Back in 2020 during high school, I started learning how to program in Python. It was confusing to understand for a couple of months, I would watch videos and smash my head against the keyboard, but eventually, things would begin to work. After understanding some fundamental programming concepts and watching a couple of Michael Reeves videos I decided I wanted to use what I knew for robotics. So, I proceeded to do some projects with raspberry pies and breadboards until I realized I was a broke teenager and had to go back to the drawing board.
Then about a year later I got interested in game development, so I downloaded Unreal Engine 4 and started to learn C++. Once again, I watched a lot of videos and smashed my head against my keyboard numerous times. Eventually after familiarizing myself with their documentation, I began to develop a game that was meant to be a First Person Shooter where players could build a boat and battle against one another.
The most difficult and core parts that I programmed started with a system that would allow players to interact with the environment and collect resources to build a boat. Then I continued to make a building system that would snap together so it could be used as the boat. Following that, I messed around with buoyancy so the boats could float, resulting in many fun bugs, often ending with the boat getting flung to the moon. The rest of the things I programmed can be seen on my GitHub or videos below.
The experience was extremely beneficial, using C++ made it easier when trying to read and understand other programming languages. The syntax which is like the equivalent to grammar for a spoken language would change, but the concepts were the same and there seemed to often be similarities between programming languages. It also taught me other important things like how to use source control with GitHub, and a bit about networking.