
Ask HN: I'm done with my MSc and college. I have some freetime now. What now? - riotvan
So my main goal is to be a great developer. I know that this is very broad and very subjective. I just want to be an all around decent coder, who understands things deeply and who can engage in meaningful tech conversations (debating architecture solutions, problem solving etc).<p>I know being a good programmer involves reading a lot and writing a lot of code. I have problems in both these areas. Regarding reading: I don&#x27;t know which tech blogs&#x2F;people to follow, I don&#x27;t know the best books to read and I overall have the awful habit of skimming though articles when I stumble upon them. I don&#x27;t know why.<p>Regarding coding on my free time: I just don&#x27;t know what to code. I know people say to solve problems you face everyday, I just don&#x27;t know any. I try to make stuff like reinventing the wheel but that does not really inspire or motivate me. I know that probably reading more would help me with this.<p>I think the fundamental problem underlying all these is that I don&#x27;t have any real interests. All throughout highschool and college my only real interest besides finishing my degree was (is) playing video games. I can&#x27;t finish any technical article, follow and participate in discussions in reddit or here because I just don&#x27;t read articles in depth, and thus I can&#x27;t think and formulate opinions on these subjects. What screwed am I?<p>The technologies that I think I might enjoy learning would be: the JS ecosystem (react, angular, ES6, etc), learning more about Rails development besides the basics which I know have a good grasp on, maybe learn more about app development (I&#x27;m fairly comfortable with Java) and doing somekind of desktop applications (electron or C++?). Following tutorials for this technologies seems pointless. Figuring out simple and yet useful projects do build with said tools also seems difficult, since I don&#x27;t know what to build.
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thefastlane
"I can't finish any technical article" ... no offense, but i don't know how
you made it through grad school. nonetheless, here you are. :p

you need to kill your video game habit. sell that shit on craigslist and get
on with your life. seriously.

you know that you have the capability to do amazing things, but you have to
manage yourself and your time, and focus, in order to make it a reality.

see my comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798511)

edit: read books. pick random titles from the Oxford Very Short Introductions
series.

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cjbprime
Which video games do you like? How were they written? Are there replay files
you can look at, or an API you could use to analyze data or create a new tool?

