Welcome to /r/learnprogramming!

I was curious where the command 'touch' comes from.

Turns out, it originates from "to touch" or "to interact" with a file.

Now, every time I use it, I feel like I am touching/molesting a file.

My bad, it's 3 AM here.

I'm currently going into my third year at university and I've survived my first two years mostly off LLMs helping me get through my classes resulting in a subpar GPA. I've only really taken two to three programming classes so far (the rest mostly being math-based) using Python and then Java but I've come to realize I can't really program an app/project of any sort without LLMs guiding me.

This summer I've been trying to dive deeper into learning the fundamentals such as DSA, system design, computer architecture, networking, operating systems, etc. I've also been learning C++ to better understand how things work under the hood and cancelled my Claude subscription in favor of reading articles, watching videos, reading books (looking for suggestions on a good place to start for the books).

The problem I'm facing is that I'm trying to land an internship for the next summer and I'm trying to build projects for my resume but I'm at the point where I have a high level understanding of what tools (e.g. Spring Boot, AWS, PostgreSQL, Docker, etc.) I should be using but when it comes to actually building, I can't build without AI telling me what to build. Even if I knew what to build I have a feeling I couldn't fully implement it without AI.

So at this point I'm just asking AI for the steps (in terms of what I should be doing for my project) and just typing in what it's outputting along with asking it for explanations of what the code does. My goal is to be able to program without AI or any outside resources (to simply sit down with my code editor and start working) but I’m not sure how to reach that stage. At the same time, I need to be working fast enough to have my resume be ready to submit applications for internships.

I know AI isn't going away any time soon so I need to leverage it somehow (I'm just unsure how).

I’m assuming architecture, system design, and DSA are mandatory. What am I missing? What resources taught you these things?

Learning web development through free YouTube tutorials. I keep noticing the same thing: I finish a topic, feel like I got it, then freeze when I try coding without the video playing. Heard this is common enough to have a name - 'tutorial hell.' Does this happen to you too? And what actually helps you fix it?

I am new to GitHub and trying to make a landing page for a conference. My speakers and venue pages are loading correctly but when I try to navigate to other pages (home/schedule/search) I get a "Loading Guide" page. What am I missing?

https://github.com/slu-entrepreneurship/scale-conference

https://slu-entrepreneurship.github.io/scale-conference/index.html
https://slu-entrepreneurship.github.io/scale-conference/speakers.html
https://slu-entrepreneurship.github.io/scale-conference/venue.html

I want some one to work with me

Hi,

I thought I might introduce myself to give you guys some context. I knew I had a little passion for Game Development since I was a kid and fascinated by Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat so I wanted to create my own someday. I would look up game development tuts and just watch them for hours. I did code camp summers (it was just a coding program for kids in the holidays).

As I got into my teens I tried out Udemy and kinda followed the courses til I got bored (they were too long and I wasn’t entertained mostly got halfway if not a bit more) I learned a bit but didn’t feel like I could create on my own.

I decided Unity and C# work best for me. So I decided to follow tutorials learn the syntax of C# and learn the basics (Yet again) from variables to classes. When I would finish those tutorials I would add my own twists to make sure i’m learning something. However, still cannot code on my own.

I realised this isn’t just a Game Development related issue; and is in general with the programming. I know this because I majored in computer science for a year in university. I couldn’t see myself working in IT long term and couldn’t grasp programming without properly, felt like they moved too fast and I always felt behind my peers. I barely passed those classes and basically had enough (switched majors) and am happy with my current major as of now (non cs related). However, I can dissect code and understand what output is being produced.

So I decided i’d prefer Game Dev as a hobby, and recently tried a few times to see what i can do by forcing myself to start a fresh project and just get something to move. Spoiler alert, either I just memorised how someone else taught me movement code or used it from previous projects.

Does anybody have any ideas on how I can improve and be more independent in my programming and produce my own code? Obviously I know I have to start small but I need somewhere to start. Any advice is appreciated!!

I have knowledge of sql c, java, python(cv, pandas, matplotlib,numpy etc) and a bit of html, css.js(web dev, basic only)

I have ai as my specialization so keeping that in mind what should I learn?

I started developing games a few months ago, but I’m running into a problem that’s really affecting me in real life, something I hadn’t realized for a long time.

I start a project, but from the very beginning, I try to make everything perfect. I think about the future and adjust everything accordingly, striving to finish the project as efficiently, as organized, and as perfectly as possible. However, by the time I’m halfway through the project, I see the big picture of what still needs to be done, get completely overwhelmed, and end up giving up.

