Learning to program is getting harder

I tried hosting my own mailserver out of an ec2 instance in an excercise.

Learned lots in those hours and hours

Add a decade and your statement is correct.

Getting a C++ toolchain in 1998 was pretty easy. You were either Windows and lived with whatever Microsoft abomination they shipped or you were on a Unix and you installed gcc and vi/emacs. Truly smart people installed CVS.

In 1988 on the other hand, you sometimes had to figure out how to bootstrap gcc--possibly from the broken garbage compiler the manufacturer shipped and sometimes from nothing at all.

I get along pretty good on blind trust, issuing commands provided in tutorials or setup guides sometimes having little understanding of what the heck it is that I'm doing. There is always an end point that I'm highly interested in and I spend my time learning the ins and outs of. I spend my time learning what I need to learn when I'm stuck. Sure this attitude can be disasterous. I keep current and offline backups at all times and not nuking the production code is a standing order. I know enough to install Gogs, but I am by no means an expert on all things git quite yet. If it weren't for stack overflow and search engines I'd still be writing inconsequencial stuff in Director Lingo. No one can afford the time to really understand the stack, its tens or hundreds of millions of interconnected lines of thought. When I take time to learn something I intend to do something useful with it. At this time my mind is like a buffer. For every new thing I learn, stuff from 10 years ago is fading fast. There is a lot to learn sure. There is even more that is forgetable.

As many others, I also disagree. Back in the day, laptops are more expensive and less capable. Now you can program everywhere with laptop and wifi. More importantly, sites like SO makes learning to program so much easier than before. Back then, if you don’t know somebody you might be stuck with some silly issues for a long time. Not to mention Windows had frequent blue screen of death.

I was you a few years ago. There's two ways forward:

1. Get a job programming and slowly build up your skills/expertise by learning from those around you.

2. Develop a lesson plan for yourself and figure out how to build and deploy different kinds of apps.

I don't know if you're into #1 but I think it can be massively useful. There's so much stuff you don't know about that some dude who's been working somewhere for 5 years does. You can pick up best practices, design ideas, constructive criticism, better coding, better tools, knowledge that's easier to get in person than from a webpage. Today no single person makes a truly great and novel software application, and working at a tech company will make that apparent to you.

As for 2, some ideas assuming you know how to code:

1. Write an HTTP API that talks to several different databases. Learn how the databases work and when to use them. Get good at using them both from their CLI and a programming language.

2. Write a site using React/Angular/etc. and HTML/CSS to query an external API and display the results or organize user input into a fun framework.

3. Find a way to publish both of the above so that mom can interact with them.

4. Figure out how to wire a web app that you wrote to an API you wrote.

5. Find a way to deploy that as a complete system.

6. Figure out how to write a simple iPhone/Android App if you're interested in that.

7. Now make it do something cool, presumably by hooking it up to an API that does the heavy lifting.

8. Now make it all pretty.

9. Now figure out how to get it in people's hands. Collect their feedback and figure out what's working and what's not.

10. Go back to whichever step needs work and fix it.

That's easy to say, but there's a ton of work in learning all of these skills. It's one thing to write an app, it's another thing to get it in people's hands, and it's a third thing to get it to really really work to the point where people love it. A lot of people spend 40 hours a week doing that for years and don't/can't do everything - that the reason there's so much specialization in the world of software engineering.