Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

Reading textbooks.

Using a REPL-based language like Lisp (which I learned from reading advanced Lisp textbooks) for several years before I worked professionally as a programmer enabled me to dive into complex, underexplored parts of the (Python, C) projects at my first job, which meant I basically owned some very important parts of the stack.

Reading and applying ideas from Unix sysadmin books enabled me to be comfortable jumping around the OS very quickly, giving me a speed advantage even when the computer I used was pretty underpowered, relative to my colleagues, early in my first job.

The day I stopped worrying about not knowing everything, and that if you break a seemingly impossible task down into small enough parts it soon becomes clear on what is actually required.

Whenever I have this situation, it's always with a library too big for my smooth little brain to comprehend.

The trick is to dig deeper into those big library's dependencies as well. It's turtles all the way down.

The other thing I find is that big libraries are either mostly dependency bloat (as implied above) or dealing with a hard domain problem. If it's the latter, what you're really struggling with is not the library, but the domain it's trying to represent.

for me it was (and still is, especially when i learn something new) successfully solving problems. for a novice that means breaking tasks down so that they can be solved in small steps, each step giving the feeling of success and motivating you to go on. it is frustrating to spend a week hunting a problem without making any progress. for a novice that can be crushing their confidence, especially if they get the impression that it their fault that it takes so long.

books or classes didn't do anything for me until i was able to actually apply the new things learned. (for me learning is problem oriented, i take a problem and learn how to solve it)

also as a novice i found building a project from scratch daunting, because there is so much stuff to do before you can get to have some actual functionality. i prefer either to start with something very small but with some usable functionality that doesn't take long to build, and then add features until it is completed, or take something already working, and build upon that.

when i learned lisp i took the example project that was in the book towards the end and built it into the tool i wanted.

though i think test driven development can help here too. as each passing test is a success. so write a test, pass it, continue, until you have something working.