[Some advice from a practical angle, though I see others are being much more helpful advising you about life stuff, which is heartening.] You write well. Prog

[Some advice from a practical angle, though I see others are being much more helpful advising you about life stuff, which is heartening.] You write well. Programming is an exercise in communication. You are building a structure that at the very least has to be understood by a machine, but moreover has to be understood by you and anyone else who comes to the codebase. Good programmers create readable code just as good writers author readable books. As with any kind of writing, reading is a good way to learn. An excellent way to do this is to configure your computer to let you jump into the source code of any library you are using. If you frequently use a library, being able to press one button on your keyboard and jump straight into that library’s source code is very powerful. You get to go deeper and deeper and see how other people solve problems and communicate their solutions. It makes you better. At the next level, if your coding environment can give you instant access to the version control system of another project then you can leverage that to learn. If it’s a high quality project then each line of code will “git blame” to a commit where the developer explains what they were doing. The Director’s commentary, but for code. If you can get some kind of critical feedback that would help. That’s hard to do online. People are more unkind than they are kind. You may well be on your own there, until a good mentor finally comes along. For many people, their job provides a way to get exposure to other engineers who can act as a mentor.