I don’t why but I think of you as my big brother, you have this aura about you, and I can’t help but think that. I read your latest blog post, I didn’t want to dm you when you posted that tweet, I thought I’ll let you finish with what you have and then shoot my shot.

I’m struggling so much right now I don’t know what to do, it’s been two and a half years since I started “trying” to learn computer science. yes you read that right two and a half years of “trying”, I gathered the best resources for the task, from http://teachyourselfcs.com and top university curricula to everything you can think of, I’m not lying when I say 90% of the resources you share (books - blogs - lectures - YouTube videos - papers) I’m familiar with, that’s how much I was gathering, I’m in my early twenties and since I graduated high school this was what I was pursuing, and if you tell me what I got done in any given week since then, it’ll be mostly watching YouTube videos, scrolling Twitter, or watching anime and configuring my OS and text editor, I’m taking the self taught route cause in my country, almost everything is outdated and they focus on stuff I’m no intersed in, mostly web and mobile dev. I usually try for 3 to 10 days and then I jump to something else. all these years I haven’t moved past the most basic stuff, think the first 2 chapters of a book if that.

Now I decided to study math all day for 30 days or so, I forgot all the math I studied in high school and my problem solving skills are usually a bottleneck. I’ll be going through these two books: basic mathematics by serge lang and why math by rodney driver and then algebra and trigonometry by james stewart for a refresher and then I’ll do some calculus and linear algebra. This is just to get into that grindset.

I want to learn low level stuff, that’s what I’m intersted in, so C, computer architecture, os dev, networking, algorithms/DS, databases and stuff like that.

One thing I’m ashamed of and no one knows about is that I keep telling my parents I’m doing good and learning so much and I need just a little bit of time to go get a job, which is not true at all and I told them December 31 is the deadline so 6 months from now for me to get gud.

I’ve never told anyone, you’re the first person I said this to. I don’t what’s the point of me telling you all this but I hope you have a few nuggets of wisdom you can share, and I promise you on god that I’ll do my best and I’ll get back to you in December 31 for an update. I created a twitter list of 6 people and after this month of only doing math I’ll be checking twitter for 1 hour or so a week and getting back to the grind. Sorry for rambling so much. Thank you so much.

First of all, unless you’re really under financial pressure, don’t stress too much about the past big dawg: what’s done is done. I was terribly inefficient and lazy for most of my life, and wasted countless hours consuming or playing video games instead of actually learning, and even when I did learn, it was always surface level. I spent years in tutorial hell – I had very little natural talent. Or rather, I never learned how to learn and approach things seriously, because my childhood was so unstable.

I also lied to my mom for months and months about how “great” I was doing with programming, even though I had basically been doing surface-level course following and tutorials and very small & shitty projects.

I guess I don’t have any specific bits of wisdom to tell you outside of: the past is the past, and the road to get to where you want be WILL take time. It’ll take time and it won’t happen overnight, or with any specific course or even project.

However, love what you’re doing with the 30 day math grind. A great byproduct of that is that you develop your grind-mode + you learn to reason and visualize things in new ways.

I have tons of thoughts to give you on programming / problem solving skills, but I’d love to hear more about what’s your immediate goal: I assume it’s entering the job market? What kind of positions, FE, BE?