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"Proper CS degree" is really not relevant to your ability to write software. What I learned in CS was completely irrelevant to my job, and to the jobs of most p

"Proper CS degree" is really not relevant to your ability to write software. What I learned in CS was completely irrelevant to my job, and to the jobs of most programmers. You can do things (computer vision algorithms) that I cannot. I'm sure I can do things you can't. That's fine, software is a team effort, with different people taking on different tasks. The issue isn't formal education, then, it's breadth of practical knowledge. The thing that has helped me most, at least in that realm, is getting bored easily. Once I learned a problem space enough to be confident in my skills there I get bored, and move on to something new. Learning something new always involve discomfort and lack of confidence and "I don't know what I'm doing." So to mitigate that, you can try to pick somewhere that is adjacent to your skills. E.g. maybe you can switch jobs within your company to working on the platform itself, so you learn a new set of tools and problems but still in same programming language. Or find an open source computer vision library and read the code and learn the tool chain, build some toy projects with it. (Contributing without work's permission might violate your intellectual property agreement, depending.) More expansive thoughts on choosing something to learn: * Choosing a technology: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-technology/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-technology/ * Choosing a side project: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/09/side-projects/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/09/side-projects/

Joeri 10y ago
Studying formal CS is useful to learn the breadth of software solutions, as well as to understand the underlying shared theoretical grounding. It makes it easier to know what solutions to explore, and to learn what you need to learn. But I agree that it didn't add much value in the actually learning to code department. The best way to be better at programming is to read and write a lot of code.
- sn9 10y ago
  You can learn most of it nowadays online from sites like Coursera, edx, Udacity, and Stanford's Lagunita. The only exception might be discrete math, but pick up a copy of Rosen or Epps and some Schaum's Problem books and you can pick that up as well.

Joeri 10y ago

Studying formal CS is useful to learn the breadth of software solutions, as well as to understand the underlying shared theoretical grounding. It makes it easier to know what solutions to explore, and to learn what you need to learn. But I agree that it didn't add much value in the actually learning to code department. The best way to be better at programming is to read and write a lot of code.

sn9 10y ago
You can learn most of it nowadays online from sites like Coursera, edx, Udacity, and Stanford's Lagunita. The only exception might be discrete math, but pick up a copy of Rosen or Epps and some Schaum's Problem books and you can pick that up as well.