Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

Just recently started using a website for learning languages called exercism [0] yesterday that has tons of programming language exercises (including Rust and Racket). You might try that, although it doesn't teach you the language (you have to search for language specifics yourself) it gives you mentors that can comment on your particular submissions to exercises. I'm learning bash right now and submitted an incomplete exercise last night with a question and literally just got my first message from a mentor telling me how to print unsigned ints using printf as that was the last thing I needed to solve my exercise. Of course chat channels are helpful for getting aid too.

[0]: https://exercism.io

If people are doing a lot of copy-and-paste or boilerplate, then it sounds like a management issue. I suspect other people are in the same boat as you and are just hacking up anything that works and Just Ship It(tm) to look good.

This is a modern version of an old problem, now with all the micromanagement tracking and Github stats, etc. But it's all equivalent to the practice of counting lines of code. And it's wrong for all the same reasons.

My answer to this is the same for the last 10+ years. Management needs to read The Mythical Man-Month and internalize it, and you need to find a new job.

Too many companies out there think they can run their bloated organization as lean as a startup with all the cruft a "best practices" operation has. Unit tests, end-to-end tests, proper QA, peer review, various code sign-offs, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, Joe Bob Developer at Startup Inc. has root access to the prod server and pushed to prod three times before lunch.

I didn't get married until I was in my late 20s. Before that I had never held hands, never kissed, was still a virgin, etc.

I always struggled with thinking my competition had a huge advantage by having experience in all those things. But now that I have significant experience myself (married + 2 kids), I realize that wasn't really the case. You can go from a level 0 kisser to a level 3 kisser in an evening or two (most people never make it past level 3). And plus, the people worth dating won't reject you on inexperience in those things alone.

I struggle with crippling social anxiety and shyness that has affected every aspect of my life. I'm 33. It's made job interviews awkward/uncomfortable, and even made it hard to find rock climbing partners because I'm not really fun to be around. I don't know what to do. Therapists haven't helped.

I'm struggling to get away from being a developer. I left a comfortable, but low-paying job because there was no future and no promotions or job changes in sight. I want to work with people, not code. I hate being by myself in front of a computer all day.

That led to my current job, where I'm paid twice as much but not really measuring up to their expectations. I'm still by myself in front of a computer all day. I can't see myself getting promoted given how unimpressed they are with my performance.

I had a chance to get some experience doing something other than programming, so I took it - a 20-hours-a-week contract as volunteer coordinator on a political campaign, which I absolutely love, but now I'm stressed and running for my life all the time because I'm working every hour that I'm awake (and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to add more stuff to my todo list).

I'm in trouble at my day job because my performance there has gotten worse, and expect to be fired soon. And now I'm worried that I'm doing badly at the second job as well, because I keep on forgetting things and making mistakes. It's too much and I'm miserable.