Brain Food: Apprenticeship

My first time around as a freelancer I was ‘just a web designer’. Like a low-rate waiter, I served anybody with money.

it, the book taught me the dictionary. The rest of it, the bulk of what I learned about software engineering—how to split a big problem into smaller ones, how to connect the pieces together, how to figure out why it didn’t work, and how to decide when it was finished—I figured out on my own by trial and error, and everybody else in the class figure

Despite graduating with a degree in computer science, I was sorely lacking in the wisdom that I would eventually acquire, through experience, during my career as a programmer. And it’s not just me: essentially all programmers working today were self-taught. The people who designed the Internet were self-taught, those who architected Windows were se