"Self taught" is an unhelpful distinction. It is the work itself that teaches. Helpful voices found in university programs, books, and boot camp courses may point you toward useful habits, but there are no shortcuts to experience. At day's end, everyone is self taught.
Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#1021. Learned Basic from copying/modifying programs from a magazine when I was in elementary school; learned (most of) C/C++ by reading the books that came with Turbo C++ in middle school; formal education was Pascal in high school CS, C in high school taking classes at community college, C++ and Java at university (no degree); taught myself Perl/PHP/shell/Python/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/etc after college.
2. Started in the early-mid 80s.
3. Programming's always been a part of my job but not the primary focus. I guess the first time I got paid to do something like it was around '99.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#1031) I was dragged into it - I was 12 years old and a member of a forum that was shutting down. My limited experience in HTML + CSS and a bit of naivety made me think I was an expert in web development, so I offered to take over. I basically had to learn PHP + MySQL overnight and over the course of my 2 month summer I spent late nights reading code to try and figure out what it did (i.e. no books, just trial and error and a lot of Google).
2) Started around the time I turned 12 years old, so June 2006.
3) I started making money in varying ways almost right away. I took over the site and installed Google ads within a few months. I probably started doing freelance within a year. My first full-time job was this past April doing an internship after first year university.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#104I just got obsessed with it while still in grade school and spent all of my spare time learning and trying stuff. I started hundreds of little useless projects, all of them out of my league. Pre-planned courses never appealed to me at all, maybe because of some slight ADD tendencies. They try to titrate knowledge in a steady, regulated, and pedagogic way. That just bores the shit out me. The only thing that even remo…
I know what you mean by the "not as many as those who think they will", but I would say that largely those stats seem to be measuring the wrong thing. Course completion is only one side of the coin. I've learned a TON from free MOOCs, and taken significant parts of about 10. I've finished maybe two? Sometimes the curriculum hits things I already know, so I skip them. I don't have a "complete" course, but I learned what I came for, and since they're not for credit, what do I care if I miss out on internet points? For instance, right now I'm trying to figure out how to do some more complex (for me) HABTM relations in Rails. If there is one lecture in an entire MOOC that makes the concept click with me, I'm happy with the time invested.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#105I loosely consider myself a self-taught programmer:
1) a)My middle school (~2000) used to have a computer co-curricular course. I learned some BASIC, some HTML, and made websites/applets that trolled the user (the cancel button that runs away, icons and buttons that didn't do what they said, hidden buttons and urls via formatting, etc). Turns out I studied UX anti-patterns via trolling.
b) When I was 13 (~2002), my brother was studying Computer Science for his Indian CBSE 11th grade concentration. I bugged him incessantly about what he was writing, helped him debug, tried to come up with better ideas and algorithms for what he was writing. He was torn between enjoying teaching me stuff and getting my help, and feeling inferior if I actually came up with a better idea than him. Regardless, he was vital to me becoming as much of a hacker as I am today, because he was an excellent teacher, constantly challenging me and giving me interesting things to think about without making me do mindnumbingly boring tasks. While being taught is not really self-taught, that I seeked to learn it without any external motivating factors and purely out of interest, and I just capitalized on the nearest and most effective resource available to me I think makes it close enough. This is probably the answer to (2), by the way.
c) I followed in my brother's footsteps (2005), but I already knew the material, having been progressing through it on my own in my spare time in the interim. Taking the course just meant I could dedicate that much of my "not free time" to doing something I intended to learn! I skipped most of the homework, got mediocre grades, didn't know the algorithms asked on the exams, but enjoyed being vindicated in sitting in front of the monitor staring at code, making my first Tank game, a hangman game, a file encryption/decryption system, etc, all in C++.
d) I started pursuing a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the hands-on school Olin College in Greater Boston, where I was encouraged to learn to do, and less about theory. This is where I really stopped learning computer science, and really started teaching myself programming. I hated CompSci more with every class, and at some point found myself writing way more code the semesters I had no CompSci credits, because I was enjoying it so much more programming controllers for electromechanical projects to do cool things, than learning how Turing Machines and Regular Expressions flip things on and off.
