Adopting a New Approach: Learning Software Engineering from the Basics

For a long time, I’ve been trying to learn software engineering.

My reasons for wanting to learn were mainly rooted in my wanting to have a fully-rounded skill-set and also for my ego.

Self-teaching software engineering has been a struggle; I’ve read more about how to self-teach then actually doing self-teaching and my GitHub is disappointing to say the least.

Until recently, when I had an epiphany.

This epiphany mainly came about due to watching Oppenheimer.

A quote in Oppenheimer that changed my brain chemistry was the following:

“The important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it.”

This made me think a lot about how much of a part intuition has to play when learning or applying skills and mainly made me ponder on my design skills to date.

It also helped me to realise software development, at its core, is largely pattern recognition and to an extent memorisation, to the point that both become intuitive.

I recently had another epiphany; I could use ChatGPT to create a study plan containing practical exercises for me to complete and this would help me to learn far quicker than most other sandbox platforms due to my having to read documentation to gain a deeper understanding when stuck and also working in the VSCode IDE as opposed to a sandbox environment.

Safe to say, I’ve recently taken this approach to learn JavaScript and it has worked well so far.

The ChatGPT prompts I used to create my study guide were the following:

• Give me a list of (insert language) fundamentals to learn

Following this prompt I then used the following prompt:

• Create 100 exercises to practise using (insert concept) in JavaScript

I then compiled all of these exercises into a document and I’ve been steadily working through them which has involved trial and error as well as reading documentation to understand which approaches are better for certain contexts.

Here is a link to said document:

JavaScript Fundamentals & Exercises

I hope this helped anyone else stuck with their learning, happy coding!