The Joys and Vexations of Being Self-Taught

I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while, but I feel like now’s a good time to lay some of my feelings out there. When I set out on this journey to teach myself programming, I had no idea what I was in for. I knew that it would be difficult, as all self-motivated things are, but I never imagined how frustrated, how lost, and how discouraged I would feel at times. While I’ve been able to incorporate some structure into my education with textbooks and online tutorials, much of my learning has been on the fly. As someone who has always thrived in highly structured environments, this has been far from ideal. The world of software engineering is virtually limitless, and this can produce an overwhelming effect on self-taught programmers without clear, well-defined goals. Though I’ve been able to largely skirt around this feeling, it always come back to me whenever I reach a major milestone or complete a project I’ve been working on. And having just finished the lion’s share of work on my website, I’ve been hit by this feeling full force. Essentially, I’m at a point where I have numerous ideas of new projects I could start on, but I just don’t know what direction to go in. This website was a massive undertaking, and I’ve been hesitant to commit to any of my ideas for fear that they would pale in comparison to the size and significance of this site. But maybe that’s ok. If this site proves to be the largest and most ambitious project that I can produce for my portfolio before the career fair in September, I could certainly be content with that. Not every project I start needs to be huge and revolutionary. Because at the end of the day, my portfolio is primarily a testament to my drive and commitment to educating myself in a new skillset. My number one objective is to obtain employment as a junior software engineer, not become an all-knowing computer magician in a handful of months. And this brings me back to the joys and happiness that this experience has brought me. Every time that I load up my website, I’m overcome by pride in the quality of my work. Line by line, and concept by concept, I built this thing from absolute scratch. No free HTML templates, no pre-constructed backend codebase, just my own, original work. And all of this I accomplished a day at a time, keeping my nose to the grindstone and my focus on the task at hand. As I mentioned earlier, focusing on the project in its entirety was a sure-fire way to trigger feelings of anxiety and overwhelm. So perhaps more than anything, this self-taught journey has been a phenomenal and ongoing lesson in compartmentalizing seemingly endless and gargantuan tasks into small, achievable increments. So as I move from this website onto new and exciting projects, I just want to end this post with a few reflections and affirmations for myself. I had the goal of creating a sleek and professional personal portfolio website. I broke this massive goal into smaller components, and set about accomplishing them all to the best of my ability. I have the goal of becoming a junior software engineer without a degree in computer science. I feel even more overwhelmed and intimidated by this goal than I did by my website. I have a roadmap of steps I can take to achieve this goal. And I will accomplish one after the other with the same commitment and standard of excellence that I’ve demonstrated throughout my life. Being self-taught might be the most challenging path towards becoming a software engineer, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. -Joe