Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

I think you need to elaborate on this a lot in order to get relevant feedback. Speaking from experience, a lot of the answers you're getting here won't work for someone who's started a family—you need to be very precise in identifying and targeting the root cause, and you don't have tons of free time for side projects and after-work learning.

In what aspects of your work have you felt out of your depth? Is this sense in comparison to others around you, or to the work itself? When do you most often feel it?

How long have you been in your current company? Are you losing interest in your job, or in web development, or in computers in general?

What you need to do will depend a lot on how you answer questions like these. It honestly might be as simple as getting a new job that stretches and engages you more than your current one.

I started out chasing my curiosity: wanted to make a simple video game, so I Googled my way to one as my first real programming project. I think passion projects are the way to start, because learning programming is frustrating no matter what (but totally doable, and totally worth it).

Some folks prefer guided courses; they're great, but they just don't work for me (I get impatient and bored). There are tons of very good free ones around these days.

Stepping away or switching to different challenges when stuck have saved me countless hours.

Focus on building a foundation of understanding as you go. Copy/paste is totally fine as you learn, but try to read the code, error messages, Stack Overflow posts etc. to garner deeper insights. A lot of it won't make sense at first...that's ok. Things start to click eventually.

I strongly recommend using ChatGPT as a tutor. It's already way better than Google or Stack Overflow, and you can ask specific follow up questions so you can understand the "why" better. I'm currently using ChatGPT to learn Swift (for a new iOS project I've started).

And, reading HN helped me a lot. At first it was mostly Greek, but I read the articles that sounded interesting and can't even describe how much I've learned from reading the comments on this site.

Most importantly, have fun with it :) This is probably the most important point. The field is vast, so pick the route that draws your attention.

Best of luck!

When I am learning something new or working on something difficult, it's important to keep motivation high to avoid getting bummed out, frustated, and quitting, especially if this is self-directed and not required for a job. The way I do that is to start with a working program, no matter how small, and then extending it in very small increments. After each increment you should still have a working program. You might spend a lot of time thinking about how you want to implement a feature (the design phase), but also spend time thinking about how you can get to a larger goal with baby steps. A good analogy for this is if you are contributing changes to an open source project: the maintainer doesn't want to see a 10K-line pull request that they've never heard of before. It's much more likely to be accepted as a series of smaller changes with a larger goal.

By doing these small increments, its much easier to isolate problems, because you haven't introduced much new stuff at once, and always having a working program keeps your motivation high. If you don't have a working program because of some changes, it forces you to be disciplined and fix things before continuing to add more new stuff.

-> use chat rooms like IRC to have free Q&A sessions with experienced developers

-> check out www.roadmap.sh for ideas on which areas to grow skills in

-> ebooks at libgen.is

-> motivational speeches & music playlists (e.g. david goggins, motiversity, two steps from hell) -> video series at udemy.com (and other places, such as KodeKloud and ACloudGuru)