23
kiki
1y

Haha kids, you're all dead wrong. Here's my story.

There is a thing called “emergence”. This is a fundamental property of our universe. It works 100% of the time. It can't be stopped, it can't be mitigated. Everything you see around you is an emergent phenomenon.

Emergence is triggered when a lot of similar things come together and interact. One water molecule cannot be dry or wet, but if you have many, after a certain number the new property emerges — wetness. The system becomes _wet_.

Professionalism is an emergent phenomenon too, and its water molecules are abstract knowledge. Learn tech things you're interested in, complete random tutorials, code, and after a certain amount of knowledge molecules is gained, something clicks inside your head, and you become a professional.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. Uni education can make you a professional seemingly quicker, but it's not because uni knowledge is special, it's because uni is a perfect environment to absorb a lot of knowledge in a short period of time.

It happened to me too. I started coding in Pascal in fifth grade of high school, and I did it till sixth. Then, seventh to ninth were spent on my uni's after-school program. After ninth grade, I drop out of high school to get to this uni's experimental program. First grade of uni, and we're making a CPU. Second grade, and we're doing hard math, C and assembly.

And finally, in the third grade, it happens. I was sitting there in the classroom, it was late, and I was writing a recursive sudoku solver in Python. And I _felt_ the click. You cannot mistake it for anything else. It clicks, and you're a changed person. Immediately, I realized I can write everything. Needless to say, I was passing everything related to code afterwards with flying colours.

From that point, everything I did was just gaining more and more experience. Nothing changed fundamentally.

Emergence is forever. If you learn constantly, even without a concrete defined path, I can guarantee you that you _will_ become a professional. This is backed by the universe itself. You cannot avoid becoming one if you're actively accumulating emergence points.

Here's the list of projects I made in the past 11 years: https://notion.so/uyouthe/...

I'm 24.

Comments
  • 9
    Hey kid.
    You should probably take less of this… emergence.
    😉
  • 0
    @gintko you probably don’t even need the second one
  • 1
    I've had no click yet 😞
  • 5
    I think I had that click at university. We started coding with Python (we did it procedural) and C, which both were nice and I liked them.

    But then... We had C++ OOP course and...it just made perfect sense. That was my second year at uni and it feels like I've not learned anything new since, it's just the repeat of that all in a different gift wrap.

    It might also had helped that on that course we had this young, really hot teacher. Maybe that's why I still spend most of my work days daydreaming instead of coding.
  • 1
    Maybe not a click, but an insight that I can solve all coding problems that are put infront of me, it's only a matter of how much additional learning that is needed in that area that defines where I'm an expert.
  • 2
    Sounds like you have achieved a zen.
    Im happy for you
  • 2
    Cool list. Didnt know you were Russian (you might have told me but I have a bunch of concussions from fighting).

    My list us basically three items long:
    Prime generator.
    Primality checker.
    Unfinished game.

    But then I iddnt write down most of them because every time I went to, I said, hey wait a minute, I could be shitposting!

    Naturally the shitposting won out.

    This feels like a goodbye post from you. A "I was here. This is what I want to be remembered by."

    I hope it isnt. I really do.
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