I've been learning Python by myself for about 3 years now and I can say that I know quite a lot but I don't really feel confident in my own programming skills and always after a while of practicing or reviewing I end up quitting because I feel exactly this.
I don't know how to explain it, but I really feel like I'm in a cycle repeating the same noob exercises over and over again.
For example, lately I have been practicing a lot PyQt but I really feel that I am wasting time when I don't learn a new concept or I don't memorize something and I need to look at my notes to remember how to do it, and also that practicing with online courses, especially with Youtube is often a challenge because the authors do things differently and I get confused by that. And when I want to learn something new the amount of information overwhelms me and I feel tired because of that.
As a Linux user I know that what I just said is stupid, because for example it is impossible to learn all the commands in the world, you just really learn the ones you use most regularly but in programming I feel that for example asking ChatGPT (or any ChatBot) counts as cheating for some reason, I don't know how to explain it.
I really consider this probably a mentality problem more than a skill problem because honestly even though I know I can I don't feel sure how to program, many times I even doubt the name of my variables or my functions.
Thanks for reading my silly post!
Memorizing isn't a huge deal and will happen naturally as you use things more.
For instance I've been doing c# for almost 20 years and I still have to Google how to do a switch expression every time! It just doesn't stick haha
Once you do something for the 1000th or 10,00th time you won't need to look at your notes.
As your knowledge grows you'll find you actually have to look stuff up more.
It's an endless field and it's all out there so you don't need it in your head. It's better to learn how to find the info you need.
I'm not alone! Been a dev for almost 10 years and every time I declare and initialize a dictionary I either have to Google it or stare at it for a minute to realize what I'm doing wrong ๐ I blame JSON.