1. Use git for any code you write. Yes, even a simple script.
2. Commit and push often. More often than you think is reasonable. You can always rebase / fixup / squash / edit but you can’t recover what you didn’t commit.
3. ???
4. Profit.

Seriously, once you commited something to the repo it’s hard to lose it. Unless you delete .git. But a this point frequent pushing has your back.

I know git can be hard to grasp in the beginning. It was hard for me too. I highly encourage everyone to put in the effort to understand it. But if you don’t want to do that right now just use it. Just commit and push. It will pay off.

Following tutorials and courses is definitely a very popular way of learning programming but I personally hate it. For me, the motivation was always a problem to solve, and programming was just a tool to solve it. Of course, you probably need to follow some kind of guided experience to gather the absolute fundamentals, but to get better you just need to apply this in practice.

The first ever problem I decided to solve with programming was organizing pirated video files into manageable directory structure. I knew almost nothing about programming at this point and my thought process was something like this:

1. Which programming language should I use? Search the web, read a bunch of articles, make a decision. I chose Python.
2. Ok, first I need to find the files to process. Search the web for “get files in a folder Python”. Read a bunch of answers (never just a single one!). Apply the solution.
3. Now I need to somehow discern between movies and series episodes. Search the web for “check if text contains text Python”.
4. Repeat until you have a working program…

Now, the most important part of this is to have an idea for a project which either solves a real problem of yours or just is exciting to you. Some examples of my projects:

• Due to weird grading system used in my school, calculating GPA was pretty inconvenient. I decided to solve this with programming. I wanted to make the solution easily available to my teammates so I created a web app.
• I wanted to control my smart TV using a computer. I knew it can be controlled using Android application so it seemed likely that I can do the same using my PC.
• I bought a smart lightbulb and I was playing with setting it to different colors while listening to music. A thought suddenly popped up: “hey, can I make it blink to the music?”.

When starting most of these projects I had no idea how to approach the problem. So I just searched the web until I knew it. In the beginning you will probably be searching and reading much more than writing code. But that’s a good thing! Programming (or rather software engineering) is not about typing out code, it’s about breaking down the problem into smaller chunks until you actually know how to solve each of the chunks with the tools you have at hand. Once you have this understanding, writing code is usually rather easy.

You are entitled to your dislikes. It’s just that your comment comes off a little bit aggressive. I don’t see anyone here bragging or feeling smug about their preferences. Just a normal discussion.

Bro, chill out, people are just discussing what they like and don’t like. It’s like a point of social media.

I always wanted to play with those cool pipettes you see in lab stock photos and videos. I don’t even know why but they just seem so cool.

Looks very very cool but I don’t want to deal with an inkjet printer ever again.

Nice I guess. I wonder how many people will change their mind due to this. My mom for example, has zero problems with simultaneously being ultra-catholic (explicitly pro-church, not just pro-religion) and at the same disagreeing with the pope whenever she feels like it.

I would probably fall in love if I got to hear a 30 minute, passionate info dump on a date.

Haha, yeah, I know it very well. It can help but it’s not a silver bullet. I can’t (and don’t want to) use it every day because it affects my cognitive abilities too much. Also, even with weed I still need to actively distract myself with something else, because otherwise I’ll end up just as hyperfixated, but also high.

Yeah, so much this. In my case it’s designing or “coding” (still in my head) something related to my current projects. There’s no point in going to bed if I have some unsolved project-related problem because I will not be sleeping anyway…

Really? Because my first thought was: how did they get away with reference this obvious. I mean, writing “all c… are b…” on a cop car doesn’t seem subtle at all to me.

I’ve never seen anything like that in Europe.

Same for me. The technology is cool. Big tech corporations are not.

Beautiful game, this price is a steal!

Easy. The next step is declaring that refusing sex is an abortion. Problem solved.

Chrome is just faster than Firefox. I use Firefox, but I do it despite its performance, not because of it.

Yes, that’s why I’m asking questions and not bashing this person for using an LLM.

How could you catch hallucinations without checking this information with another source? Or is it the case that coming up with a correct search phrase was the hard part so when you already had the explanation it was easier to search for it? But at that point quoting the other source instead of LLM would be the obvious choice for me.

Hey, that’s a very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing!

After my diagnosis I actually noticed a lot traits similar to mine in my dad. Now I’m almost 100% sure he’s on the spectrum as well. The funny thing is, he has absolutely no idea about autism and I’m completely sure he would never believe that either of us has it.

My mom on the other hand… I never considered it but I will have to think about this now. Autism or not, it is possible that she struggled with some similar things as me and thus didn’t see it as unusual.

Man, that’s fucked up. I’m sorry you found out like that.

When I got a diagnosis in my twenties, for some time I was convinced that my mother had to know but for some reason never told me. Like, when I recall my childhood, how could you even not notice?! I guess you could if you never heard about autism but I know for a fact that she has at least some idea about it. And teachers, etc…

I don’t really believe in this conspiracy anymore. Although I will probably never know for sure because I do not intend to tell her about the diagnosis.