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Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

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Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#51

Post by fenomas »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #36
fenomas wrote: post #23

Self-taught dev here, and I remember feeling similar things at a similar age. During a gap between jobs I wound up taking three online courses: Algos 1 and 2, and Andrew Ng's introduction to ML course (all at Coursera). This was just out of curiosity, I didn't have any particular goal or expectation for them. At the time I didn't feel like I learned any One Big Thing, but in retrospect the courses demystified a lot o…

I still got nothing out of NGs courses. I vaguely remember something about matrices, how to decide how many parameters to change when training, and some other very-vague understanding things. I don't really understand why they are "the gold standard", but I also don't do any ML "irl".

I took the Ng course when it first came out, but I hope it's been updated since - it was taught in a language I've literally never even heard of outside the course (GNU octave).

That said, if you want to understand ML stuff I learned waaaay more from Andrej Karpathy's famous video series. But I still found the old Ng course useful in a "ah, so this is what they teach in a college intro to ML course..." way.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#52

Post by mcjoken »

lolinder wrote: post #31

> But also have been feeling out of my depth recently, perhaps regretting my lack of solid CS background. But, above all I feel like I haven't been challenging myself enough and I've begun to lose interest. I think you need to elaborate on this a lot in order to get relevant feedback. Speaking from experience, a lot of the answers you're getting here won't work for someone who's started a family—you need to be very p…

Thanks for the response.

4 yrs at current company, flexible job with a small team. family commitments definitely affect my ability to focus beyond my day job.

If I could summarize how I feel out of my depth. When I encounter something I'm unfamiliar with I often feel like I've limited my self and played it safe. I feel I should be diving into these uncomfortable feelings and learning new things but it also seems vast and intimidating. Which often has me questioning why I want to do this work at all in the first place?

As for a new job, I applied to some new roles recently and found the interviews challenging. Which obviously is it's own thing I need to work on.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#53

Post by rgrieselhuber »

Byamarro wrote: post #22
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much agreed on both. Especially systems. There seems to be a hard cutoff in developer productivity and solution finding that is directly correlated to their level of knowledge in this area. There is just something about being initiated into the UNIX philosophy that helps immensely.

As a web developer, I'm curious - what kind of projects are you talking about and what kind of solutions did you witness being implemented as a result of the creator having knowledge in this area?

In backend dev, it's almost non-negotiable for what I would consider to be obvious reasons but I still see a learning curve for developers coming from self-taught or bootcamp backgrounds.

On the frontend, I guess you could make the argument that it's not as relevant but I still don't fully buy that after watching the last ten years in frontend development trends with React, etc. The whole thing just seemed like a way to escape the basics of dealing with web servers, basic HTTP, server-side development in "icky blue-collar" languages (anything not-JS or TS), deployments, SQL, etc.

Everyone has their biases and I'm no exception but this has been my experience.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#54

Post by vonwoodson »

thisisbrians wrote: post #33

What worked for me: I started out chasing my curiosity: wanted to make a simple video game, so I Googled my way to one as my first real programming project. I think passion projects are the way to start, because learning programming is frustrating no matter what (but totally doable, and totally worth it). Some folks prefer guided courses; they're great, but they just don't work for me (I get impatient and bored). The…

Check out phind.com it’s a ChatGPT-like tool (says) that has updated models on documentation after 2021.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#55

Post by mcjoken »

vonwoodson wrote: post #50

I am not “self taught” in the sense that I taught myself to code when I was young, and got a CS degree, and continue to learn new technology on my own , but I feel that the feeling you have is not related to being self taught or not. When I turned 30-ish and had a kid and a wife and a mortgage… I lost a metric ton of interest in computers and computing. It happens. The truth is that software is a terrible time-sink a…

I appreciate the response.

"When I turned 30-ish and had a kid and a wife and a mortgage… I lost a metric ton of interest in computers and computing." - This is exactly what I've been feeling recently.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#56

Post by mcjoken »

Just wanted to thank everyone for the responses. lots of good ideas.

