11 ms·

Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

358 points by jotaen 7y ago

alistproducer2 7y ago
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 with respect to the business. In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes. I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to a undergrad or graduate (MS) level. And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring. Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head up" my labs for outside credibility's sake.
- hooloovoo_zoo 7y ago
  I don't know what you're doing with chemistry, but if it involves any kind of physical experimentation I would implore you to exercise caution. Lab sciences are very hard to self study because a lot of important practical and safety knowledge is passed down in the lab and not in books. My friends who became chemists spent 1000+ hours in labs by the time they finished their undergraduate degree, for reference.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Exercising caution is good advice, but you can overdo it too. The kind of stuff I got up to with my chemistry set 42 years ago would probably scare the pants of you but I learned a lot and the worst that ever happened was that I lost some glassware. Safety glasses, good ventilation, gloves when you need them and patience are the most important ingredients here, as well as a good textbook or course. You can have hours of fun and learn a lot for very little money, the real dangers are usually in stuff that goes 'foom' is larger quantities than advised and stuff that poisons you, and with MSDS online that is a lot safer today than it used to be when I was a kid.
    - jcims 7y ago
      The tree F's of safety in home chemistry: fans, fire extinguishers and feet.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Fire extinguisher is a good one, also important, to know what will put out a particular fire and what ends up making things (much) worse.
      - andrewflnr 7y ago
        Is that feet as in "wear closed toed shoes" or as in running away if necessary?
        jacquesm 7y ago
        Fans to ventilate, fire extinguisher for when things go wrong, feet for when the fire extinguisher isn't enough.
      - anesmike 7y ago
        hot glass looks like cold glass.
      - ddsea 7y ago
        This quote made me wonder about analogs in other activities, e.g. woodworking.
- parf02 7y ago
  Web developer with a background in Chemistry here! Hit me up if you want to discuss Chemistry-related software development :)
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    What sort of stuff do you do?
  - tpfour 7y ago
    Your profile does not give a way to reach you.
  - alistproducer2 7y ago
    Email me. Its on my profile.
- jczhang 7y ago
  What do you mean by using a rollover?
Eylandos 7y ago
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?
- ghaff 7y ago
  I agree with that as someone with a mechanical engineering degree. I've never been a professional software developer but I've mostly self-taught myself over time and even ran a small software business as a sideline at one point. I've never had a particular desire to go into development full-time. (I was out of working as an engineer by then anyway.) But, had I wanted to, I have very little doubt I could have slid into a dev job fairly easily with my background if I spent some time focusing on the area I wanted to work in.
- jotaen 7y ago
  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 topics I’m looking at rather than going through them one after the other. I’ll definitely need/will start working again in a couple of months, but my hope is that working freelance and continuing self-studying is not mutually exclusive. But I’ll need to see next year how this works out then in practice.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    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.
moosey 7y ago
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 interest, I have taken what little time I have (with a job and two children) to relearn the baseline college mathematics that I've lost from my apathy towards serious continuing education. I first completed the course "Learning How to Learn" and applied the practices within to courses in Calculus and Physics. I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT. I was never a great student, and it could be just because, as I think I've discovered, I'm just a slow learner. My early educational talents and successes were due to a lot of early reading that I did, but it's clear to me that it takes a lot of repetition before I start to understand a subject, and I often have to go back over lectures, then read the associated notes, and run through a ton of practice problems (which I then put into anki) before I grasp a subject. Due to this my learning has been slow (along with the two kid situation), but I'm certain now that I have a much better grasp of the subject matter than I did when I was twenty. I'm not suggesting I'm smarter with age, what I am suggesting is that I didn't have study habits that allowed me to flourish. Clearly, the current educational models that we are using in our schools are failing students like me who get a good head start due to early reading, but can't learn fast enough to keep up in a