This blog represents the public view of my latest personal endeavour: I’m going to create my own software engineering degree. To be a little more specific, I plan to try to learn as much about the field of software development, and a bit of proper computer science, as I can. Rather than spending a few more years, and a few more dollars, in a post-secondary educational institution, I aim to teach myself the topics of computer science I would learn in the classroom on my own.

To be completely honest, I’m not entirely sure from where the motivation for this project came. As near as I can tell, there were three fundamental sources:

1. A video I found on reddit by a guy called Clay Shirky that talked about our collective ‘cognitive surplus’ and what we can accomplish if we start putting our ‘free time’ to better use.
2. Joel Spolsky and/or Jeff Atwood. While I’m no longer sure exactly what was said, I know there was a point several weeks ago during a stackoverflow podcast where I more or less decided to start this project. One of the two made a distinction between career programmers, those who program as a job and only as a job, and ‘geek programmers’ (for lack of a better term), who program largely for the love of programming. The latter of these being notably better because they simply care more about their craft.
3. Personal dissatisfaction with my career thus far, as well as an increasing fear of skill atrophy. With all due respect to my current employer, I don’t really have any sense of identity in the work I currently perform. I got into this particular job as a way to stop my bank account from hemorrhaging funds, and am now worried that I’ll never get back into newer technologies and that this in turn will cause me to regret entering the field entirely.

This will clearly be a monumental task, which is part of the reason this blog exists. My thinking is that if I have a public record of what I am doing, I’ll be more likely to continue to make an effort to accomplish my goals. If I were to put this project on the back burner, there would likely be people (admittedly, at this point it would mainly be some close friends and selected family members) who would ask about my lack of forward momentum. This would, I hope, give me the kick in the butt I need to get back into it. If nothing else, I’m trying to follow Jeff Atwood’s advice from a year ago: “When in doubt, make it public.”

I’m not expecting this blog to ever develop a major following, but I do hope that if others embark on the same journey that maybe they will find some motivation or guidance here. The hardest part I’ve found so far is learning what I never knew I needed to know, so I’m going to lay it all out here as I discover it so others don’t need to blaze this trail again.

Wish me luck.