r/learnprogramming

I’m 24, working a 9–5 job, and trying to seriously improve my life by learning coding and Japanese. I have a long-term goal of becoming skilled enough to change my career path and eventually move to Japan.

The problem is I struggle a lot with guilt and comparison. Even when I study for an hour after work, I feel like it’s not enough. I compare myself to high performers and think I should be doing more, pushing harder. But I’ve burned out before, so I’m also afraid of overdoing it and collapsing again.

I’m trying to build a sustainable routine (around 45–60 minutes a day after work), but mentally it’s hard to accept that “slow and steady” might actually be enough.

For those of you balancing full-time work and skill-building, how do you deal with guilt and the feeling that you’re always behind? How do you stay consistent without burning out?

I'm a third year CS student and for the past year I kept hearing the same thing from every senior developer, every reddit thread, every youtube video: just build projects, that's how you actually learn. So after finishing a Python course I decided to do exactly that and build something small on my own, a web scraper that would collect apartment listings and notify me when something matched my filters. Seemed reasonable. I had no idea what I was about to walk into.

The first two hours were fine, I knew requests and BeautifulSoup from a tutorial. Then the site started blocking me and I had no idea why. Then I figured out rotating headers but the data was inconsistently structured across different listing types and my parser kept breaking in ways I couldn't predict. Then I realised I hadn't thought about where to actually store anything. Then I had to learn a bit of scheduling to make it run automaticly. Every single step opened three more questions I didn't know existed an hour earlier. I finished something working after about two weeks and it was genuinely one of the best learning experiences I've had, but I think the reason "just build projects" feels useless as advice is that nobody tells you the project will completley fall apart four times before it works and that is the actual point. If someone had told me upfront that constant breakage is the mechanism and not a sign I'm doing it wrong I would have panicked so much less in week one. What was the first project that actually taught you something?

Hello,

In my university cs curriculum, they are going through a lot of languages every couple of months from js to php to java to python to c# to .net to jsp to spring to i don't what anymore.
To be honest i think sticking to java or typescript and learning concepts deeply would be the best but oh well.

And even if i want to just stick to typescript and focus on building stuff and learning more, i start under performing in these subjects and i don't have enough knowledge to do the asked of projects(which are sadly classic repetitive CRUDS since they are the only thing we can make with the time given).

What would you guys do in this kind of situation?

I'm thinking of just learning these new technologies, doing these projects and just try to notice the different design decisions of each technology(if you can notice them of course).

EDIT: i'm on my second year of my cs degree, so i know the basics of programming i just want to focus on going deeper on cs concepts like dsa,networking , database architecture but no time because of the repetitive CRUDs in different stacks