Learning a topic requires you to break it down to its most basic components which are suspiciously like writing a recursive algorithm. Why write the same lines of code over and over when you can call the functions in on themselves until you reach the most basic primitive case? In a way, design patterns do very much the same thing. By allowing you to realize many problems you face are just the same problems in different trenchcoats. Instead of being sporadic and clever by writing hundreds of different lines of code for the same problems it is much more efficient and much more appealing to see code that tackles the same problems to visually and logically work the same too. Now when faced with daunting coding tasks you can easily break it apart into all the little tasks that comprise it and with enough experience, you’ll be able to look at any small task and understand the code necessary to conquer it. In essence, it is the same as baking, except your house is on fire and you have no recipes. The best thing you can do is ask others how they make theirs and then from there analyze the ingredients they use and more importantly why. Doing so will allow you to understand what ingredients you may want to add to your recipes depending on what you are trying to do.
The internet exists so you have plenty of people to ask As for where to get started there is a simple one-step process I used which works for baking too. You start. Today I use many “baking” tips and tricks when starting on any new type of delicately shaped yeast. I try my best to implement the techniques I’ve learned into all my projects and some can even be as subtle as syntax. The major cookie-cutter templates I apply are for major projects such as the final project we are working on now. Something my old team use to call “sphagettifying” which is the act of simplifying code to different sections which makes it easier to digest and test as well. It is much easier to code along different components of a major component than doing it all at once. Kind of like whisking dry and wet ingredients rather than shoving everything into one bowl and then baking it.