I didn’t go to university. It took me over a decade of professional life to discover something that I wanted to study. I’m now on my second career as a self-taught software developer.
I have proven to myself that I can make it as a developer without formal education. But I am left wanting more. It’s not about money: I don’t think six years of a part-time degree would produce a monetary increase that I couldn’t achieve through professional experience and grit in the meantime.
This dilemma has played on my mind for a while now. I want knowledge. I want to identify unknown unknowns. I am attracted to the structure that education provides. But I don’t want the financial burden of university — I especially don’t want to pay for modules I have essentially obtained through personal study and experience.
An idea began to grow: could I do this on my own?
A quick search on eBay confirmed I could obtain second-hand materials for Open University modules and other university-level textbooks are available for purchase online too. Large Language Models such as ChatGPT are potentially good-enough for my needs as a tutor/professor.
Just to be clear, AI cannot currently replace the expertise and wisdom of an experienced university professor. Perhaps one day. But not today. AI is, however, at a point where it can provide additional insight through investigative conversations, and confirm understanding through targeted Q&A sessions. I created my own “GPT”. I instructed it to behave like a CS professor and guide me to answers rather than regurgitate facts. I can even give it photos of pages in books and it will generate questions to test my comprehension! As I learn more about configuring GPTs, I will be able to improve its effectiveness.
Next, I just needed a curriculum. I used Open University as my baseline to linearise topics. I compared their various Computing & IT pathways and chose the most relevant modules for my career plans. Most of these modules have reading material available second-hand. I then used resources such as teachyourselfcs.com to identify additional materials to study. I spent some time deciding how deep I would go into each topic and disregarded a few recommendations that I felt would be overkill for my needs. I created a three-stage curriculum.
Then I began to diverge from the typical university pathway. I began to include books considered by most to be must-reads for anyone working with code. And I fit them around the structure I had already defined.
But there are so many non-technical skills that compliment a career in software: leadership, finance and business to name a few. So I created a fourth stage to capture these additional skills. This stage is unstructured and designed to be studied as and when I desire. If I need a break from data structures, I’ll study business or leadership. Why not?
I published the whole curriculum on my website and called it The Self-Taught Degree. Each ‘module’ has a tick box next to it so I can track my progress. I imagine it’ll take me years!
Knowledge for its own sake is futile. It needs a higher purpose. Yes, it will make me a more competent developer, but there’s also an opportunity here. Considering my ‘Self-Taught Degree’ will lack the status of a formal qualification, I need to prove my competence another way.
So as I progress through each module, I shall do what any good student does: I’ll take notes, converse with “Professor GPT”, summarise content and rewrite it in my own words to confirm understanding. And then I will publish it all online. My website has been designed to become a hub of knowledge as I go through this process. Being a resource for both myself and others on their own self-taught journey.
What a world we live in. Access to education has been a barrier for the individual progress of humans since time began. Those days are long gone. Now it’s a matter of grit.
Watch this space.
This article was originally published on my blog.
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