I turn 21 in roughly 26.5 hours, and am looking forward to every new day as much as I ever have. I popped straight out of high school and into university to study Commerce, but quickly discovered programming/software engineering as my true calling.

The educational system can be a little stifling at times, and I’m all too well aware of how successfully programming can be learned without instruction, but the two years I’ve spent at uni have completely changed my life. University’s greatest value comes from the provision of ideas, rather than the content that surrounds them.

Before the start of my first semester of my tertiary commerce degree, I was reading about a subject I’d taken that sounded interesting – Informatics 1. I’d always had an interest in programming, but being young and self-taught it had always been a tool, a toy. Apparently we would be using this language called “Python” in Informatics 1. Sounded pretty cool. I waded through a couple of pages of tutorial, and it started to click. Programming languages are exactly that – *languages*, a means of expression, and if you can just find the right word you can say anything you want.

If I had’ve struck off on my own after high school, I doubt I would have learned Python, and I probably wouldn’t have had the motivation to become an expert at anything other language either. However uni gives you ideas. Uni introduced me to Python, then XML, then MySQL, then Java, OOP and design patterns. Suddenly I had the capability (if not the time) to create anything. The world opened up, everything became possible, and even at 20.99 years of age I’m feeling there’s not nearly enough time to do everything.

I’m going on about university a lot, as if trying to undermine your argument, but what I’m really getting at is that uni taught me to learn, just like you say. You can’t directly teach someone to learn, but if you present them with a few interesting-enough ideas in just the right way, they’ll do it themselves. And you’re right, sometimes you just need to take yet another step back and appreciate it all. See that there’s always, ALWAYS something else to learn.

Thanks for making me take another one of those steps .

Great to hear from a brother in arms. It’s awesome that there’s more of us out there. The culture seems to advocate a march through education as the best way to get into our field, it’s good to know there’s more people who see this isn’t necessarily the best idea.

I left school at 16 with only standard grade qualifications (Scotland’s version of GCSE).

Never been to Uni/College and have now been programming professionally for around 9 years.

I started programming at the age of 8 on a C64, just messing about etc.- I had no idea this is what I would spend the rest of my days doing.

I started my first proper programming job at 17, earning £12k per year as a junior.

I am now 26 working in an amazing company, NetIDme Ltd, and I, like yourself, learned how to learn at a very young age.

There is nothing more fundamental in personal development than learning how to learn.

I am a C# dot net head 9-5 but in my own time im RoR up to the max and am constantly looking what’s next to learn.

Massive big-up to yourself and any other fellow self learners – it is the way forward I tell thee!

Dave the Ninja

I started reading your blog after joining the Fluent NHibernate project. I just wanted to say:

I can’t believe you are only 23. Damn straight you should be proud of yourself! I feel like you are about 5 years ahead of me (4 years younger, 1 year better), which is, incidently, precisely how long I spent earning my bachelors degree… hmmm….

Food for thought for me.

“learn how to learn”. It’s one that most people block out or are too afraid of the outcome.