classroom environment. It is clear from what I've learned about the learning process from Barbara Oakley and others that the actual processes that we put in place are further suboptimal for the learning process, but the ways that we set up our education system are not the result of experimentation. If I were to surmise their source, I would say that they are explicitly designed to fail, so that we can excuse reduced spending in public education systems. Still, these self-study courses are great for people like me, as long as you are permitted to study at your own rate. This is important as I'm going to guess that perserverance is as important as intelligence when it comes to advancing to the point where you can aid research teams. I predict that nations that automate educational models (as well as hiring a broad staff of educators, lecturers, and tutors) that are successful will have a much larger impact on the future of the information age than they did in previous eras.
- 7y ago
gorpomon 7y ago
For those wanting something a bit less intense, the Recurse Center in NYC is a great place to practice a few months (or now even just a week) of self study with some of the brightest folks you'll ever meet.
- jczhang 7y ago
  Anything similar in LA?
christiansakai 7y ago
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 bit everyday just by code review, bug squashing, practicing best practices, do better tests, etc. But mostly these are the mundane tasks. While you can argue that technical skills have diminishing returns, but I do really want to focus more on it at this point of my life. I see it in HN, Reddit, everyday people make very cool projects and I wonder what it will take for me to reach that level? Anyway, I decided to buy the book "Engineering a Compiler" and set a goal to actually finish it. I guess that's my soul searching direction will go for now.
- cjauvin 7y ago
  I'm currently going (slowly) through this fantastic book, which I greatly enjoy and recommend: https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/
  - christiansakai 7y ago
    Nice, I'll take a look on that one as well.
    - munificent 7y ago
      I'm the author of "Crafting Interpreters". I really like "Engineering a Compiler", but it's probably not the best first book for implementing a programming language. It's primarily a textbook for backend optimization. It covers just enough front end to feel like a complete book, but you can tell the authors assume you've already taken an undergrad class in compilers before. It is an excellent second or third book after you have a working compiler and you want to start understanding how industrial-grade compilers make code go fast. It's the best textbook I know on optimization. Most other compiler optimization material lives in academic papers, which can be scattershot and difficult to absorb. One of my goals with "Crafting Interpreters" was to give people an intuitive feel for PL implementation so that they are better prepared to approach deeper works like "Engineering a Compiler".
hwwc 7y ago
I'm also taking a sabbatical! I guess mine is also self study, although I never quite thought of it that way. I've taken this time to be able to have in-person lunches with many interesting people, work on open source projects, and sit in on seminars at the local university. I think I'm just beginning to learn how to access local resources for learning. I'm also thinking of freelancing, and have been gearing up for contracts, and also to perhaps start an agency with a friend. I really value the freedom that has allowed me to explore my programming and math (and climbing/yoga/martial arts) interests these last few months. One unexpected thing about my sabbatical: my social life is better, I have way more time and energy for it :)
- mcrwfrd 7y ago
  I love the idea of taking sabbatical. If I were to take time for one, I think the structure would look more like what you're suggesting here. Expanding network of people to learn from and contributing to OSS. As introverted as I am, I have learned in recent years how much easier and faster it can be to learn from other people than from textbooks alone.
ggambetta 7y ago
I'm also on a sabbatical, and to some extent, also self-studying -- but focusing on filmmaking. I'm acting, writing, directing, and producing! I recently made this hour-long, no-budget feature film about an evil social media company, available on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1 https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1 Worse than even The Room, but might be the first movie including a realistic depiction of a FAANG interview?
- christiansakai 7y ago
  Looks interesting. I’ll watch it
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    I did say "worse than The Room". You've been warned ;)
asdfman123 7y ago
I don't see how you guys have an appetite for this kind of thing after years of education and full time work. If I take a sabbatical, I'm walking across New Zealand.
- guidoism 7y ago
