Same.

I actually feel that my stubbornness has made my life better in this case.

I’ve been to Reddit since, but I no longer feel the need to scroll it. I just use it when I went to find a genuine human recommendation on a topic.

You can still use programming to leverage your current position.

If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.

Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.

Because I refuse to install the Reddit official app.

Basically, an RSS feed is a link that gets updated when there’s an update to a website (here’s an example from my medium page). Anytime I post something, it gets updated.

An RSS feed reader is an app that you can use to list out which websites you’re interested in, and pulls up any new articles that get published.

RSS feeds are everywhere, but often hidden beneath the surface. For example, in the youtube page for Reuters you can’t see any link to an RSS feed, but if you right-click and press “inspect page source”, and then Ctrl+f for the word “rss”, you can find the link hidden there: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UChqUTb7kYRX8-EiaN3XFrSQ

Most RSS feed readers would be able to find that hidden link for you (you’d just have to give it the normal youtube page link). This is how I “subscribe” to things, I just have one central app where I get updates on everything I’m interested in following (blogs, news, videos, etc).

If a youtuber has both an Odyssey and a Youtube channel with the same content, I subscribe to the RSS feed from Odyssey.

If a youtuber I’m interested in mirrors their videos somewhere else, I’ll subscribe to that source via RSS. But that’s just to divert traffic from YouTube, not because I have a preference either way regarding community interactions (I never read comments on videos).

It’s really hard to recommend something without knowing what you’re interested in. And you only know what you’re interested in once you start exploring.

IT is really vast, and some positions do not require a lot of proper programming (besides some system scripts). My advice is to explore a lot of things, and narrow it down later down the line.

With that in mind, if you never programmed before, I would recommend starting with python. It’s easy to learn, there are a ton of resources out there, and it’s almost the “lingua franca” in a lot of areas (since it’s so popular). I’d say most developers these days are at least familiar with python, so that gives you a lot of options of people you can work with.

The fact that it’s so popular also means that whatever sub-problem you’re trying to solve, most likely there’s already a python library that does it, or some library written in another language that also includes python bindings.

Can’t recommend a specific book (since I’ve learn it a long time ago), I’d start by searching “best python resources site:reddit.com”, and go from there.

EDIT: apparently python can now be used inside Microsoft Excel. This might unlock some entry level positions to automate the admin workflow of a lot of companies (a lot of them heavily rely on Excel).

You’re not going to learn much from a phone app. Specially programming.

“Learning apps” are mostly gamified gimmicks. If you never learned programming, you need a good book explaining the concepts of what you’re trying to learn, a computer, a project, and the internet to search when you get stuck.

I know it’s the boring answer, but this is one of those skills that it’s basically a lot of tinkering, exploration, and nose to the grindstone.

SearXNG.

It’s a metasearch engine (aggregates results from several engines and feeds then back to me). It also filters out sites I don’t want, and redirects Reddit to the old interface.