Do Not Let Schooling Interfere with Your Education

I quickly discovered the disparity between formal education and fresh and practical helpful knowledge.

If I had followed the university's teachings, I would have ended up in my first job using outdated practices like most employees because, in the late 2000s, web development and web standards were evolving rapidly.

And this happened:

After 15 years of formal education in my 20s, I knew nothing about anything.

But I knew something about web development.

I moved to a big city.

I was hired by a company that won the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Program award in Central Europe.

I have been questioning how they do web development since day one. It was a pretty risky start, I know.

I was sure they were going to fire me. Fast forward to my second week at the company.

The CEO, Stefan Batory, approached me in the kitchen. We discussed web standards, and he said, you are going for a weekly web development training course.

I was thinking, I need to get out of here!

Nobody understands me. (Imagine that sentence spoken in the voice of Moss from The IT Crowd.)

We chatted briefly, and he asked me how long I would need to prepare the training.

Me?

You will visit our branch in another city for a week to conduct web development training.

I could write another page about the training, but it’s time for the moral.

The Moral

If you want to stay current, forget formal education and learn. Thanks to AI and the Internet, there are no better or easier times to learn anything than it is today.

❯❯❯ Simplified

Today, LLMs are the future of learning.

The Student-Led Curriculum

The student-led curriculum is an interesting concept - YouTube I recently came across.

I have been teaching myself using this concept throughout my entire life. I just didn't know it had a name. Most of the knowledge I was getting was from the internet.

Don't let schooling interfere with your LLM infinite learning machine.

Stay curious, Wojtek

PS

An interesting read on the topic from Anand Sanwal, and from Tine Thygesen.