  Yeah there's no way I could have done this five years out of school. I remember contemplating getting my pilot's license just a few years out of school and after looking at now much I needed to study I was like: Hell no. But 20 years out of school — This was ideal for me. Walking across New Zealand sounds awesome and if my kids were older I'd do it, but honestly I'm really happy just reading books, watching videos, and tinkering with different ways to program. After decades in the industry I can't say enough about how awesome it is to not have a schedule, boss, meetings, performance evaluations, 1:1s, deadlines, people counting on you to make the right decisions (though I guess my wife and kids would argue that they still depend on my decisions).
faitswulff 7y ago
Having done this multiple times myself, I have to say...not everyone is wired for it. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops on reddit and, of course, hackernews.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I suspect it will work out well. I've been in an "involuntary" sabbatical. When I left the company I'd been at for over a quarter-century (mostly as a manager, but very technical), I immediately ran into "Go away, old man. Nobody wants you." It was pretty jarring, insulting, and humiliating, but what really happened, was I got upset. When I get upset, I get busy (paraphrased from "Back to School"). Fortunately, I have the means to set up my own company (I actually have 2), and I have spent the last couple of years ferociously focused on working full-time to write software, using the most modern and relevant techniques for my chosen direction (Apple tech -I've been writing Apple software since 1986). It's working well. I haven't lost a thing, in over thirty years of software development. In fact, I seem to learn much faster, these days, than I ever did, when I was younger. I suspect that all the context I have makes picking up new stuff easier. I've been building (actually, just organizing and adding to) a HUGE portfolio, with six figures of lines of code, in dozens of repos, spanning at least a decade (although I also reference my first engineering project, from 1987), hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of articles and essays, and a number of deployed and shipping solutions. I've learned to work alone very well, indeed (I spent my entire career in HUGE heterogenous teams; spread around the globe). That was one of the things I was afraid I wouldn't be able to master. The difference in productivity is staggering. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day as a corporate software developer (I get up early, and close my green ring by 6AM). I tend to be all about "Get Stuff Done." I like theory and experimentation, but I've been writing shipping software my entire career, so that's the direction I've picked. I heard a guy once say "The #1 feature of the project is SHIPPING." Working alone has forced me to keep the scope humble, which has worked out, after I learned to adjust my project plans. The biggest coefficient for me has always been quality. I like to think of myself as a craftsman. I get special joy from writing high-quality software. One of the biggest lessons that I've taught myself was how to be very, very flexible (I call it "ultra-agile"). My corporate background was Victoria Falls (REAL Waterfall). I have been yearning to break free of that yoke for decades. Working alone has allowed me to explore an evolutionary design and construction process that has, so far, worked fairly well. The story is still very much unfolding, and we'll see how it goes. I still have a lot to learn, and I like it. More Will Be Revealed...
- 7y ago
nafizh 7y ago
Can anyone tell me what's the font used in the article? It's beautiful.
- jotaen 7y ago
  It’s the “Input” font family by David Jonathan Ross. https://input.fontbureau.com/ https://input.fontbureau.com/
  - nafizh 7y ago
    Thanks!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pyxelr 7y ago
  Next time you can try looking it up in the browser inspector. Use RMB + "Inspect" on the font of interest, and you will find it in the "font-family" attribute.
cryptozeus 7y ago
I was hoping for more details as to what you have been doing and how it has been.
emmanueloga_ 7y ago
Thinking back on all the subjects I've ever studied and books I've read, I've lost a lot of familiarity with many of those subjects (although I do find myself picking up much faster when I come back, even years later). I dream of taking this kind of sabbatical too, it is just a bit scary to do it without some kind of framework that would allow me to plan my week, and annotate, structure, accumulate, and review the things that I learn. I feel like I should focus on finding / designing that system before planning on taking the sabbatical.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
khiner 7y ago
I also recently took about 10 months off of work, specifically to focus on learning. It was incredible, and I don’t regret it financially. I would often get up at 6 in the morning or even earlier (which I never do) just from excitement about what I was going to learn about and accomplish in the day. Spending my time focused Only on what I was most interested in was incredibly rewarding. It’s going to be awhile before I am able to do it again financially. It is a life-impacting hit to the bank account, especially factoring opportunity costs, but I agree with the OP that it feels well worth it as an investment in myself. Can’t wait til I get the chance again.

