How to learn programming faster and more productive

Intro

There are a lot of posts/videos about this topic.
This blog post is purely subjective and was created solely from personal experience when faced with certain obstacles in the course of learning programming to show it from a different angle with illustrations that can probably apply to many people.

Common beginner developer problem

Get the best out of learning without feeling overwhelmed

Keep an eye on the rabbit hole of coding tutorials

Focus on a specific thing

As you understand, to learn something faster, you need to focus on specific things without spreading attention everywhere. It requires nothing more than focus, time, and constant practice. You already knew about it but might forget.

Build something small

Building small apps, and scripts will lead to a lot of experience by going through the whole process of specific things without spreading attention everywhere.

For example, a lot of experience could be gained by copying something that you might like, be it a website or a script. You can always simplify things if something doesn't click.

Start an email/telegram newsletter or a blog

Another thing might be handy to start writing your email/telegram newsletter or something similar that can be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis where you can teach yourself by teaching others.

Organize your thoughts

For example, how to go about figuring out whether you like data analysis or not? The approach of it will be different from person to person, take this as an example.

Phase	Example (beginner)
Focus-1	Figure out data analysis.
Study	Learn Python fundamentals either by yourself or with some course.
Experience	Gain experience in Python and data analysis by using libraries such as `Pandas`, `NumPy`, `Seaborn` for a specific task.
Repeat	Get additional knowledge about data analysis by creating a specific project which can be simplified.
Speed Boost	Better know how to use some functions in combo to get rampage code.
Focus-2	Figure out how to create an animated historical time-series chart movement of Uber taxi drivers in New York.

What is comfort zone? Should I be in there?

The comfort zone is good.

For me, the comfort zone is when I feel secure and not overwhelmed by many things. This does not mean sitting in one place for a long time without a change of scenery or something else, although I don’t see anything wrong with that. For some, it fits, and for some, it doesn't.

Comfort zone from the programming perspective

From the programming perspective, it brings things such as the ability to focus on specific things instead of everything at once, which could lead to torning between things. It lets gain experience (skill) faster by only studying specific things which in turn brings faster iterations between trials and errors.

Comfort zone applicable to everything

All of this stuff is applicable not only to programming.

If you want to start playing piano you need to focus on that and study specific things i.e notes, chords, sight-reading, key signature, and intervals (2nds, 3rds, 5ths...), and practice it regularly until you feel that you can move to a different thing i.e from notes to chords.

Next time is going to be much easier

The most interesting thing about all of this is that the experience gained during the study will be transferred to the next skill that you want to learn.

It will be clearer how to go through the learning material, when to stop watching tutorials and put things into practice, where and how to take examples for study, etc.

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