The Endless Agony of Lifelong Learning

Years ago, while I was building Integrated Roadways, I was solicited by a recruiter to join a lauded and exclusive Executive MBA program. I demurred. The company was growing fast, I was busy with clients, I had employees to manage.

“I have a lot to do, I can’t take on more,” I told them.

They offered me a full scholarship. “It’ll cost you nothing,” they said, “except your time.” But time was the thing I had the least of… other than interest.

I was sick of education. I have 240 credit hours. Three degrees, two professional. Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and a BLA (originally English Comp / Journalism). I was Valedictorian of my Entrepreneurship program. Have a certificate in Project Management.

I had been in school for, at the time of that discussion, around 87% of my life.

I was

And I was sick of it.

More school? 🤮

School Ends but Nightmares about Tests Last Forever But when it was time to start over again, I knew that last time, everything about my startup was too far off-target and out-of-bounds for traditional startup investing, which made everything far harder than it needed to be. Admirable, maybe, easy, no.

This time I knew I needed to stop fighting the inevitable and build a web app.

While I’m a Computer Engineer, most of my work has been very large scale system integration, taking existing systems and gluing them together to make something more than the sum of its parts. I have like 60 patents, so I guess I’m pretty okay at it.

For my ECE program I’d learned Assembly, C, C++, some C# and .net, and methods for building embedded code and workstation applications. I had scripting from being a network admin way back when. Good stuff, but not web app frameworks.

I’d built websites, so I knew HTML, CSS, and some PHP. A little Python. Still not a webapp.

It was time to do what I’d never really got around to, which was learn how to build modern web apps.

And that meant it was time to go back to school.

Development Patterns for Developing Patterns I was a college dropout the first time. I went because everyone was like “oh you’re smart, you should go to college.” It turned out that was a terrible reason to go to college. Education is a powerful tool, neutered through lack of purpose. To do, you need to know why. Or at least, I do. I seek purpose.

My alma mater used to have me give talks to students until I told the students “don’t go to college until you know why you’re going to college.” They never invited me back after that.

My statement may be true, but for the meatmarket that academia has become, to the organization, flow is more important than purpose. But to the student, purpose is way more important.

I knew what I wanted to build, so I read everything I could find that was about things that were like the thing I wanted to build. When I was building houses, watching people build houses was a great education. It wasn’t the same house, but it was similar, and that’s good enough. It’s the techniques that really matter.

You need to know what to learn before you start learning. I already had a good idea of what I needed to know just from my being terminally online. But knowing what you need to know isn’t the same as knowing.

Having a good idea is may be the first step, and knowing what you need to know may be the second step, but you still have to put in all the rest of the work.

I studied trends in web app development so that I knew the current state of the art. I read developer blogs, articles about the tech stack of hot new startups, everything that would lead me towards the right-now. I didn’t care so much what the application or product was, moreso how it was built, and with what tools.

I signed up for an interactive coding platform and dove in. Spent hundreds of hours reskilling into Javascript, Typescript, Next.js, React, more Python, SQL, database management, state management, getting into the technical side of blockchain and crypto development patterns, UI/UX design. I installed VS Code, familiarized myself with Github, npm, yarn, pnpm. Full-stack, front-end, back-end, authentication and authorization, app security, data security.

Installed CoPilot in VS Code. Turned off tab completion to emphasize muscle memory. Coding, like with writing, requires you to know the rules before you’re good enough to break the rules, and I wasn’t ready to start skipping ahead yet.

I downloaded repos for apps I thought were interesting, and tried to absorb their development patterns. Hand re-coded interesting elements to get more familiar while using known-good code.

I called software oriented entrepreneur friends for advice. Two I will always value for their directness basically said “quit making excuses and just do it, man!” There’s no experience like experience. Another pointed me towards some really powerful AI tools. I signed up for Claude, then swapped VSC for Cursor.

The more I worked through the courses, the more time I spent working on my own app instead of completing more courses. Pretty soon I had a good enough grasp on how to build what I wanted to build that I started cranking out the logical framework for how it would all operate - the major application functions.

It was July, I was 3 months in, and had a “working” local version. But there was a problem - I still had a lot of ground to cover and couldn’t possibly learn fast enough to stay ahead of the industry. I felt time breathing down my neck.

And to really build the system, it had to live online, not in a codebase that was only running on my own local machine. That last step - making it alive on the internet, safe, secure, reliable, and with concurrent users - was the furthest from my previous experience with software development.

I needed help. And the first step to getting help is telling people you need it.

So that was next.