My local timeline is literally the whole reason I joined this particular instance. There isn’t enough traffic in the niche subs, so I find a popular instance with posts that tend towards my interests, instead.

Codeacademy.com

It’s free for individuals and teaches all the popular languages (Python, Java, C++, etc.). Figure out what language will be most useful to the kinds of programs you wanna build (website, game, etc.) and start with the beginner courses. Once you get the hang of it, you can look up how to run a local development environment on your computer for the language of your choice so you can start building applications for real.

Best of luck!

It’s funny because I just recently created a tiny web app that I run off my own computer which allows me to aggregate the feeds of any subreddit I want along with posts from Lemmy and other Reddit-like forums. Because of this, this change won’t really affect me. While I do occasionally use a third party Reddit app to surf Reddit, I mostly just use my web app and it doesn’t use any Reddit APIs but just scrapes the website directly. Only thing is I’ve heard that they might be getting rid of old Reddit. I currently scrape from old Reddit rather than the new one because the old one has easier HTML objects to identify. Still, it shouldn’t be too hard start scraping the new UI, if I have to.