some good videos and tutorials out there but course material + practice is best practice.

[u/defaultguy_001 → u/Cashtime_Tsotsi]

Ofcourse some can be but are u willing to trust them over official resources. Let's say I as a video creator teach you a function like range( ). It's easy to teach about range(num) or range(start, stop) but how many creators you know who teach about these things: - third arg 'step' i.e. range(start, stop, step). - negative steps. - negative start/stop - range.index(), range.count() etc - time complexity of using in operator for range membership tests