A beginner's journey in programming
I have a confession to make. Kind of. See I didn't ever aspire to be a programmer, and I considered "software engineer" a profession, where (especially in India) there was intense competition, thus resulting in lower payment.
Beginnings
Thus I had not even "touched" any aspect of programming until a few years before. It all started with a little application called Blender. Its an awesome application that I plan to write on soon. So, anyway I learnt we could do game development on that 3D modelling application, and my interest was piqued. So I loaded up the internet and tried to follow a little tutorial to create a little platforming game, and when I say little, I really mean little. It had two stages, one like a 2D maze, based on the tutorial and the second like a 3D maze( I figured I could, in fact, change the camera perspective). That in itself is an interesting story, but lets close that book for now. So, positron (you may be saying) that's how you learnt programming? Actually no, not at all. It allowed us to create games with logic bricks. But when I searched more about game creation in blender (motivated by by initial "success"), I quickly learnt that, logic bricks were for kids (apparently they are not). I learnt that blender used python to create games, so I started to force myself to learn python. I downloaded a 1hr Youtube video on python, and forced myself to watch that every morning. I got stuck on dictionaries, and try as I might, I couldn't understand that video, and learn python. With the power of foresight, the problem was that, seeing someone do coding was excruciatingly boring.
Now there's this monthly technology magazine called Digit, and even though I liked it a lot, as is with all things, I got bored of it, and had not bought new issue for a few months.Still I liked to ask my friend, for the cover story of the month. The magazine had a booklet free with it, called fasttrack, which included skill improvement topics like creating your own website( on a sidenote I never followed that to create any of my websites). One day that friend topic me that digit had released a fasttrack on python programming. It would be understatement to say I was intrigued. I got that booklet from my friend the very next day. It introduced how create objects in the very first chapter. Now, it is only only now that I have a basic understanding of what OOP is, so there is no way I could have read that mag. Still I held on to that mag for 6 months, and me not returning the mag become a joke between my friend and me.
I even tried to learn programming from this app, even completing some a few chapters, but I never really got to write whole scripts with it. It just told me some python 2.0 syntax.
There is also a little venture of me trying to learn C# on unity, we don't talk about that venture as a programming one. I was just coping code really. I understood what the code did, but I really did not get how it really did it.
How I really got into programming
Now admitting this is very excruciating for me, but what really got me into programming was school. Now hear me out, I am not saying that absolute garbage of a place is actually good for learning, no no, but I think what school nails is getting us on our arses and getting us to practice. See our school taught python(nice coincidence rt?), from 11th std.. The knowledge I got was really basic, just variable, lists, tuples, if/for loop etc., but the little knowledge that the book gave, it had literally 100s of examples on that specific topic, and credits to our teacher, he actually did those examples, and asked us to do some ourselves. That made programming fun, it was now not just learning syntax, but actually doing something, it was problem solving. THAT, I think that is what makes me come back to programming every now and again, and made me delve further into advance topics of programming that I would have not read before, going even into C#, that looks more promising from game dev and career perspective. Just the irony of the situation is that blender has scraped its gaming engine in its 2.8 update which came out last year :') .
What's next?
Actually I have not completed my programming journey at all, and I plan to write more articles on my ongoing journey soon. Add to the matter that, I want to write more about specific programming languages and fully expand my story on how my school actually taught was programming, and you should not be at all fearful of possible dearth of programming related content.