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A large part of me feels like this is an oxymoron. Someone who is capable of self-teaching this content is probably not going to need such a structured program.

A large part of me feels like this is an oxymoron. Someone who is capable of self-teaching this content is probably not going to need such a structured program. At best, this would function as an aspirational index for them to refer to. This also covers a lot of things you should probably not be studying as self-taught dev, since there is a much larger opportunity cost because you are not at university. I like calculus and maths, but that knowledge is low value for a developer. Once you've bootstrapped a basic understanding of programming and CS, I think you should be building stuff 80% and reading up on new things that catch your eye 20% until you hit diminishing returns. Reading about things like SOLID, DRY, algorithms, OOP, etc is just not going to stick. You need to build stuff and start getting an intuition for the concepts. Immersing yourself in community discourse is also very underrated. You will pick up so much jargon and be exposed to lots of different concepts and tools just by hanging out where other programmers talk, like on HN, Twitter and Reddit.

Hermitian909 4y ago
I think this depends on your ambitions. As someone who made the transition from math education to CS I knew that I wanted to be a seriously good engineer making top of market. One of the first things I did was build myself a curriculum similar to https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/ (not sure it existed back then). I'm pretty confident this is a big part of what's made my career both because it's trivialized most interviews and because being competent up and down the stack is rare enough that I can often generate outsized impact with relatively small changes. Obviously this is not what everyone wants in life, but it's a fairly straightforward path to career success and financial independence. Aside: any good curriculum definitely needs to include building, learning is not a spectator sport.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  If you can afford to spend the time learning the full CS curriculum before you get your first job then sure, it's a good strategy. But most people don't have that luxury. I don't think it's at all related to ambition, it's about the quickest path to getting a job. If you want to be a top engineer you will need to learn CS stuff at some point, but you don't need to do it all at once right at the start.

Hermitian909 4y ago

I think this depends on your ambitions. As someone who made the transition from math education to CS I knew that I wanted to be a seriously good engineer making top of market. One of the first things I did was build myself a curriculum similar to https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/ (not sure it existed back then). I'm pretty confident this is a big part of what's made my career both because it's trivialized most interviews and because being competent up and down the stack is rare enough that I can often generate outsized impact with relatively small changes. Obviously this is not what everyone wants in life, but it's a fairly straightforward path to career success and financial independence. Aside: any good curriculum definitely needs to include building, learning is not a spectator sport.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
If you can afford to spend the time learning the full CS curriculum before you get your first job then sure, it's a good strategy. But most people don't have that luxury. I don't think it's at all related to ambition, it's about the quickest path to getting a job. If you want to be a top engineer you will need to learn CS stuff at some point, but you don't need to do it all at once right at the start.