As a follow up a question. Many of you said you pursue your interests and passions, exploring them in personal projects. Feels weird to ask but, how do you identify/kindle these interests? I feel like early in my career they came fast and easily, but now my interests often take me away from the computer screen.

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#57

Post by rmshin »

I never went to college at all and have had (still have) similar feelings of unstable CS foundations. Some things that have helped me:

1. I historically treated programming purely as a means to an end (for income/work, for business ideas, etc.) and this really inhibited my joy for the craft. After a bit of a burnout, I decided to finally embrace it as a "passion" and have since begun learning things I'm intrinsically interested in–3d graphics, operating systems, webgpu, and others.

2. One part of being invigorated is being around others who are invigorated. I've recently applied to a hacker retreat at Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/), so that I can meet and be surrounded by other hackers who pursue programming out of love for the craft itself. Even if this doesn't go through, I plan on finding other communities related to my sub-interests and learning alongside them.

3. Good online courses (whether paid or free) can be really effective at giving you a lay of the land for a given topic. Not too long ago I bought & went through a video course on 3d graphics (https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-progra...), which let me build a 3d renderer entirely from scratch in C (https://rmshin.github.io/3d-renderer-wasm/). Now I'm learning webgpu on my own through https://webgpufundamentals.org/, but I wouldn't be able to do so if not for the knowledge I gained through doing the video course.

4. From my experience, in order to upskill in programming (and anything else) there is no substitute for putting in the raw hours. This is why I mentioned the importance of intrinsic motivation in the first point, since it's hard to put in long hours for something that doesn't excite you. I realise you have a family (I don't) so this might really be the biggest barrier for you. If you can afford it, I'd highly recommend taking 2-3 months off to invest full-time in upskilling. Otherwise it'll be much trickier, but maybe possible if you can find a great community who you can learn alongside on a regular basis.

Lastly, I'd be more than happy to connect and chat about programming & self-learning if you don't have anyone around you–email is in profile :)

Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#58

Post by travisgriggs »

Mechanical engineer who’s spent the last 30 years programming instead. First thoughts:

- Find ways to ask questions. Whether forums or slack channels or peers. Asking puts you in the learners seat.

— Find domains that excite you. A friend told me “web development rots your brain” after he tried that for a while and found that carving out some time to contribute to open source Linux drivers kept him going and engaged.

- There’s an adage: Make it Work. Make it Right. Make it Fast (or optimal). I’ve observed that most programmers have a tendency to stop after the first priority is met. It’s understandable, that’s the lowest investment with the biggest (short term) return. But it’s also where the least learning happens. Push yourself to make one of your solutions a “right” solution. Push yourself to optimize something about it (even if you don’t deploy the actual optimization, because there be lots of evil around optimization).

Re: Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

#60

Post by coldpie »

mcjoken wrote: post #56

Just wanted to thank everyone for the responses. lots of good ideas. As a follow up a question. Many of you said you pursue your interests and passions, exploring them in personal projects. Feels weird to ask but, how do you identify/kindle these interests? I feel like early in my career they came fast and easily, but now my interests often take me away from the computer screen.

> how do you identify/kindle these interests

Hm, I don't know how to answer that. Maybe some examples will help?

For example, I'd kind of like to learn about some web programming. I have some ideas for a photo file browser/slideshow application that would be useful for me, so making a web app to do that is an idea I could use to explore some web framework.

Another example, I'm into Street Fighter 6 lately. I've been thinking about how it handles input for choosing moves in a way that "feels good," and how to specify hit detection, handling move priority, etc. If I wanted to learn a new language or graphics library, I'd probably try to write a simple fighting game to explore those challenges. This would just be a toy, not a serious project. The end goal would be to learn whatever library or language, and then forget about the project, except as an example of something I made with the library/language.

So... I guess I just kind of keep a list of stuff that seems useful/interesting in my head, and grab something from that list when it's time to go learn something new.

> but now my interests often take me away from the computer screen

Yes. I'm the same age, though I don't have any kids, and I feel the same way. With programming as a job, it's stopped being a hobby for me. I kind of miss it. Now I do guitar and woodworking instead :) but that doesn't help with the career.

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