358 points by jotaen 7y ago

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 with respect to the business. In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes. I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to a undergrad or graduate (MS) level. And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring. Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head up" my labs for outside credibility's sake.

hooloovoo_zoo 7y ago
I don't know what you're doing with chemistry, but if it involves any kind of physical experimentation I would implore you to exercise caution. Lab sciences are very hard to self study because a lot of important practical and safety knowledge is passed down in the lab and not in books. My friends who became chemists spent 1000+ hours in labs by the time they finished their undergraduate degree, for reference.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Exercising caution is good advice, but you can overdo it too. The kind of stuff I got up to with my chemistry set 42 years ago would probably scare the pants of you but I learned a lot and the worst that ever happened was that I lost some glassware. Safety glasses, good ventilation, gloves when you need them and patience are the most important ingredients here, as well as a good textbook or course. You can have hours of fun and learn a lot for very little money, the real dangers are usually in stuff that goes 'foom' is larger quantities than advised and stuff that poisons you, and with MSDS online that is a lot safer today than it used to be when I was a kid.
  - jcims 7y ago
    The tree F's of safety in home chemistry: fans, fire extinguishers and feet.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Fire extinguisher is a good one, also important, to know what will put out a particular fire and what ends up making things (much) worse.
    - andrewflnr 7y ago
      Is that feet as in "wear closed toed shoes" or as in running away if necessary?
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Fans to ventilate, fire extinguisher for when things go wrong, feet for when the fire extinguisher isn't enough.
    - anesmike 7y ago
      hot glass looks like cold glass.
    - ddsea 7y ago
      This quote made me wonder about analogs in other activities, e.g. woodworking.
parf02 7y ago
Web developer with a background in Chemistry here! Hit me up if you want to discuss Chemistry-related software development :)
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  What sort of stuff do you do?
- tpfour 7y ago
  Your profile does not give a way to reach you.
- alistproducer2 7y ago
  Email me. Its on my profile.
jczhang 7y ago
What do you mean by using a rollover?

Eylandos 7y ago

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?

ghaff 7y ago
I agree with that as someone with a mechanical engineering degree. I've never been a professional software developer but I've mostly self-taught myself over time and even ran a small software business as a sideline at one point. I've never had a particular desire to go into development full-time. (I was out of working as an engineer by then anyway.) But, had I wanted to, I have very little doubt I could have slid into a dev job fairly easily with my background if I spent some time focusing on the area I wanted to work in.
jotaen 7y ago
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 topics I’m looking at rather than going through them one after the other. I’ll definitely need/will start working again in a couple of months, but my hope is that working freelance and continuing self-studying is not mutually exclusive. But I’ll need to see next year how this works out then in practice.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  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.

moosey 7y ago

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 interest, I have taken what little time I have (with a job and two children) to relearn the baseline college mathematics that I've lost from my apathy towards serious continuing education. I first completed the course "Learning How to Learn" and applied the practices within to courses in Calculus and Physics. I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT. I was never a great student, and it could be just because, as I think I've discovered, I'm just a slow learner. My early educational talents and successes were due to a lot of early reading that I did, but it's clear to me that it takes a lot of repetition before I start to understand a subject, and I often have to go back over lectures, then read the associated notes, and run through a ton of practice problems (which I then put into anki) before I grasp a subject. Due to this my learning has been slow (along with the two kid situation), but I'm certain now that I have a much better grasp of the subject matter than I did when I was twenty. I'm not suggesting I'm smarter with age, what I am suggesting is that I didn't have study habits that allowed me to flourish. Clearly, the current educational models that we are using in our schools are failing students like me who get a good head start due to early reading, but can't learn fast enough to keep up in a classroom environment. It is clear from what I've learned about the learning process from Barbara Oakley and others that the actual processes that we put in place are further suboptimal for the learning process, but the ways that we set up our education system are not the result of experimentation. If I were to surmise their source, I would say that they are explicitly designed to fail, so that we can excuse reduced spending in public education systems. Still, these self-study courses are great for people like me, as long as you are permitted to study at your own rate. This is important as I'm going to guess that perserverance is as important as intelligence when it comes to advancing to the point where you can aid research teams. I predict that nations that automate educational models (as well as hiring a broad staff of educators, lecturers, and tutors) that are successful will have a much larger impact on the future of the information age than they did in previous eras.

