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Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

jotaen.net

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Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#31

Post by adjkant »

christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

If I may offer, technical skills are only one part of a person and can be small or large in importance. It's completely okay for programming to be a day job. Personal projects can take many forms outside of the CS world, or sometimes they can use it tangentially. Sometimes CRUD is more fun when it's powering something you really care about personally :)

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#32

Post by Aperocky »

christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

I might be speaking from an unfair vantage point, but working for the largest cloud company has its perks, namely, the tooling that deal with exactly the problem that you described.

While some CRUD is still necessary, most of that is abstracted away, we still have to be schema conscious, but since 1. Our team is dedicated to one back end product. 2. We have a lot of resources (and demand), we had to spend a lot of time thinking about more complex (and interesting) problems with scaling, distributed computing etc.

It's a blessing for me because I'm sure if I was in a place where I need to be responsible for all part of the stack the job would turn into a mundane grind. But it's not just for work, I've been able to turn some of the stuff I learned into private projects and make them more interesting and less CRUDly.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#34

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

If you're soul searching, I recommend skimming several technical books before devoting yourself fully to one.

And then just pick the one that most excites your curiosity.

The process of deciding what to learn next is a type of skill that you can learn. And potentially it's valuable to learn that skill if you feel bored.

The risk of just picking a book and committing to it is that it may not be the right book for you, or the subject for you right now, or any number of other things.

Anyway it's worked for me; your mileage is likely to vary :)

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#35

Post by Aperocky »

jotaen wrote: post #6
Eylandos wrote: post #3

Nice post Jotaen but I feel you are heavily downplaying how well a mechanical engineering degree looks when switching. You have math and critical thinking skills but just needed a little time to get the fundamental computer science concepts down. Also how does the idea of boredom come into play here? Yes self-studying is important but at what point do feel burned out and want to apply it in a real world work station?

Yes, I definitely profit from basic skills that I acquired in studying mechanical engineering, as you mentioned. However, when applying for jobs I didn’t have the impression that my prospective employers valued that too much, at least as far as my CV is concerned. Not sure what you mean by “boredom”? I don’t have a clear “definition of done” or a deadline for my sabbatical, that’s also why I try to diversify the topi…

I'm currently in software but graduated from mechanical as well.

I think one of the biggest drawback of the current education system is the assumption that people should have one major and that it would last throughout their career. In reality, most of the skill learned ended up being not used, the proportion of the major is basically the opposite of what the job market actually need. And the constraint of it actually ruined a lot of people and careers. I've been fortunate to be able to choose whatever class I want in college and discover my love for programming - if not for that I might be in a much less productive place today.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#36

Post by christiansakai »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #34
christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

If you're soul searching, I recommend skimming several technical books before devoting yourself fully to one. And then just pick the one that most excites your curiosity. The process of deciding what to learn next is a type of skill that you can learn. And potentially it's valuable to learn that skill if you feel bored. The risk of just picking a book and committing to it is that it may not be the right book for you,…

Thank you. I agree with that approach. I do have an interest in programming languages. I played around with programming languages in my free time. I'll start with this subject, and see if I am good enough to do it.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#37

Post by christiansakai »

adjkant wrote: post #31
christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

If I may offer, technical skills are only one part of a person and can be small or large in importance. It's completely okay for programming to be a day job. Personal projects can take many forms outside of the CS world, or sometimes they can use it tangentially. Sometimes CRUD is more fun when it's powering something you really care about personally :)

Indeed. It's not that I don't care about the job, but after doing it so many times it loses its magic already. I do think stuffs that I am building during my day job is useful.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#38

Post by christiansakai »

Aperocky wrote: post #32
christiansakai wrote: post #9

I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by…

I might be speaking from an unfair vantage point, but working for the largest cloud company has its perks, namely, the tooling that deal with exactly the problem that you described. While some CRUD is still necessary, most of that is abstracted away, we still have to be schema conscious, but since 1. Our team is dedicated to one back end product. 2. We have a lot of resources (and demand), we had to spend a lot of ti…

I hope I'll get to where you are one day.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#39

Post by sidusknight »

moosey wrote: post #4

I am 20 years out of college with a CS degree, working in your typical business rules development kind of job. Exactly the kind of job that doesn't need a CS degree, but I'm perfectly decent at programming business rules, so there's that. Last year, I've been on a learning binge myself, due to the fact that I want to understand the underlying workings of the technologies that are shaping our near future. In this inte…

> I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT.

It's probably too late for that course, but IMO MIT's courses on edx are much better structured than on MIT OCW or whatever it's called.

Re: Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

#40

Post by parf02 »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #2

I'm doing something similar. I got undergraduate degrees in CS and business and worked 5 years for a large corp right out of school. I saved my money and, using a rollover for business startup, I funded my business. I'm lucky enough to have a 2-earner household and a partner that is giving me time to figure out where I want to go next. I've been on "sabbatical" for a little over a year. I've had a couple false starts…

Web developer with a background in Chemistry here! Hit me up if you want to discuss Chemistry-related software development :)
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