I am "self-taught". Started in 1981 when I was 10 years old and my mother bought me a sinclair zx81 instead of the Atari 2600 I wanted for Christmas. It came with a bunch of games in the form of 3 books. After my initial shock and disappointment wore off I started to input the games and became hooked on programming.
I did study a uni CS and EE for a couple of years, but left because my school was way behind what was happening in the real world at the time. I was consulting in the IT world, and thought at the time that the CS stuff was hopelessly outdated. I realised years later that I should have stuck with it because now I know that some of the theory is universal and timeless and would have stopped me from reinventing wheels a lot.
I've mainly learned by doing, solving problems using technology. I learned in the beginning from books and usenet, then gopher was my friend and eventually of course the web. I still find a good book is the main foundation I use for learning, supported by things such as forums and MOOCs (I've yet to find a MOOC I agree with, mainly because I am personally not a big fan of video learning - I still like books the most)
I've worked on and off in the IT world for 25+ years, currently I am an English teacher, I do IT projects on the side and I'm about to tackle e-learning head on with a new start-up. I would have trouble finding a job because I have no formal degree (people toss my CV/resume) and I am late to the world of github so nowhere to point people to see my work as most of the problems I have solved are internal problems businesses have. So most of my work comes through word of mouth recommendations, and I only take projects nowadays that have an new, interesting angle for me - point in case I am learning NoSQL and Graphing DBs to create a recommendation system for a network of insurance brokers. (I think the problem could actually be solved trivially with Postgres and judicial use of statistical analysis, so I am creating 2 solutions in parallel to see which one will perform better at scale as well as more accurate). I've never done rec systems before, but I'm a big fan of AI and ML, so this seems like an interesting problem to research and look into, as well as having the opportunity to be a little profitable.
I did study a uni CS and EE for a couple of years, but left because my school was way behind what was happening in the real world at the time. I was consulting in the IT world, and thought at the time that the CS stuff was hopelessly outdated. I realised years later that I should have stuck with it because now I know that some of the theory is universal and timeless and would have stopped me from reinventing wheels a lot.
I've mainly learned by doing, solving problems using technology. I learned in the beginning from books and usenet, then gopher was my friend and eventually of course the web. I still find a good book is the main foundation I use for learning, supported by things such as forums and MOOCs (I've yet to find a MOOC I agree with, mainly because I am personally not a big fan of video learning - I still like books the most)
I've worked on and off in the IT world for 25+ years, currently I am an English teacher, I do IT projects on the side and I'm about to tackle e-learning head on with a new start-up. I would have trouble finding a job because I have no formal degree (people toss my CV/resume) and I am late to the world of github so nowhere to point people to see my work as most of the problems I have solved are internal problems businesses have. So most of my work comes through word of mouth recommendations, and I only take projects nowadays that have an new, interesting angle for me - point in case I am learning NoSQL and Graphing DBs to create a recommendation system for a network of insurance brokers. (I think the problem could actually be solved trivially with Postgres and judicial use of statistical analysis, so I am creating 2 solutions in parallel to see which one will perform better at scale as well as more accurate). I've never done rec systems before, but I'm a big fan of AI and ML, so this seems like an interesting problem to research and look into, as well as having the opportunity to be a little profitable.