I'm mostly self taught other than some basic in high school and R in university. It's taken me years of working on different kinds of projects, reading tons of

I'm mostly self taught other than some basic in high school and R in university. It's taken me years of working on different kinds of projects, reading tons of books and practicing to the point where i became competent enough to work on a decently large project from start to finish and complete something. I don't feel like i really went from programming stuff to knowing how to program until after i'd finished a bunch of smaller programs in a few different languages. Like a lot. Years worth. There came a point though where, even if i was working with an unfamiliar language, once the syntax is out of the wat, i started thinking about the problems i was working on differently. I understand now how computers work on a more fundamental level and what the code is actually doing under the hood. What's actually happening when i declare a variable, define a function or compile some code. Before i understood that stuff I realize now i was always kinda just shooting in the dark only vaguely understanding what i was actually doing. But, it took a long time. I guess the very first time i ever programmed was i dunno at like 5 or 6 years old when i managed to write a loop on the atari. It took almost two decades learning on and off for me to actually understand what i was doing. I'm still not sure if i'd feel qualified enough to apply for a professional programming job.