7y ago

gorpomon 7y ago

For those wanting something a bit less intense, the Recurse Center in NYC is a great place to practice a few months (or now even just a week) of self study with some of the brightest folks you'll ever meet.

jczhang 7y ago
Anything similar in LA?

christiansakai 7y ago

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 bit everyday just by code review, bug squashing, practicing best practices, do better tests, etc. But mostly these are the mundane tasks. While you can argue that technical skills have diminishing returns, but I do really want to focus more on it at this point of my life. I see it in HN, Reddit, everyday people make very cool projects and I wonder what it will take for me to reach that level? Anyway, I decided to buy the book "Engineering a Compiler" and set a goal to actually finish it. I guess that's my soul searching direction will go for now.

cjauvin 7y ago
I'm currently going (slowly) through this fantastic book, which I greatly enjoy and recommend: https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/
- christiansakai 7y ago
  Nice, I'll take a look on that one as well.
  - munificent 7y ago
    I'm the author of "Crafting Interpreters". I really like "Engineering a Compiler", but it's probably not the best first book for implementing a programming language. It's primarily a textbook for backend optimization. It covers just enough front end to feel like a complete book, but you can tell the authors assume you've already taken an undergrad class in compilers before. It is an excellent second or third book after you have a working compiler and you want to start understanding how industrial-grade compilers make code go fast. It's the best textbook I know on optimization. Most other compiler optimization material lives in academic papers, which can be scattershot and difficult to absorb. One of my goals with "Crafting Interpreters" was to give people an intuitive feel for PL implementation so that they are better prepared to approach deeper works like "Engineering a Compiler".

hwwc 7y ago

I'm also taking a sabbatical! I guess mine is also self study, although I never quite thought of it that way. I've taken this time to be able to have in-person lunches with many interesting people, work on open source projects, and sit in on seminars at the local university. I think I'm just beginning to learn how to access local resources for learning. I'm also thinking of freelancing, and have been gearing up for contracts, and also to perhaps start an agency with a friend. I really value the freedom that has allowed me to explore my programming and math (and climbing/yoga/martial arts) interests these last few months. One unexpected thing about my sabbatical: my social life is better, I have way more time and energy for it :)

mcrwfrd 7y ago
I love the idea of taking sabbatical. If I were to take time for one, I think the structure would look more like what you're suggesting here. Expanding network of people to learn from and contributing to OSS. As introverted as I am, I have learned in recent years how much easier and faster it can be to learn from other people than from textbooks alone.

ggambetta 7y ago

I'm also on a sabbatical, and to some extent, also self-studying -- but focusing on filmmaking. I'm acting, writing, directing, and producing! I recently made this hour-long, no-budget feature film about an evil social media company, available on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1 https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1 Worse than even The Room, but might be the first movie including a realistic depiction of a FAANG interview?

christiansakai 7y ago
Looks interesting. I’ll watch it
- ggambetta 7y ago
  I did say "worse than The Room". You've been warned ;)

asdfman123 7y ago

I don't see how you guys have an appetite for this kind of thing after years of education and full time work. If I take a sabbatical, I'm walking across New Zealand.

guidoism 7y ago
Yeah there's no way I could have done this five years out of school. I remember contemplating getting my pilot's license just a few years out of school and after looking at now much I needed to study I was like: Hell no. But 20 years out of school — This was ideal for me. Walking across New Zealand sounds awesome and if my kids were older I'd do it, but honestly I'm really happy just reading books, watching videos, and tinkering with different ways to program. After decades in the industry I can't say enough about how awesome it is to not have a schedule, boss, meetings, performance evaluations, 1:1s, deadlines, people counting on you to make the right decisions (though I guess my wife and kids would argue that they still depend on my decisions).

