Programming feels simple until you start

I’ve been trying to learn programming and at first it looked straightforward but once I got into it, it’s a different story. There’s a lot to understand and it’s easy to get stuck.

For those who’ve been through it, what helped you push past the early stage?

find a project to contribute to that actually interests you, and slowly start chipping away at it, when I first started learning py automation I had the same issue. When you actually start working on use cases you’ll learn as you go.

Depends how early. Early stage you want to make sure you understand all the datatypes etc and then just find something you want to build and build it.

There is always more to learn, you may master on stage but then the next day you'll be learning something new.
Don't vibe code too much in the beginning you'll learn nothing and won't be able to unstuck yourself.

Danielcross said:

I’ve been trying to learn programming and at first it looked straightforward but once I got into it, it’s a different story. There’s a lot to understand and it’s easy to get stuck.

Click to expand...

Dunning-Kruger effect

My own experience just shock me
I firstly think it's what I can do but on my first day of learning it I just keep sleeping

Getting stuck is normal. What helped me was consistency just coding a bit every day.

The wall you're hitting is normal — every scraper, automation guy, and tool builder went through exactly this.
What actually helped me break through: stop reading tutorials and start breaking things on purpose.
Pick one very small, concrete problem. Not "I want to learn Python" — but "I want to download all the images from this page automatically" or "I want to check if a list of URLs is still live". Something with a visible end result you can actually run and see working. Messy code that works is more educational than clean code from a tutorial you barely followed.
The other thing that kills people early on is trying to understand everything before moving forward. You don't need to fully understand how HTTP requests work to write a script that makes them. Read just enough to unstick yourself, then keep building.
For the BHW context specifically — Python + requests/httpx covers 80% of scraping and automation work. Playwright covers the rest: JS-rendered sites, login flows, anything that needs a real browser. You don't need to be a software engineer. You need to write functional scripts that solve real problems.
Errors are the actual curriculum. The more specific the error message you learn to decode, the faster you progress. Copy the error, Google it, fix it, move on.