Most programming (maybe 90% or more, depending on what you're doing) is boring. The exciting stuff comes when you're learning, debugging, or architecting. (De

Most programming (maybe 90% or more, depending on what you're doing) is boring. The exciting stuff comes when you're learning, debugging, or architecting. (Dealing with other people's horrible code, the build process, deployment, etc., can also be "exciting," but they aren't sexy.) When there's nothing challenging you and everything's just running smoothly, it's just really straightforward, simple stuff that will put you to sleep, and the downfall of a lot of programmers is to try to make it more exciting than necessary(amazing new architectures, savage optimization, burying everything in tests/types/patterns blindly). So the key to learning, I think, is not just to "start small and work your way up," but to try to make the small projects exciting, and gradually build up to the big and boring ones, but always striving for some occasional challenges along the way. I did bits of programming, off and on, from an early age, but did not have a major breakthrough until college, and still did not consider myself a "programmer" until fairly recently. The breakthrough came from getting a good formal treatment of CS topics(particularly data structures) in a lecture setting. I needed that to see the possibilities.