[idkwhatiamdoing]

ice overview. A personal struggle of mine as someone who is self taught (with a degree in statistics) and has a full time job that does not constantly require programming, I struggle with learning fundamentals alongside doing actual projects. If someone has any advice in this regard, it would be much welcome.

[jairuhme]

I don't have any advice on self learning, but I have been getting a MS in CS for similar reasons. I also have a stats degree, work full time, and struggle with self learning. For me, being in a structured program makes it easier for me to manage. Certainly not a requirement, but it is the way I learn best. Maybe look for classes you can take at a local university or online and see if anything grabs your attention.

[retrac]

Write something. My usual suggestions (although I am biased) would be an operating system or a compiler. Or both! When I was in school those were typical course projects in a CS program. (The program I took was more to the circuit and electronic side of it, and my final year project was to design a CPU in VHDL.)

A compiler will exercise most of the fundamentals, and in ways you're probably not too familiar with, if you primarily just do a bit of scripting or numerical computation. Areas like parsing - how do you deal with reading in arbitrarily nested recursive structures? And the abstract -- how should you structure the representation of a program internally, perhaps as a tree? And the concrete -- what opcodes does your processor accept?

[calepayson]

Im a student right now and have a background in a non-CS field so struggle with the impostor-syndrome/fundamentals double whammy. The advice I’ve found most valuable is to basically cosplay as someone who’s a complete pro. What would that person read for news? How do they practice their craft? What books do they read on their free time?

Cosplay that role long enough and you become it. I’m still learning but it has been a great signpost for me over the last couple years.

Cheers and keep crushing it!