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I donno man. I took to coding like a fish to water. And "coding" is really like, a half dozen skills put together. It's knowing the language you want to code in. It's knowing the ecosystem of libraries that probably do most of the work for you. It's having some knowledge, if imperfect, of what's probably going on under the hood with respect to threads, memory, disk access, garbage collection, etc. It's knowing how not to code yourself into a dead end, or unfuck yourself if you find yourself there.
It actually reminds me how woodworking isn't just cutting and assembly wood. It's making a design, picking out planks, milling to s4s, factoring in wood movement, sanding, finishing. The part most people think of as "woodworking" might actually be 5% of the task. It's the exciting part most youtube woodworkers focus on. But it's still probably the smallest part of the job.
And I went to school to learn how to code. I'm not sure I'd recommend that mid career. Maybe take some online classes. Open source can be intimidating, but I think contributing to it did more than anything to grow my skills and increase my confidence. Diving into a foreign, mature code base and learning how they do things is also a huge part of the job.
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