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

Don't think too far. Find a problem of your own, your family or friends and try to solve it. Best chance is that if you have it, someone else might have it too.

I started development actively in 2010. At that time I was in my first year of college doing Mechanical Engineering which I didn't grasp really well. So, I ended up putting all my time into development.

The first thing I built was a small website which was a music catalogue. When I think about it now, it seems utterly pathetic but it was the first thing I ever built. Later on, I got into WordPress and spent a lot of my time picking up PHP and writing new themes. This was an enlightening experience as I picked up a lot of plugin writing practices and I ended up being invited to a few WordCamps.

In the coming years, I learnt a good deal of JavaScript and was working with PHP frameworks to write a lot of admin interfaces for my own projects and some tools for my college's software development team.

In the last one year, I picked up Ruby and wrote a few tiny gems.

With this much experience, I have been able to port code from most of the languages I have encountered to all the languages I know.

Currently, I work at a company where I write a lot of PHP, SQL queries, a lot of front-end and all of us are expected to be full-stack.

My only advice to you would be:

1. Start slow. Try to spend a lot of time learning from other people's code and attempt to imitate a lot of code which is already out there. Solve the same problem many other's have done and trust me that you will learn a lot more from it.

2. Why don't you start a blog? You can start with a blogging system in the beginning and maybe later you can write your own.

3. When you say:

> "But I don't know how to make a site with logic and structure behind it that will lend itself to solid functionality that users can benefit from."

My answer would be, "If you can solve a problem for yourself, then there is bound to be a person who is benefit from it."

Good luck to you.

One of the best quotes I've heard about programming was from an old C++ developer I knew- "the best way to learn how to program is to start 10 years ago"

The fact you are asking this question is a great sign. This is a key skill that is overlooked in technical hiring and by many development blogs trying to qualify what makes a "good" programmer. Problem abstraction is a huge part of software development. I work in enterprise development around a very specific niche of oil and gas. (ETRM) the "programming" I do amounts to little more than reading and writing to a database. The tricky part is modeling a business process and breaking it down into manageable units of work. For what I (and probably most developers) do, language is just syntax to know and interchangeable.

In my experience, programming is a series of learning curves and plateaus. A lot of what I know just comes from experience. The best way to learn is to program. You will eventually see patterns in the types of problems you see and know the general approach to solving it even if you don't have the exact answer.

Apart from good advice already given in this thread, solving problems with code usually consists of the following actions:

1. Define the problem - think about/write down exactly what you want the final program to do.

2. Break it down into smaller problems, then break those further, right down to the smallest.

3. Solve the small problems individually, one by one.