A place I found to be extremely helpful is chatting over IRC, I've helped others and been helped myself, the best one I've found is the #programming channel on LiberaChat.

There's usually not much to do apart from practicing, I highly recommend to ignore books and whatnot and stick to simpler tutorials, the actual code experience and first hand experimentation should be what you need to prioritize.

If you still need to choose a language, Python and JavaScript are the best to begin with, Python is a good option for understanding the general syntax while JavaScript, apart from being a bit more verbose, is the simplest to work with as you just need to press F12 and go to the "Console" tab on any browser to have a fully working live environment.

For the kind of software you might want to start with, I think videogames are the best type, they let you have immediate feedback and most bugs are easy to notice without even looking at the code (like a character moving to the opposite direction of what you intended), it also help to write code that's made to be simpler and faster than other type of software, as performance and the resources are easier to handle (drawing a square on a screen is much simpler that building a web app with a database).

Those are advices based on my personal experience and I've used the same approach to teach others at work where I work as a web developer fulltime for years, I have never went to any specialized schools, never paid for any online courses or book, I just used random videos and played around by myself.

I've written some time ago a collection of advice for beginners here on SN: #360597

But, as I got swept up with private stuff, I halted it at that. Now, seeing your post alongside others with a desire to least to code, I think what I can share can help many people greatly, so I'll try to get back to work back on it soon.

😆

Went to a friend house yesterday and it felt like stepping into @DarthCoin's home when I saw this at the door! 😆

You're welcome! I hope to see more from you. 👍

I don't write much except for some fun ideas I get whenever.

When it happens I tend to write down bullet points and then use the snowflake method to expand the post until it gets decently readable.

For your writing sessions, you could use short breaks to work on small ideas to see if they are feasible, working on the main concept and structure to write about, then take a dedicated time to write it properly.

Maybe you can find a time where you're the most relaxed, like in the morning or late at night, based on how you manage your day.

The only real advice I can give, if you want to be consistent, is to keep a buffer. Good ideas and times to write will be flakey for sure, so it's better to write them ahead and publish consistently.

Also, sharing your learning process is always an interesting topic, especially if you want to get better at getting better, there's many blogs about writers sharing how they learn to write.

As you can see in the comments, there's lot of people who try to help others even if they're not professionals, don't be afraid to share what you like, your passion will be felt regardless of your writing style! 💪

Thanks!

I was born in a Christian family and ever since I can remember I've always felt something was "off" with their teaching.

Luckily for me, I kept for myself all the reasoning and self analysis I did, and now I live as a "stealth atheist" in my family, as they would be strongly shaken by the fact that I don't believe in anything.

What made me question religion in general is how people handled other religions from the one they followed:

Those are wonderful words that teach to give anyone the right to hold their personal beliefs, yet that also states that every religion is "the correct one" which was quite confusing for my tiny brain at the time.

Then I also noticed how my family interpreted said teaching, people following other religions were looked at with pity, and older abandoned religions talked about as blasphemy or ignorance.

As I looked for an answer, the only things I could find were:

So here's my final and personal answer:

After this realization my life has been much happier and more relaxed, no rules to follow or grand price to obtain apart from being able to appreciate life and nature, if I help someone I do so out of free will, not for fear of being judged.

Even if, in the end, I'm proven to be wrong, a higher being as a God will surely forgive a poor human for doubting them.

I don't even try to go over saying "Bitcoin" is good.

I've learned to dodge the pain in the ass people bothering me like I'm a bank owner that would fix their problems.

It's their money, I just tell them there's a better alternative to hold them, the rest is their own decision.

I absolutely love NixOS! I use it as my main OS both on my desktop and my VPS.

What is truly magical is the ability to configure even projects with pinned dependencies via shell.nixand if you have NixOS on a server you can also write and import a default.nix to set up a reproducible deploy on any NixOS machine.

Here a couple of tips I learned myself:

Share some photos once you settled down. 😎👍

As fast as you can!

Philosophical moment...

99% of media, books and games for children is made entirely by adults. 🧩

Not at all, I know people being ruined by those things, so I'd rather avoid them.

But, I've been curious about videogame development and how those online and gacha games manage to "brainwash" their users.

Not for profit, but to avoid following those shady patterns by mistake.

Like slot machines and other games with micro transactions (like on mobile or online), having an uneven currency conversion helps confuse people estimation of their spendings.

Also, these types of games could potentially gain a faster adoption over other business types, as it can be "exploited" as a game specific currency to the masses, they could even profit from swapping locally or keeping custodial wallets for their customers.

Slot machine players would go crazy to see so many sats in their jackpot!

Or go incognito all the time as I do.

Incognito for work and Tor for myself.

That sure has the right crunchiness to keep you awake at night!

An FPS gamer has the same reaction speed of a professional military aircraft pilot.