Hi everyone, I'm new here! Excited to learn from this community and get started with

Opening thread commentary.

Welcome!! Just joined myself a few months ago — the learning curve feels steep at first but everyone is super helpful here so you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Welcome!

Welcome to the group — we're glad you're here, and I think the best way to approach your first project is to start small and build momentum by shipping something usable rather than trying to design a perfect system that never gets finished, which is what happened to me when I tried building my own blogging platform in college instead of just using Jekyll or Hugo. My professor kept telling me to scope down but I had this vision for custom markdown rendering with integrated task management and image optimization pipelines — yeah right, the only thing I actually shipped was a broken homepage that would redirect to Google if you clicked anything at all. The lesson I learned is that done beats perfect every single time because there's nothing more demoralizing than looking back at code from three years ago and realizing it does absolutely nothing useful while your current projects are stuck in the planning phase forever, so honestly my advice for getting started would be to pick one specific problem you want to solve this week, write a script that solves just that one thing, and don't worry about scalability or design patterns until after the first version works. There was also this time I tried to build a CLI tool for regex testing because I kept forgetting how to escape nested parentheses — which is my life right now — but the real issue wasn't the escaping logic it was that I spent three days building an argument parser when I could have just hardcoded two flags and been done in ten minutes, so whatever you do don't overengineer your first project because the temptation will be there and you need to resist it fiercely. Also if you run into any issues with Docker or environment variable management those are probably going to crop up sooner than you think — let me know what stack you decided on and I can point some resources your way.

Welcome to the community — it is genuinely great to have you join us, there are so many different skill levels here from complete beginners who would never have started without this forum's support to people with decades of experience sharing what they know freely because that is how the learning happens in these spaces and I remember exactly when I was at that stage where everything felt like it needed a tutorial but then you find the right thread and suddenly things click. That actually reminds me of my first job as an intern which was basically just organizing files for someone who had no idea what they were doing, they'd tell me to file something under 'general' and I would sit there staring at the cabinet trying to figure out where general fit in the alphabet — it sounds ridiculous but that moment of confusion is actually when you learn most because your brain starts building connections between concepts. That was back in 2014 before everything became so streamlined with cloud systems, now we just have a folder and you click create new directory and file and boom everything's organized which is great until you realize the organization itself has become an abstraction layer that makes you wonder whether you actually understand what you're working on. Anyway I digress — to answer your question about where to start, my suggestion would be to pick one specific small project rather than trying to learn every concept at once because overwhelm is the primary killer of motivation and most people quit before they ever get past the first week when everything feels too complicated.

hi im so lost i dont know where to begin literally everything looks like gibberish right now is there a roadmap or something? sorry if this sounds stupid but i have no idea what anyone else knows either and everyone seems to already understand things that make zero sense to me still learning the basics pls help

Welcome! Glad you made it — there's a lot of cool stuff happening in modding right now, especially for Skyrim. Definitely check out the Community Patch and SKSE first before adding anything else. That usually fixes 90% of compatibility issues right off the bat. Good luck getting started!

hi im so sorry for being annoying but i just downloaded everything and i have no idea where to even begin... is there like a roadmap? or do people just figure it out as they go?? my friend said this community is great for beginners but honestly im kinda overwhelmed already :( help please