I need help how to start (coding noob)

Hey everyone it's been a long time since I've logged on here.

Anyways, last year at around september I started to teach myself python and as my first project I decided to create a discord bot for fun as a way to learn how the code works, after a lot of trial and error it was functioning!. All was well until I hit a point that I lost motivation at around november or december, because I felt like my code just wasn't mine as it's just a copy and paste from places like stackoverflow and modifying it just enough so it could do what I want it to do. In the end I just felt like a fraud and quit. If anyone is curious how that code looks right now you may view it here: https://github.com/AnekiScarlet/Artemis

My point of this blog is that I am thinking of going back into coding again as I believe I finally got over this feeling, but I have no idea where to start or what I should do as I'm still a beginner and I can't seem to make up my mind.

Comments

Did you understand what the code did when you were doing things?

What were your changes like? If you borrowed a bit of code to grab some data and then did a whole lot of extra processing on it (even if some of those too were libaries/snippets you grabbed) then that is rather different to copy paste, change popup text and press go.

"I decided to create a discord bot"
Ew discord but that is how you learn. Find something you want to do and do it. Some also like challenges -- code golf, coding contests and whatever else is used to mean that. Write something that works for that, does not have to win or be done within time limits but still can get you to have to think.
https://codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com/ has some examples.
 
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I would like to think that I did understand what the code does as I learned how to scrap a webpage(insta.py), how it opens a txt file and save information on it (quote.py), how it reads the txt to post out a link (hug.py), the possibility of a making a powerful calculator (math.py).

The best example of changes will probably be on the cogs file on insta.py. I did a whole lot of research on how to get to a webpage and take information on what I want. It started out with copying and pasting the basic code of what I found others did and while doing trial and error I found something that worked. So I started modifying it to where it grabs the username, link to the username, name, bio, follower/following count and their latest post if it was public. The latter was the hardest to figure out because it kept on crashing whenever a profile was set to private. But after I got it working it posts it in a nice embed message. Then after that I based the twitter.py on the instagram one with some modifications. The other example is probably my music.py file, that file isn't complete, but the basic code was an old music bot that I found on github I believe and modified it so it works with wavelink. Granted a lot of the original features were broken when I was making it work with wavelink, but it was still helpful as it made me visualize how to set the code up to work with it.

I guess my issue is that there's a lot I could do, but feeling overwhelmed on what exactly to pick. Thank you for the suggestions and I'll keep them in mind and be sure to look into that link!
 
Sounds like you did some real programming then, not just changed a few strings or increased a table size.

Programmers in the real world no more reinvent the wheel every time than write a whole OS to do it on. They might be able to (for some measure of that term anyway) but you won't catch them doing it in a hurry, and might even have those reviewing their code look down upon them for trying it.

"I guess my issue is that there's a lot I could do, but feeling overwhelmed on what exactly to pick."
Common enough, and then comes the thought that I don't do it often enough to spend hours (and possibly some more on account of it being a new skill) figuring it out
XKCD because why not
https://xkcd.com/1205/
https://xkcd.com/1319/

If you want to think of it as training with an end result then do that. Alternatively it could be a prove to myself I can do it -- I once had some homework I could have done in excel in a few hours, however as I was learning matlab at the time then 4 hours later I had a nice thing in matlab as well. Promptly swore off matlab the time after that as well (said time in the homework paying off in spades for that one) but that is a different story.
 
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That video was neat, it reminded me of the purpose of beautifulsoup on python as it's used on web scrapping and does some neat things so that the coder doesn't have to worry about coding it from scratch.

I have to thank you for reaching out to me as I'm now feeling a bit more confident on the code that I have done so far.
 
It's rather normal not to write your own code, but take an example and mess around with it, when learning new stuff. Hell, even in actual work I take existing code and tweak it to fulfill the requirements.

As far as learning goes, pick a project, that interests you, and try to realize it. For example, make a to-do list app. Start with something simple that runs in the command line, and has little functionality. Next expand it, add the ability to actually save the to-do list in a file between runs. Then add a gui. Next change the saving to a file to a database, and so on.

Also I find this site enjoyable, to practice coding: https://www.codingame.com . A lot of the puzzles are nicely presented as games, and the bot coding competitions are also fun. Feel free to PM me if you want more info, or mess around on the site :)
 

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