Indie hacking vs CS101

If I learned coding from my university, I would have NEVER started coding, and therefore indie hacking.

Maybe for some CS career pathways or some personality types, university is a good option. But if you just want to make your own website and eventually apps as a web dev/indie hacker, you don’t need a university class for permission to start.

I can 1000% confirm this to be true from experience. Back in 2018, my alma mater university offered free summer CS101 sort of class for alumni who are now working professionals. All part of some lifelong learning initiative.

I signed up, all excited that finally I will learn how to code my own app. This was the early days of my indie hacking journey.

But it was a total disappointment. We learned lame sh*t like how to draw circles and squares using python. Lots of CS theory which I don’t care about (nor do the other working folks to be honest).

All I wanted is to learn some web dev, make my first website, that’s it.

I even politely asked the lecturer if I can start my own project and they help guide me with it. Was instantly shot down, and got talked down—like legit insulted—how he’s the master and I know nothing and should just do as he says - excerpt from the email:

“You are correct that CS1010X is structured to make sure the students have a solid foundation in CS. Coding is like kungfu and I am the kungfu master. I tell you how you should learn kungfu. You don’t tell me how you prefer to learn kungfu. That’s not how it works. What you want to learn is really trivial. Just go and sign up for some web programming course or maybe General Assembly. I train the 10x engineers, i.e. the people eventually grow up to work for Google and Facebook. It’s a different world.”

That left a really bad taste and I dropped the course immediately. In fact, it was such a negative experience that I didn’t want to do anything related to coding for a year.

I only picked it back up because the itch to make my own product grew again.

So school didn’t just make me dislike it, it gave me such a negative experience that it almost killed my indie hacking dreams.

The fact that I can code today is in spite of that, not because of it.

I’m lucky I survived that.