faitswulff 7y ago

Having done this multiple times myself, I have to say...not everyone is wired for it. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops on reddit and, of course, hackernews.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I suspect it will work out well. I've been in an "involuntary" sabbatical. When I left the company I'd been at for over a quarter-century (mostly as a manager, but very technical), I immediately ran into "Go away, old man. Nobody wants you." It was pretty jarring, insulting, and humiliating, but what really happened, was I got upset. When I get upset, I get busy (paraphrased from "Back to School"). Fortunately, I have the means to set up my own company (I actually have 2), and I have spent the last couple of years ferociously focused on working full-time to write software, using the most modern and relevant techniques for my chosen direction (Apple tech -I've been writing Apple software since 1986). It's working well. I haven't lost a thing, in over thirty years of software development. In fact, I seem to learn much faster, these days, than I ever did, when I was younger. I suspect that all the context I have makes picking up new stuff easier. I've been building (actually, just organizing and adding to) a HUGE portfolio, with six figures of lines of code, in dozens of repos, spanning at least a decade (although I also reference my first engineering project, from 1987), hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of articles and essays, and a number of deployed and shipping solutions. I've learned to work alone very well, indeed (I spent my entire career in HUGE heterogenous teams; spread around the globe). That was one of the things I was afraid I wouldn't be able to master. The difference in productivity is staggering. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day as a corporate software developer (I get up early, and close my green ring by 6AM). I tend to be all about "Get Stuff Done." I like theory and experimentation, but I've been writing shipping software my entire career, so that's the direction I've picked. I heard a guy once say "The #1 feature of the project is SHIPPING." Working alone has forced me to keep the scope humble, which has worked out, after I learned to adjust my project plans. The biggest coefficient for me has always been quality. I like to think of myself as a craftsman. I get special joy from writing high-quality software. One of the biggest lessons that I've taught myself was how to be very, very flexible (I call it "ultra-agile"). My corporate background was Victoria Falls (REAL Waterfall). I have been yearning to break free of that yoke for decades. Working alone has allowed me to explore an evolutionary design and construction process that has, so far, worked fairly well. The story is still very much unfolding, and we'll see how it goes. I still have a lot to learn, and I like it. More Will Be Revealed...

7y ago

nafizh 7y ago

Can anyone tell me what's the font used in the article? It's beautiful.

jotaen 7y ago
It’s the “Input” font family by David Jonathan Ross. https://input.fontbureau.com/ https://input.fontbureau.com/
- nafizh 7y ago
  Thanks!
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pyxelr 7y ago
Next time you can try looking it up in the browser inspector. Use RMB + "Inspect" on the font of interest, and you will find it in the "font-family" attribute.

cryptozeus 7y ago

I was hoping for more details as to what you have been doing and how it has been.

emmanueloga_ 7y ago

Thinking back on all the subjects I've ever studied and books I've read, I've lost a lot of familiarity with many of those subjects (although I do find myself picking up much faster when I come back, even years later). I dream of taking this kind of sabbatical too, it is just a bit scary to do it without some kind of framework that would allow me to plan my week, and annotate, structure, accumulate, and review the things that I learn. I feel like I should focus on finding / designing that system before planning on taking the sabbatical.

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khiner 7y ago

I also recently took about 10 months off of work, specifically to focus on learning. It was incredible, and I don’t regret it financially. I would often get up at 6 in the morning or even earlier (which I never do) just from excitement about what I was going to learn about and accomplish in the day. Spending my time focused Only on what I was most interested in was incredibly rewarding. It’s going to be awhile before I am able to do it again financially. It is a life-impacting hit to the bank account, especially factoring opportunity costs, but I agree with the OP that it feels well worth it as an investment in myself. Can’t wait til I get the chance again.