Ask Lemmy

Like, you go to your computer and start working on…what?

Most of my work goes into an opensource game.

what people do especially when starting out.

Make some apps for yourself. You'll probably not use them, or even share them, but it's a good thing to have a vision of what you want to make.

I just want to learn it to know it.

Being a good programmer takes ages. And even then you'll probably only know a handful of languages and focus on specific branches. If you just want to know it, you'll lose a lot of interest pretty soon because sometimes it takes days to fix something and you really need to be able to push trough those rough patches and that's hard without a goal. Imagine trying to become good at woodworking without actually making furniture.

But im not sure how to apply it to anything realistic.

A lot of stuff already has apps for it. And a lot of things are being worked on. People saw the money and a lot of people jumped on the wagon.

The most realistic thing one can do with programming is to make something that does exactly what they want. And that can even be something small. Like learning how to write scripts that automate simple tasks. I suggest high level languages such as Python, PHP, C# or Java to get going. And only look at low level languages such as C, C++, or Rust when you actually start to understand it.