Ask HN: I've learned a programming language – how do I solve problems with code?

Start with an idea, a problem. It really helps when the problem is personal. What do you hate? What annoys you? The text editor you use? Some little feature of JS that the makers of the language seemed to have forgotten about (how could they!)? Some website that just looks wrong to you? The todo list that doesn't work the way you want? Just think of something that doesn't quite work the way you want, a void, and then try to fill it. Just start and get in over your head. Do some spying on how others solved it (preferably only if you really get stuck, or once you made substantial progress). Maybe you can solve it better? Gotta dog food it. I find dogfooding a solution to a personal annoyance is what keeps you progressing towards a finish line.

If your asking about, say, the idea of website design, and the typical systems that make up sites (the software stack), just start reading about website design. Make a dumb website. Make a blog. Make a family photo album. Basically, start, and then figure out what you don't know, and then figure out what you need to know to proceed. It is an iterative learning process of realizing all the things you do not know and calmly tackling them. For some, this is the best part, the adding of another tool to the toolkit, the unearthing of some common pattern among the tools.

Example: If you want to learn to play baseball. You learn the mechanics of the game. You learn to hit, catch, and throw. You can be an expert baseball player, and you can practice the shit out of mechanics all day long, and play games, and win games all day long for decades.

But if you want to manage a club and win games, you need to take that next step to learning the mechanics of the game beyond playing baseball, or all you will ever be is a player, and you will never be able to actually build a team that wins games.

Telling someone to go practice hitting, throwing, and catching in order to perfect their ability to orchestrate and manage an entire team of different moving parts would sound crazy.

And that is how it sounds when people continually say "just go write, fix, and build."

I do not have an answer for this problem. But, the answers that always rear their heads when this question comes around, have the opposite ideals of how anyone that has taken the time to learn the mechanics of development. Those people that have taken the time and effort to learn the mechanics are mostly those that appreciate clear and concise paths to solutions. And, as far as I know there is not good resource for bridging that big gap between mechanics and craft. I could be wrong, and there could be a wealth of this information on this process stashed away somewhere. But, the problem is that most of these paths are most likely buried somewhere in a course or resource that is shrouded in mechanics, when the learner is just looking for craft.

The person that clearly outlines this path from Mechanic to Craftsmen will undoubtedly be very successful.

I completely agree with "working with someone else". Find a programming buddy, do it. Join IRC and start becoming a regular in whatever channels you're passionate about (#programming, #rails... etc). You will find someone you kick off well with, and you will find yourselves working on the same project but the BEST thing is you will both make each other passionate and force one another to finish a project. It's exciting and fun.

However, "being forced to do it" I'm not sure sits well with me -- if you're forced to create web forms all day, every day, you'll get so tired, bored and you'll start to _hate_ programming. It's best to be around like minded people (even if it's IRC or your programming buddy).

My programming buddy is now my co-founder. Exciting times ahead! :-)

My last tip would be to learn algorithms, which aren't tied to any programming language but will give you a really good mindset for solving problems. It wasn't until I really sat down to learn recursion etc, that I learned programming for real.

How do I learn that?

When you figure it out, please pass the message on to the fifty bazillion useless websites out there, that all want me to enter my e-mail address and create an account, yet provide no benefit.

To create something that will benefit users, you need a brilliant idea, not only the ability to code, even to code very well.

If you don't have your own idea, then you get someone else to supply the idea. The idea will start out vague, then take the shape of concrete use cases (interaction scenarios between the proposed system and the people or other agents that use it). From those emerge requirements and a detailed design, and then some prototype code that becomes production code.