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The context of my reply was generally towards a 4 year program in engineering or computer science. I think if you just want to be a front-end app or web develo

The context of my reply was generally towards a 4 year program in engineering or computer science. I think if you just want to be a front-end app or web developer than a bootcamp or alternative education can suffice. And I agree you learn more by producing work. Teaching yourself how to use frameworks like bootstrap or angular is easy. But teaching yourself fundamental CS principles like traversing a linked list or rotating a 2D matrix is much harder, and the payoff comes much later. For example, you mentioned that you do backend dev. Suppose your boss asks you to do load balancing to handle server traffic. You could probably hack something together with AWS tutorials and Stack Overflow, but do you understand the principles behind it? Can you actually improve whatever it is you built? What if you can't afford AWS or you need a custom solution? If you don't know or can't do these things, then you'll never be as valuable or useful than someone who does.

gremlinsinc 10y ago
True I guess, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none I'd say. PHP I'm pretty intermediate on, and linux. I can hack things and make them work, but I've taken college classes on programming, and to this day I've never used linked lists in my code. I've also never rotated a 2D matrix, but a lot of web apps and even mobile is a lot of the same interacting with api's, manipulating data, etc.. I've used linode before for node balancers as they have those as builtins. -- I do actually spend about 2 hours per week going through CS courses on things I haven't learned from a github CS syllabus which basically has an entire CS degree crammed into free online lessons. I'm also becoming more interested in learning pentesting - not only to be able to become a Whitehat hacker, but because it'll give me more insight into securing my own applications better from malicious hackers.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

True I guess, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none I'd say. PHP I'm pretty intermediate on, and linux. I can hack things and make them work, but I've taken college classes on programming, and to this day I've never used linked lists in my code. I've also never rotated a 2D matrix, but a lot of web apps and even mobile is a lot of the same interacting with api's, manipulating data, etc.. I've used linode before for node balancers as they have those as builtins. -- I do actually spend about 2 hours per week going through CS courses on things I haven't learned from a github CS syllabus which basically has an entire CS degree crammed into free online lessons. I'm also becoming more interested in learning pentesting - not only to be able to become a Whitehat hacker, but because it'll give me more insight into securing my own applications better from malicious hackers.