I tried teaching myself programming for a few years, on and off. But it wasn't until I took a statistics class, which involved programming in R, that I began t

I tried teaching myself programming for a few years, on and off. But it wasn't until I took a statistics class, which involved programming in R, that I began to realize the purpose of functions: to handle inputs, and return outputs. The class involved data engineering, so I created functions to deal specifically with data. And it was then that I realized "Ohhh... functions in any language just operate on data... so... with this knowledge, now I see the purpose of application routes in web frameworks like ExpressJS, Python Flask, etc." A course on relational databases helped me understand how to store data. And from there, I finally realized the purpose of a REST API, and how browsers connect to servers. At that point, I realized "Wow, I finally understand how to create a full stack app (including database design)"