It’s like everything else, you need to actually do it to get better at it. The more you want and try to get better, the harder it’ll feel. The best way is to just enjoy doing it. But it’s easier said than done.

For me personally, since it’s not my job, I don’t feel any pressure programming, and it’s kind of a stress reliever. I’m not very good at it anyway, but the improvements I’ve made were due to the fact that I didn’t feel any pressure in learning new things, and was able to do things at my own preferred pace. As an example, for the last few days I’ve been learning about the internal working of SQLite. It’s pretty complex, but I don’t feel like I need to know and remember everything, so it’s easier for me to actually get through it. (Btw, if anyone reading this has experience working with SQLite, let me know, I’d like to discuss some stuff. It’s about optimizing some queries, so you don’t need to know about the SQLite codebase, just a rough idea of how it works, and some experience with Rusqlite. Fwiw, happy to add you as a contributor in my project if any performance improvements come out of it.)

But it’s a different story when it comes to learning stuff for my actual work. Even though the rewards are bigger, the process feels much worse. (Hating on Deligne-Serre representations right now. :( They’re beautiful objects, but the pressure to learn is just too much.)

So, if you’re like me, try not to take it too seriously, and it’ll be easier to learn.