I'm a complete beginner in c++ and I'm trying to revive whatever I've learnt about it in my mind as I've only taken the academic course in uni about it so I'm trying to revive it by problem solving so is there any source where I could find great questions on the internet where I could solve them and they could help me to become prof in the language??
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I'm a tutor, and a potential student just asked me if I could "dump keywords on them" to see if "I'm up to date on trends", and I just can't deal with it today.
No, I'm not going to "dump keywords" on you so you can judge me based on TikToks and Youtube Shorts you've watched about web development. If your friend just wants to know what's trendy so he can mindlessly repeat things he thinks will make him sound smart, then just recommend he does the same thing you do and watch videos all day.
Most of my students are not like this, thank god, but like 1 in 20 are these guys (ALWAYS men btw) who just regurgitate things they've heard on YouTube and podcasts and shit. Yes I can teach you NextJS. Yes I can teach you Clerk. Yes I can teach you supabase, firebase, mongodb... Whatever the fuck you want, but you have to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript first.
But they NEVER want to learn those things. I have to explain to them like they're fucking toddlers that you have to learn things in a certain order, that you can't just start with learning NextJS when you've never even written a function before, let alone know what React is. If I'm lucky enough to convince them to sit through some lessons, they'll scoff when I try to teach them how to render HTML via DOM manipulation, and say it's "bad for SEO". Then I'll ask them what SEO means and they have no fucking clue because they're just repeating shit that they think makes them sound smart.
It's like having to explain to someone that in order to learn how to make soup, you have to boil water first, but then getting mocked because "the water has no flavor". But I honestly don't even think I could teach these douchebags how to boil an egg if I tried.
Men who listen to podcasts and influencers non-stop: Why the fuck are you like this? What is wrong with you? Why don't you want to learn an actual fucking skill?
I've been a software developer for the last 3 years, and during that time I've learned a lot from working in production codebases that are 15+ years old. One of the biggest lessons has been how much your mental model changes when you're working on software that is maintained and used by many people, compared to projects that are only used by yourself.
In my free time, I've spent a lot of time reading books about software architecture and design. What fascinates me most is how people build systems that can be modified and extended by multiple developers over long periods of time while still integrating cleanly into an existing codebase.
This is also where I struggle in my own development. When I build systems, I often look back 3-6 months later and wish I had designed something differently. A particular part of the code might be difficult to change because of how I designed the API, and making improvements now could introduce breaking changes for other developers or tools that depend on it.
What confuses me is that many of the books I've read seem to contradict each other. For example, A Philosophy of Software Design advocates for deep modules and interfaces, while Clean Code emphasizes keeping methods and classes as small as possible. Both books are highly respected, yet they often appear to push developers toward very different design decisions.
I brought this up with a senior developer on my team, and his answer was essentially, "It depends on the situation." When I pushed further, he said that knowing which trade-offs to make is something that largely comes with experience. That's the part I struggle with. I'm the kind of person who likes having concrete principles or patterns to apply when design problems arise. I find it difficult to accept that two experienced developers can look at the same problem, choose different solutions, and both be right because of factors that only become obvious with time and experience.
I think this is also why I'm drawn to frameworks like Rails and Phoenix more than Next.js and much of the modern JavaScript ecosystem. Rails and Phoenix tend to provide strong conventions and well-defined patterns for solving common problems, whereas something like Next.js often presents several officially supported approaches for tasks such as data fetching. While that flexibility is valuable, I sometimes find myself wanting clearer guidance on which approach is preferable and under what circumstances.
Has anyone else gone through this stage in their career? How did you become more comfortable making design decisions when so much of the advice seems contradictory?
