[albrewer]

Similar thing happened to me. I had to take a C++ course (with C++ 2008 on Windows) and hated the way it was taught. I conflated that with hating programming. After I finished my engineering degree, I got frustrated with repetitive tedious manual processes, so I started automating them. As my skill grew, I realized I liked programming more than I liked being a mechanical engineer. Now I write code full time, but I'd be way farther ahead if I'd just got the CS degree to start with.

[tayo42]

But since then have you gone back and learned all of that stuff from those classes? Is the point of school to make you interested in the first place or just assume you already found the topic interesting and see the value and you want to learn more

[albrewer]

Yes, sort of. I haven't taken a deep dive into anything like how to implement an OS, and I know I'm woefully undereducated about networking and the internet, but I have a tough time learning stuff without a concrete problem to solve that will make my life better. For example, I've written plenty of stuff that uses Python's requests library, but I don't know what happens under the hood between me making the library call and the network packets leaving the PC. I'd like to learn, but I don't have any problems facing me that would require that skillset or anything tangentially related.

As far as programming itself and designing software, I think I have learned as much as I would have retained in an undergraduate degree in CS. I have a minor in math and I took some basic circuits courses, and Ben Eater's YouTube channel has been hugely illuminating in areas of CS.

Really, if I could find places that are something like "solve this useful problem, here are the requirements, you'll need to know these 10 keywords to search stuff on the internet, here's how it'll be useful later" and then have someone or something evaluate my work, I'd love to see it.