3) I had no real opportunities to work internships in the Middle East where I grew up, the industry was very young and elitist where it existed there. And I'm glad I didn't get numbed to professional programming work there. I worked as a tools developer for an electrical engineering lab where I also did research for a couple summers. I then went on to work at IBM for an internship (2010) and discovered it was a pit of doom for someone like me who could see it "being pretty alright," but never feel fulfilled being a cog in someone else's machine that I didn't care about. There was nothing wrong with the work, but I'm glad it was just an internship. I made something I was proud of, some bigwigs clapped when I presented it, they shook my hand, asked me questions like they were interested, genuinely made it sound like they would use it in a product at some point (I stopped checking a year ago), and I was on a tiny high in my first professional dev job. I fled from corporate software dev, and now live poverty stricken in the Bay Area making (about 50% of) something really exciting, with people I'm excited to see everyday to work with.
I think at some level anyone who pursues programming to fulfill their dreams is self-taught. School does not teach you how to make the things you really care about making, but it can help you a bit.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#106Considering I've done a bit of both...3 years of CS for the fundamentals and everything else self taught..I recommend getting the degree if possible. It made things significantly easier when I started diving in to concepts I was interested in.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#107I was able to teach myself Basic programming on a TI-99/4A, Atari 2600, and Commodore 64 from 4th grade (in the early 1980s) because the languages were simple, the machine was simple, there were magazines (Compute!) to crib code from, all the freeware and shareware programs were in source, and my dad said "There's the manual." when I asked him to teach me. :)
I spent time programming because I didn't have a modem. It turns out this was the best thing for me, since I didn't waste my time on BBSes. A friend of mine who had, dropped out of the CS program at Penn State after a digital logic course I loved.
In high school I took a year and a half of Basic and Pascal, but more importantly spent three periods a day in the computer lab exploring every nook and cranny of programs I had to write, programs I wanted to write, and the shell language of the school district's VAX.
Seemed clear to me that I wanted to do computer science, but I switched to computer engineering after that digital logic course. Took college classes in Pascal, C, C++, assembly for microprocessors, common lisp for ai, vhdl for processor design, operating systems, and wire-wrapping a microcontroller system.
Grad school courses in Smalltalk [edit: and computer architecture and petri nets and, most importantly, self-taught makefiles for a class project build system].
After I got out of school I took company courses in Java and Perl, but more importantly taught myself the Unix environment from books, and had opportunities to use it every day at work.
On my own, I read books and did programming exercises in Haskell, Ruby, and Go.
[edit: I dug seriously into make and bash for ten years, writing the build system for a telecom network.]
I have a real passion for functional parallel programming in the Inferno shell, so I'm working on a blue-sky build-tool project. [edit: https://github.com/catenate/credo]
On my job I'm now picking up Python because I have to maintain a build system code base in it.
Overall, I'd say I've probably taught myself more than been taught, but only because I had about 8 years of formal instruction in a programming span of 30 years. The education was essential though, because there were so many concepts I would not have gotten to on my own.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#108I learned R http://goo.gl/RNob on my own for data analysis, and so this is more of a specialty language than a full programming language. With that out of the way, here is what I did:
1. had a series of projects where R was the only way to go, which means I was "forced" to get it to work 2. learned how to ask proper questions to the experts 3. searched for the most appropriate tools to create an environment that worked for me 4. started working with other people who knew the technology and became friends with them 5. after some time, started teaching what I had learned to others - this really forces you to make all concepts crystal clear
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#109If you are serious about programming and have any possibility of doing this at all, by all means get a CS degree at the best university you can access. I have worked with or interviewed a few programmers without any university degree and time and time again their confidence in how getting a degree is a total waste of time was directly proportional to their ignorance of basic facts from various areas of CS and inabili…
I've been really considering a 2nd BS in CS at times, but just can't seem to get myself to do it. I have BS in engineering, but not CS. I get fustrated because of what would be required for a MS in it, and some schools the time for a 2nd BS is just out of control for myself.
I also see myself being in more management of programmers at sometime. It's pretty rare for me to trivialization a solution process. I've done it, but so has everyone. Making mistakes is the learning process.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#1101) I learned coding in a big way by buying a $1500 Java library with my student loan without knowing Java very well in order to build a software without really knowing where to start. But this forced me to learn damn it, I worked so hard to try and recoup that $1500 and I ended up being shy about 70% of that amount. I open sourced it and well I can't even look at that code anymore!