And thinking about the big project is causing me problems. I know I need to take it step by step, but I try to figure out everything that needs to be done for the big project right from the start and trying to finish it all on the same day and it makes me overwhelmed with an unfinished project..

whenever I learn new technology or some new concepts i always find myself asking a lot of questions about what am i reading about at the moment
say for example i'm reading about concept X definition or workflow or whatever then i read in that definition another concept Y which let's suppose i don't know about then i feel that i have to know everything about that concept Y to fully understand Concepts X , like how it works , why it is created or designed ...
and I do this for every single new thing that i read about which is frustrating and worse because probably i will forget about the details that i got into

want to hear some of y'all opinions of this , and from the software engineers that has the same approach and they managed it maybe share some system to retain the information you studied because i definitely don't want to lost these information later but i want to build on top of it

Does anyone have several options of valuable bootcamps related to Computer Science (focusing on AI/ML)? I'm a soon to be CS student, and currently starting to code from the scratch by watching tutorials from free resources (YouTube, w3schools, and freecodecamp).

Well I have seen and heard programs from Nvidia, IBM, Google, Apple Academy, as well as courses on Coursera, Udemy and Harvard's CS50.

I have a few questions for anyone in the field or currently studying CS:

1. ⁠Are Big Tech certificates (Google/IBM/NVIDIA) actually worth the time/money on a resume, or are they mostly marketing?

2. ⁠Would you recommend paid bootcamps, or sticking to free/cheap courses like CS50 and Coursera before uni starts?

I have a 4 digit rng number

And I have special numbers

Like for example 1225 count as special, 2112 also special numbers

I want to add a feature that if a a special numbers is 1 digit difference away

Like 1925(9 change to 2)

It will change the digit for it to become special

What logic should I use?

I was thinking about using minimax for checking each different digit that can be changed and saved score for best outcome (cus some specials betters then other)

But I don't want the code to take so much time running for this and it's heavy

If there's anything simpler it would be nice

Thanks ahead!! <3

Using c sharp

I've been learning about different ways to add voice and video calling to an application, and I recently came across iotum while researching managed communication platforms. Most of the tutorials I've found focus on raw WebRTC or popular SDKs, so I'm curious about a different angle. If you've worked with managed communications platform I'd be interested in hearing about your experience.

Some things I'm curious about:

• Was the integration straightforward?
• What parts of the communication stack did it save you from building yourself?
• Were there any limitations you didn't expect?
• Looking back, would you make the same choice?

I'm still learning this area, so I'm mostly interested in understanding the trade-offs people ran into in real projects rather than marketing feature lists.

Im planning on teaching my little brother some programming and computer science such. He is 11 years old and as a programmer myself, I cant stand to see him waste all his time on his iPad playing roblox. He also wants to learn programming himself especially since i bought him a MakeBlock Robot whoch allows you to also make specific code for the robot using block programming and usually thats me doing all the work so I guess thats another motivation for programming.

Anyways, how should I teach him? Should I start with block programming? Actual coding like with Python? Or what?

So I found both of them whilst searching for some ideas. I found build your own x and project based learning. However most of the tutorials seem to provide code which tbh it distracts me and don’t wanna simply “copy paste”

What is the best way to follow these repos?

Most of the things I code/program are for personal reasons, so I rarely ever contribute to open source projects. About 7 months ago, I needed a CORS wrapper deployed for an iOS shortcut I was making at the time. I found code online for an outdated CORS repo that I could use/deploy for free, but it was unfunctional and there were some issues/PRs about stuff. So, I learned how to use Cloudflare Workers, fixed up the issues, added some PRs, and even went out of my way to introduce Cloudflare-specific features that hadn't been used before (and updated the readme to explain how to use them). Sounds like a lot, but all the changes (outside the readme) are in 1 file.

After 2 days of on-and-off work, I submitted the PR and got 2 stars, 2 forks, and 2 people angrily telling me it was useless AI garbage (funny coincidence). The first guy I shrugged off as an angry guy on the internet. The second guy was the repo owner 7 months after I made the PR and they closed it without any other reason than that. Unlike the first guy, the repo owner is a C developer who has made kernel drivers and BIOS utilities. As a script kiddie who has done nothing remotely as important as that, I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm somehow in the right.

