Why I spent 4 years learning Programming Concepts That would have taken a couple of weeks (A beginners RoadMap)

Well, I might as well just put a disclaimer right now. No, I did not spend every single day coding for 4 years. It just took me longer a period than it should have and if I could go back in time I would have definitely done things much more differently than I did initially.

I started my coding journey pretty young at the age of 12(You guys probably think that's super old for a programmer but I live in a ‘regressive’ country so that is pretty young for me :] ). I am 17 now and to be honest with you folks on the internet, I have not really improved that much from where I was 4 years ago and that is really sad and pathetic. They are a lot of reasons that I am still the same disgrace that I was and well I am working on it (waits for the applause to stop). I would love to share with you my experience and hopefully, you might learn a few things that would help your programming journey.

I wish I could give an amazing story about how I started my programming journey but I cannot. I got into programming through my brother, he was in that space and because I was just a stupid kid with little or no direction, I also wanted to be in that space too. I asked my brother what programming language I should learn, Python he replied. My brother specialized in mostly Javascript and its framework and did not have any experience in python at the time. So why he recommended it for me would forever remain a mystery : [. As a 12-year-old programmer learning python 2.7 by myself was an absolute struggle. I had to do my own research about technologies I had no idea about with no help from anyone, not even my youtube friends because I did not know how to take full advantage of all the tech tutorials like Brad Traversy and FreeCodeCamp that were available at that time. It was tough, I can still remember the first time I successfully installed python 2.7 on my system and made it print ‘hello world’, I was really happy. I felt like such a genius and bragged to all my friends about what I have accomplished and I felt unstoppable(I quit for a couple of months to binge-watch anime :]).

I kept going back and forth with my python learning. Looking back at it now, it is my brothers fault for why I am such a mess, lol. I had no idea what I was doing and all he knew how to do was to make fun of 12-year-old kid because he didn't know what polymorphism was :[ (which is a form of inheritance which in double-op that allows you to pass a child class as a method which essentially makes your code more reusable or something). I finally found a book later that helped me a lot which was python for absolute beginners by Mike Dewain, it is a really excellent book and I still use it a lot as a reference. I was really good at python, Like really really good but I did not know what to do with all the knowledge I had at that point so I was just mindlessly learning a bunch of stuff because I had no direction or sense of purpose. Most of the things I learnt no longer stay with me anymore. I was very reluctant about the web development industry because I did not think it was ‘real programming’, I stand corrected. At a particular point, I got all flustered and decided to quit and pursue a dream I once had of becoming a chess grandmaster, but that is a story for another day :).

I really wish I had a stronger sense of urgency back then as I do now. I would have applied for mentorships and even unpaid internships, to learn a thing or two about how the programming industry actually works. My programming roadmap is a little like this now: Python → GUI→ Html → CSS → bootstrap → Materialize → Java → Pygame → Django → Web Scrapping → Web hosting→ javascript → Rest Api→ react. I wish to master react native and get more working experience. I choose not to pay attention to all the negatives and focus on the now because as a wise man once said “[t]he past is history, the future is a mystery but the now is a gift that is why it is called the present” (favourite kung fu panda btw)