From Prison to Programming

From Prison to Programming
corecursive.com

     I know it’s not popular to just talk about grinding, the overwork culture is not popular. I get that, this is a different space. You want this shit? You got to grind. You’re going to have to do it on the weekends, you’re going to have to lock in. I’m sure someone’s going to be like, “Oh, no you don’t. I don’t have to. don’t put that pressure on them,” that’s fine. But to me, when you come from a background, especially if you’re a felon, but even if you’re not a felon, you don’t have a college that’s going to give you any kind of signal.

    Everyone talks about the college debt but your local community college isn’t that expensive. And then, that way, maybe you could just cut your work down to 10, 20 hours and then spend the rest of time coding.

    You focus on fundamentals first. Data structures, control flow, that kind of thing and stick to that for a short period of time. Maybe a month, month and a half, just do that basic stuff. It’s not popular, people want to see things on their screen, they want to say they built a thing but you’ve got to get those fundamentals first and there’s so many free options, Coursera, freeCodeCamp. And then, once you get some fundamentals, then you can decide on the platform.

    And once you pick your platform, just focus and stick to it. If you’re building Ruby on Rails, do that every day but make sure you’re building it. Hands on the keyboard, watch a tutorial then do the tutorial again but change some things then try to recreate what you built in the tutorial while not looking, that kind of thing. Because that’s the main thing is getting your skills up.

Most of my teachers understood this and got out of my way. The ones who didn't understand caused me no end of problems in their attempts to force me to conform to expectations I never signed off on. I was the smartest (read: just the most motivated) kid at most of the schools I went to and also among the most frequently written up, punished or suspended.

I had a reputation for getting sent to the office at least once every two weeks, inevitably due to some form of "willful disobedience", which was just me refusing to buckle to any perceived narcissism or institutional coercion foisted upon me. Authority figures either hated that they could not control me, or warmly accepted that if they just left me alone I would pass their stupid tests with flying colors.

It wasn't until my last two years of high school, when I was homeless and attending on my own cognizance, that teachers finally backed the fuck off and realized what they were dealing with. Except a single teacher. My transcripts were illegally altered by a teacher who felt that she had to "win" against me, and ultimately caused me 10 years of economic hardship after high school. I passed every class, had the highest test scores. and she still found a way to rob me of the multiple full-ride scholarship opportunities I had received for several engineering colleges, just to put a boot down on my face one last time on my way out. This was substantial enough to sue the school department over, but when you're homeless and your parents are drug addicts, you don't get these opportunities.

This is what an under-stimulated individual with no support structure looks like. And I felt the concerted institutional effort every single step of the way to push me down and grind me into submission, to teach me I was a criminal for thinking for myself. I have a much more tolerant view of many forms of criminal behavior because of this experience and that is no accident.

Dude like Wyatt Earp? The only escape from Wyatt Earp, the only safe harbor, the real place you can go, is stay right where you are, in your cell.

So this is a sick hack, that's exactly what this forum is about.

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