Ask HN: Best resources / tutorials to break into modern dev
I used to develop / automate a lot of office functions way back in my career (wow, was it nearly 20 years ago?) using VB6 and VBA and managed to deliver some things that I'm still proud of.
Then my career moved on and I spent some time playing with *nix environments and picked up some bash and some python where I've again built some (modest) things that solved problems.
Whilst the 'dev' skillset isn't essential to my current work, I go through multiple cycles each year where I decide to try to 'break back in' to building things but I never get very far and end up abandoning it.
The main reasons I can see as to why this happens are:
- tutorials try to teach the basics of coding (conditionals, loops, etc) which I'm familiar with using (beyond specific language syntax perhaps) and I get bored before I actually learn anything.
- tutorials start off reasonably sensibly but then quickly descend into /r/restofthefuckingowl territory where I find that I'm making something but have decreasingly useful grasp of what I'm being told to do such that if something were to fall out of the back of it I couldn't reasonably claim I'd had a competent hand in it
- I struggle to think of something that I actually want to build as a project or a challenge so I can't build a compelling reason for my to maintain my interest
I've sat through parts of codecademy, have a paid membership to Pluralsight, have sat and tried Project Euler but I never break beyond getting started.
So, I ask you, are there any resources out there that you could point me to that could help me break back into building things using modern tools, languages, frameworks, etc? What's the current way people 'figure this stuff out'? Are there any genuinely 'tutored' options that I can work through and ask questions?
Thanks!