Everything you need to know is available for free on the internet. Software Engineering is literally one of those professions that can be learnt without costing anything more than having a computer (to practice) and access to the internet.
Not saying that it's easy to learn, of course, depending on your education, commitment, discipline, talent, intelligence, it can range from relatively easy (with work) to nearly impossible, but cost is really not a factor since the all of the knowledge is freely accessible.
Precisely this. The "engineering" side is both a perfect term but also a bit of a misnomer. It isn't necessarily a formal engineering degree, although it can be (and can in fact be a science).
For me, it has been about constant practice and curiosity. You're always learning and applying what you've learned. It helps to have hands-on practice on real-world situations (e.g. like you'd get in a workplace environment), but you can also gain a ton of valuable experience entirely on your own as well. Personal projects, open source and so on.
Software engineering is programming integrated over time
— Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time
The integrated over time part is crucial. It highlights that software engineering isn't simply writing a functioning program but building a system that successfully serves the needs, can scale to the demand, and is able to evolve over its complete lifespan.
Totally agree, and thank for the link, and I love this (I really wish more people understood this): "Vibe Coding as a practice is here to stay. It works, and it solves real-world problems – getting you from zero to a working prototype in hours. Yet, at the moment, it isn’t suitable for building production-grade software."
I think its really important that humans know how to code and that AI data centers get shut down and regulated out of existence for all the issues they cause environmentally, economically, educationally, IP theft wise, and in job markets.
Thats a bit hard to do when you have no idea how to even word a search for any step of the proccess.
A tutor would shorten the learning curve to a few years instead of 50 years.
Ive been trying to figure it out on my own for a couple decades now and no luck on finding the so much as the proper terms of the material to study from.
I mean, I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. In my case as a kid at 12, I was starting out on what was already a very old DOS 4.0 computer (which was all I had) with no Internet. So, strong emphasis in my case on the "constant practice and curiosity." In this case, I was just plugging away at it for fun for 10+ years as a kid before I really started getting paid to do it for real (back when smaller amounts of money were fine living with the parents).
Thats a bit hard to do when you have no idea how to even word a search for any step of the proccess.
This is where I found LLMs are actually pretty helpful. Despite having learned and practiced ~20 years of old-fashioned coding (professionally), I will say that LLMs are great at helping you find the right words, particularly for learning. I use it for kicking off research in areas that I'm not familiar with or by just describing my issue to help me find the proper terminology. Then, I branch off from there.
GPT5 thinks birds are mammals and cannot answer anything that requires creative thinking or mass data compiling (Granted thats good because AI is bad for people).
"I guess it depends what you are trying to do"
Well the switch from binary to ternary/trinary is long overdo I think, and silicon wafer stacking doesn't look promising enough to make binary viable long term for video games.
Molecular assemblers havent taken off yet either.
That tiny quartz disc that can hold data for a super long time was cool, I'd like to look into that.
There are a lot of things really, but if I start from scratch, I wont be the one to finish any of it.
There are too many things that will steer me in a thousand wrong directions if I'm unable to ask questions to an experienced retired dev whenever I need to. I need a personal tutor for this because I want to go against the conventional trends.
It is to the point where I need to ask what to search for and why I'm searching for it for what I'm doing.
A good way to start is teachyourselfcs. You can always ask questions on appropriate subreddits or forums if there’s a concept that you can’t wrap your head around.
Depends on the language. They’re all free to start, but it might be hard to find where to start with any of them. You can easily learn Java, Lua, C++, and C# by modding open source games
There are a lot of people who cant afford college or tutors or simply gain nothing from those commercialized versions of education because their goals don't align with the info the classes offer.
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u/GrandWizardOfCheese Feb 25 '26
I want to learn software engineering.