Thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm very aware that all I'm doing now is building very basic toy programs without any knowledge of how, say, a function that finds anagrams in an array of strings is 'useful' in the scope of a project a professional coder would work on. I've been dancing around Django and maybe it's time to dive in properly.
I find great joy in programming but I'm also grappling with the fact that I work in a well paid tech field (online marketing) and that the market for coders in the UK isn't great, especially for a (maybe) entry level Python coder. Could I conscience taking a £25,000 pay cut to code? Unfortunately I'm not sure I could.
Question for the HN community: I've been learning Python on and off for about 6 months and I can answer all of these questions with ease. I'm subscribed to Interview Cake's emails and generally figure out their programming tasks. Question is, am I good enough to make the leap to doing 'proper' programming? The gulf between hobbyist and professional coded seems huge. How did you all cross it?
I find great joy in programming but I'm also grappling with the fact that I work in a well paid tech field (online marketing) and that the market for coders in the UK isn't great, especially for a (maybe) entry level Python coder. Could I conscience taking a £25,000 pay cut to code? Unfortunately I'm not sure I could.