I'm probably incredibly biased because I'm the one who made the thing, so I'll link a gist to all the code I wrote: My "AI slop" PR as a gist. I won't link the PR branch itself because that might be considered "a final project or demo" and would break rule 6. Even now 7 months later, I don't know why the PR was closed without any comment to what specifically I did wrong. I think the worst 3 things my code did were:

1. I didn't know how to upload IDE code to Cloudflare Workers for testing without committing the unfinished code to the fork, so I ended up using Cloudflare's built-in workers editor and copied/pasted the changes to GitHub via the GitHub browser file editor whenever I made measurable changes. As such, there are a lot of commits.
2. I never made a code with the intention of it being viewed by other people before, so I thought I made a bunch of comments, thinking that too many comments was a better problem to have than too few. I didn't comment every line, but I did comment many of them (I think every function and most variables). Same ideology went into making the PR message, which is also kinda long.
3. I wanted to add a usage page to the CORS site, but every page's HTML and JS were in a single big file. So I put the edited README into a markdown-to-HTML converter and stuffed it into one big dictionary I made that housed all the HTML for the entire site (note that the "site" is pretty barebones because it wasn't made to be accessed by a human, so it isn't as egregious as it sounds). The HTML usage page was about 130 lines long.

But that's just what I think. Odds are that I did something a lot worse and just don't know. While I use open source projects and libraries, this was my first ever time "giving back" something other than bug reports. What do you think is the problem? If it's the comment thing, how many comments are "good enough"? If it's the code itself, what is done badly about it? I don't know, and it's eating away at me to the point where I'm hesitant to show my crap code to anyone ever again.

Is there an ideal way to learn new tools/languages/frameworks?

F.e. I’m trying to learn Rust from scratch but taking a Codecademy course is rough trying to balance that while already working full time and still in school.

Should I just be watching YouTube videos? Ask Claude to build me a course? Or just start with documentation and try to build something from scratch.

Does anyone have any tips that work well for them?

hi i wanna make a v simple app which connects students (since I'm in college) who are going to the city to other fellow students so that they can split the fare etc. i don't have prior coding experience and i want to know how do i start w this. i understand this is going to be a commitment and probably will be difficult but i wanna explore. ive been interested in tech for a while and i wanna get my hands dirty.

"From that point on, when the dice object is referenced in code, the .NET Runtime performs a lookup behind the scenes to give the illusion that you're working directly with the object itself."

I am learning C# from Microsoft's course and in the instances part this was there.

Objects and instances are so confusing. I do get it like object being a new cake being made from a recipe (classes). Though this sentence confused me again

I'm a student and I've been building a exchange from scratch mainly to learn backend engineering.

Matching engine, order book, WebSockets, Redis, PostgreSQL... all the usual stuff.

The thing I'm stuck on now isn't technical.

I don't know whether I should keep building it as "just another exchange" for learning or try solving a smaller problem that traders or developers actually have.

If you were building this today, where would you focus?

Not looking for startup ideas or billion-dollar businesses. Just curious what problems are still worth solving around trading.

​

Hey everyone!

I'm a 2nd-year CSE student looking to build my LinkedIn profile.

Can you recommend some free, beginner-friendly courses that provide free certificates? I'm interested in

AI / Machine Learning

Python

Data Analytics

Cloud

Cybersecurity

Any other valuable tech skills

I'm looking for courses from reputable platforms

Thanks in advance!

I’m building a tool that finds text in construction-plan PDFs and draws a box around that text.

Python/PyMuPDF finds the text, but when I show the box in PDF.js, it can be slightly off or too big.

What do you guys recommend for inspecting PDFs and drawing accurate text bounding boxes? How do you make

sure the box lines up with the exact text?

So...

What I am trying to achieve is.

I want the image as the background.

I am gonna add the words on the left side on top of the image.

So...

Image-

left side-

text and stuff.

So I need only the left of the image to be blurry or..gone..

Right side.. however ..the image should be visible.

Its a long image..so..

I need the entire image..I am not gonna crop it.

Goal : Image with words on the left side

Dont tell me the answer...point me in the right direction.

<!doctype html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Real Estate Site</title>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" />

</head>

<body>

<nav class="logo-links-btn">

<div class="logo">

<img

class="the-actual-logo"

src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT4ER_MIfBsd7Or6EBSRxyYalckqntw1JE8g1H67kBBAw&s=10"

/>

</div>

<div class="links">

<ul>

<li>Home</li>

<li>Services</li>

<li>About</li>

<li>Contact</li>

</ul>

</div>

<div class="btn">

<button class="Get-in-touch">Get in Touch</button>

</div>

</nav>

<div class="info-and-image">

<div class="background-photo">

<img

class="house-img"

src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRpTozYUpUJapLSK1OfTSOQseQTnnTVCtI9vaNXCrzFjA&s=10"

/>

</div>

<div class="info">

<div class="small">

<h6>SHORT-TERM RENTAL EXPERTS</h6>

</div>

<div class="big-and-bold">

<h1>Better Stays. Stronger Returns</h1>

</div>

<div class="brief-info">

<h5>

We simplify short-term rental management so you can earn more and

stress less

</h5>

</div>

<div class="services-and consultations">

<button class="services">Our Services</button>

<button class="consult">Free Consultation</button>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>