
Ask HN: Best resources / tutorials to break into modern dev - herghost
Hi -<p>I used to develop &#x2F; automate a lot of office functions way back in my career (wow, was it nearly 20 years ago?) using VB6 and VBA and managed to deliver some things that I&#x27;m still proud of.<p>Then my career moved on and I spent some time playing with *nix environments and picked up some bash and some python where I&#x27;ve again built some (modest) things that solved problems.<p>Whilst the &#x27;dev&#x27; skillset isn&#x27;t essential to my current work, I go through multiple cycles each year where I decide to try to &#x27;break back in&#x27; to building things but I never get very far and end up abandoning it.<p>The main reasons I can see as to why this happens are:<p>- tutorials try to teach the basics of coding (conditionals, loops, etc) which I&#x27;m familiar with using (beyond specific language syntax perhaps) and I get bored before I actually learn anything.<p>- tutorials start off reasonably sensibly but then quickly descend into &#x2F;r&#x2F;restofthefuckingowl territory where I find that I&#x27;m making something but have decreasingly useful grasp of what I&#x27;m being told to do such that if something were to fall out of the back of it I couldn&#x27;t reasonably claim I&#x27;d had a competent hand in it<p>- I struggle to think of something that I actually want to build as a project or a challenge so I can&#x27;t build a compelling reason for my to maintain my interest<p>I&#x27;ve sat through parts of codecademy, have a paid membership to Pluralsight, have sat and tried Project Euler but I never break beyond getting started.<p>So, I ask you, are there any resources out there that you could point me to that could help me break back into building things using modern tools, languages, frameworks, etc?  What&#x27;s the current way people &#x27;figure this stuff out&#x27;?  Are there any genuinely &#x27;tutored&#x27; options that I can work through and ask questions?<p>Thanks!
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frou_dh
> I struggle to think of something that I actually want to build as a project
> or a challenge so I can't build a compelling reason for my to maintain my
> interest.

This is the big problem. It's not unusual for it to be an uphill battle to
learn stuff "dry".

You truly do need a desire for some specific, reasonably substantial, piece of
software to exist. Then, you'll learn skills and techniques "just-in-time" as
side effects of making that thing a reality.

