For something like Lemmy or Reddit, any posts or conversations that I have are generally going out to random people who also happen to want to engage in a particular discussion. I don’t even look at usernames. The next conversation that I have will likely be with completely different people. In other words, there is no sense of community (unless I were to become heavily invested in a single community for some reason), and therefore I have no reason to want to make myself stand out in any way or make it easier for people to recognize me.

On the other hand, for something like an old school forum that I would frequently post on, or a discord server or something, I might actually get to know people and develop a sense of community. In that type of situation, I feel like an avatar can be appropriate.

You could use it to read Lemmy.

I guess it depends on the kind of places where you are parking. Where I am, we usually have big open parking lots with lots of space. I rarely ever back into a space, because backing in is more difficult than backing out. However if you are in more of a congested city or something, and the spots are narrow and you have a lot of cars moving around, then the situation flips and it can be more difficult to back out of the space than to back in.

I do some programming as a hobby. I’m far from being an expert or even competent at it. You work on whatever you WANT to work on. Sometimes this can be born from necessity, you need your computer to do something, but you can’t find any existing application that does the specific thing that you need. Sometimes maybe you just want to create something, just because it seems interesting to you, or just because.

So just for example, one of my hobbies involves working with video. Years ago, I was frustrated with the options available for encoding my videos into h264, so I ended up creating my own GUI around FFMPEG. It was easy enough and effective for what I needed, that the tool became quite popular among others in my hobby.

Recently, machine learning has made it possible to do cool stuff like remove the background from a video clip. A lot of this stuff is really difficult to even get working, let alone to use effectively. So a current project I’m working on is a GUI for such a tool to make it really easy to use.

So yeah… First I would say you need to figure out what you want to do. Why do you want to write a program? What do you want to accomplish?

Then you need to learn the basics of programming in whatever language you intend to use. And just gain a basic understanding of how programming works in general. Once you know enough to be dangerous, you can start working on something. Getting started is the hardest part, and involves really thinking about your problem, breaking it down into smaller parts, and considering how to solve each of those small parts. This can involve lots of research, lots of googling, and finding frameworks or libraries that might help you accomplish what you need.

LLMs like chatgpt have also been amazing in helping people like me to create something much more quickly than before. I can ask it for thoughts on how to accomplish a specific thing, or even have it write entire sections of code for me. Just yesterday, I had it create a script for me which I estimate would have taken me 10-20 hours to write on my own. However, they don’t always give right answers, so it’s really important to have a basic level of understanding of programming so that you can understand the code that it gives you. I don’t use any code until I understand how it works. The LLM can also help explain the code to you!