this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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Programmer Humor
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I find the best way to start is to come up with the simplest project you can think of. Then when you get stuck, you can watch tutorials that help you figure that part out.
That way, you can actually put the tutorial teaching to use, and taking what they're talking about and applying it to your small project will really help get it to stick.
‘Hello World!’
It's true of a lot of things. If you compare it to woodworking or auto repair, you don't learn much by just doing random cuts or undoing and reattaching a part. Having a purpose helps the understanding and retention of that knowledge. And the opposite is true too - a skill or knowledge can fade if not used regularly. I hate going into old code, or for that matter working on part of a car I haven't messed with for a while. I have to relearn and remember what I knew before. Sometimes it comes back fast, sometimes I have to retravel the road of looking it up.
A fun way to do this (IMO) is to pick some really simple classic game, and remake it. Something like Minesweeper, but pick something that's at least sort of related to the concepts you want to learn.
This is a fantastic approach.
I wanted to learn web-dev so I built a blog and a web hostable 5e character generator. Ended up learning authentication, HTTP stuff, database management, and learned CSS and HTML to handle the frontend (backend is Python).
They're not production ready, there's not even a proper server built in, just a basic wsgi dev server, but I'm proud of it and it taught me a ton!
I did the same! Wanted to learn golang, so I built a blog. Kept it simple and used other tech I knew already for the css and backend. Didn’t even enable uploads. This way, I learned go much faster than if I had learned it from scratch. The basics are good. But we’re not trying to be experts. We’re trying to have fun and build stuff.