Your path is yours

People take a path to learn and achieve things. Some people have more things to overcome than others and some learn things more naturally or “unconventionally”.

For many people it’s hard to understand how someone else can learn the same things without using the same resources or taking similar steps in learning. Thinking the way you learned was the convention is gatekeeping.

I went to a university to learn physics. I never would have made the progression I did without the structure of a classroom and a guided path of classes to take over multiple years. But that doesn’t mean people can’t use YouTube and free resources to learn the same things and much more.

When job descriptions require degrees or XX years of experience it’s gatekeeping to think someone has to go through the same path you did to get where you are. We put them through ridiculous leet code questions to validate their expertise, but in reality it’s just us not accepting that anyone could learn what we’ve learned or be as smart as us without going through the same steps.

I tried to send money to a friend in Ukraine at the beginning of the war. The best way we thought to do it was Western Union. I found the local branch, sent the money, and figured everything would be fine.

A month later I got a letter in the mail they weren’t able to pick up the money. I sent it via PayPal instead and called support to return the Western Union money.

Everything appeared to be going fine until I tried to go to a location and withdraw the money. I have—so far—gone to 2 different Western Union locations a total of 4 times and each time their systems were down, they didn’t have enough cash, or they closed early.

This small inconvenience is nothing compared to the horribleness Ukraine has faced, but it reminded me that sending money globally to individuals is not even close to a solved problem. And crypto/blockchain/web3 would not have made this easier.

Sometimes the hardest thing to figure out is where to start. This is a collection of “roadmaps” to learn different technologies (e.g. python, go) as well as career paths for frontend, backend, dba, and others. Everything is open source so you can contribute if you’re already in the field and experienced.

I got started using Linux with Knoppix live CDs. I always thought it was magical that you could boot an operating system from removable media.

Ventoy lets you boot 900 different operating systems from a single USB drive. Pretty amazing and I would have spend way too much time playing with this if it existed in college.

I started learning flutter to write a couple mobile apps I’ve been wanting to build for years. Then I found FlutterFlow and it has helped me leapfrog a lot of meticulous effort to learn all of the UI elements which are fun but aggravating to learn.