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I kept learning til 30. Now i'm still learning at 33 but it feels different. Once you learn enough is more about the ability of connecting dots. I.e. I know a

I kept learning til 30. Now i'm still learning at 33 but it feels different. Once you learn enough is more about the ability of connecting dots. I.e. I know a load of libraries and built a fair deal myself, including a orm and a crud framework from ground up, and I know many of the pitfalls (I fell for many of them but I was young and foolish) however I also learned the why stuff grlets built a certain way and now it's ten time easier to pick up new things (yeah ember does this and that because it solves the problem x in a way I already saw done here and there, which is better than this other way under these conditions) Another example I've been around to see the latency/bandwidth problem arise so many times it's not even funny anymore. and each generation solve it's time solution (initially it was the terminal because bandwith was the problem, then the thick client because latency, then it was again dumb data screen within browser, then ajax become viable so code moved back to the browser, last framework are so bloated latency is an issue again and they are moving templates back server side once more) Learn enough new thing about solving the problem yourself, and basically you'll know every class of library that tries to solve that specific domain. Then you are free to learn higher level stuff. If you start too much high then it's easy to be lost in a flurty as technology shift without understanding the whys.

danso 11y ago
Seconded...learning is not a linear-time experience...or, it shouldn't be at least. I didn't learn much during and right after university. But after a few years on the job as a reporter, I started getting ideas about how to apply my programming experience. One of my first programming-on-the-job experiences was writing a scraper for the local sheriff's website, so I didn't have to manually click through the inmate list. (this seems to be a common idea among programming journalists; someone wrote a tutorial about it: https://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) To reiterate LoSboccacc's point...with every new thing I wanted to explore, I had many excuses to try out new languages and tools...early on, many of my ideas were dumb (Drupal was my first concept of a website backed with a database)...but after enough misguided, but not crippling efforts, you get much better at being less misguided. And learning new technologies becomes less of a chore :)
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  To expand about university: it's my personal experience so ymmv Almost nothing in my curricula mapped to anything I worked afterward, and I am very glad of that. They forced me to learn how to think, how to solve problem, and gave me a set of analytical tools to understand the software world. True, I had to figure out java and javascript and aLl the other stuff on the gritty nitty details of programming myself, but I learned a lot faster than people attending work skill universities how to not work by coincidence and how to solve the real problem of software development of which coding is actually the very minor part. I'm amazed when I see people lost in coding while that is actually the less relevant part of the job.

danso 11y ago

Seconded...learning is not a linear-time experience...or, it shouldn't be at least. I didn't learn much during and right after university. But after a few years on the job as a reporter, I started getting ideas about how to apply my programming experience. One of my first programming-on-the-job experiences was writing a scraper for the local sheriff's website, so I didn't have to manually click through the inmate list. (this seems to be a common idea among programming journalists; someone wrote a tutorial about it: https://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) To reiterate LoSboccacc's point...with every new thing I wanted to explore, I had many excuses to try out new languages and tools...early on, many of my ideas were dumb (Drupal was my first concept of a website backed with a database)...but after enough misguided, but not crippling efforts, you get much better at being less misguided. And learning new technologies becomes less of a chore :)

LoSboccacc 11y ago
To expand about university: it's my personal experience so ymmv Almost nothing in my curricula mapped to anything I worked afterward, and I am very glad of that. They forced me to learn how to think, how to solve problem, and gave me a set of analytical tools to understand the software world. True, I had to figure out java and javascript and aLl the other stuff on the gritty nitty details of programming myself, but I learned a lot faster than people attending work skill universities how to not work by coincidence and how to solve the real problem of software development of which coding is actually the very minor part. I'm amazed when I see people lost in coding while that is actually the less relevant part of the job.