I am posting this at the beginning of a new month. It seems like a good place to start. I am here to hold myself to account as I start a new endeavour which somehow scares me.

I’m really fascinated by computers and developing the skills to use them to solve problems in a creative and elegant way. (If you read www.skillissues.tech/about pages, you can find out the whole backstory)

I built the website and have played with some concepts but in an unstructured way which often exposes my limitations and lack of understanding.

I have been using WSL as I haven’t been brave enough to make the full switch to Linux, but I really love the CLI.

Now I want to develop my skills further.

I’m finding the man pages, networking concepts and coding documentation hard to understand as I learn. Every sentence seems to reference another tool, system or abstraction that I have no clue about.

I don’t want to rely on AI and although I have used it as an instructor/teacher, I just don’t think it is that good. It seems to send me in circles and makes me really frustrated. It often takes away the enjoyment for me.

Sometimes I can be in the flow state and I have a small question. If I ask AI for an answer, it more often than not ruins the session for me through misdirection and rabbit holes irrelevant to the problem.

I need to up skill but where to start?

I will write a post about the resources I’ve used so far (mainly Khan Academy & YouTube), but I feel I need something more in-depth and more structured.

That is why I want to announce that I’m going to start the Harvard CS50 online to up my skills and learn basic concepts.

For some reason, I’ve been really apprehensive about starting this course, even though I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time (over a year and half now, which sounds crazy as I write it down!).

There has been some kind of block; maybe a fear of failure or fear that I won’t finish it even though I know I really want to succeed. It is not so much the course but the time commitment. I really want to do it properly and do a good job and I expect it to take around 3 months (on top of everything else going on in life).

From the sparse studying I have done it seems like a good place to start and afterwards I would like to do the Nand to Tetris Course to understand the low level, which could be another 3-6 months.

I want to share my progress as I learn in public and I hope the interaction with you will keep me going through the confusion, frustration as well as being able to celebrate the little victories with you and having fun.

I don’t know why there has been such a block around me starting this but this post is my way of overcoming it.

I hope you will join me and share your learning stories too.

Thanks for reading!