Ask Lemmy

Start my picking what you want to do with programming. Then do a couple of simple challenges in any language like advent of code and such in python just to get your feet wet and solve some problems.

After that you should have the main building blocks and then you scale up into making a "thingy" sized project. I personally liked making games with progression like.

1. Text adventure
2. Tic tac toe
3. Another text adventure but with battles and hit points.
4. Tetris

Then you can start learning separation of code into modules like "This is the game and this is just how it's shown" which applies to pretty much every application with a user interface.

After that you have enough skill to learn anything and you can go about learning a specific skill or technology that you want to work with and you'll be at a skill level of a junior programmer.

Advancing beyond that I'd recommend reading a couple of books (crazy I know) that go over best practices and why they exist. You use those guidelines and get better at working with larger amount of code and then you get to mid level. During this time you should also basic rules of thumb on how long each thing takes to run, both algorithm complexity and how http requests are usually the bottleneck.

For senior level you'll need to gain a lot of experience and become a library of solutions and bug knowledge while also having a good grasp of tradeoffs. You'll need to know when to insulate yourself from change and when it's overkill to deliver the code in a timely manner while not sacrificing tomorrow.

It's very hard to skip any step in my opinion but reading a couple of books really helped me advance through the junior phase quickly just by knowing what solutions are out there. Books are not as valuable when you don't have experience since it'll stick 10x better if you encountered the problem described in the book.

To get started just pick anything and get your feet wet. Good luck!