The blog that should have been

Hacker School is over, and I think it may be time to officially own the fact that despite my best intentions, I did not write a blog. I published one blog post, started about 3 others, and told absolutely no one that I even have a blog. However, I am now done with Hacker School and I want to write down my reflections about it, so here goes.

Over Thanksgiving, one of my aunts asked me how Hacker School was going, and without thinking too hard I responded, “it’s been the most valuable educational experience of my life.” I was immediately surprised by how sweeping of a generalization I had just made, and I paused, deciding whether I needed to qualify it somehow — running through in my head various “life-changing” college courses, and remembering the first grade teacher who had taught me how to read. Ultimately I realized that despite those experiences the statement still felt true.

My greatest fear when I was starting Hacker School was that I wasn’t going to be able to make myself work on programming all day everyday. I was afraid of spending 3 months watching silly videos on the internet and proving to myself that I am an inherently unproductive person. However, within the first week I was already neglecting emails and texts because I was intent on programming. Looking back, I think that there are three main attributes of the Hacker School space that make it so conducive to productivity:

1. You’re sitting in a room full of people who are all working. For a long time I tried not to admit how much what people around me are doing affects what I do, but the reality is that when I am around people working, I work, and when I am around people watching TV, I watch TV. It’s simple, but surprisingly powerful for me.
2. The environment is overwhelmingly positive. When talking to other Hacker Schoolers about what we’d miss when we left it wasn’t generally particular people or things (though certainly there are people that I will miss), but rather the ability to trust that any interaction you might have would be positive. For a while I thought this might be a result of the social rules, but now I think that it may be the other way around. The social rules are a product of the desire for a positive environment, and this desire for positivity has pervaded the community in many other more subtle ways.
3. You get to work on and learn about whatever you want. Hacker School was certainly the first time that I was really and truly given that freedom. It’s mind-boggling at first (see the only other blog post I’ve published), but I’ve realized that for me at least, there is no doubt that self-direction leads to self-motivation.

About half-way through Hacker School I started to stress about not finishing all of the projects I was starting, about not learning absolutely everything there was to know about JavaScript (or whatever else), about basically running out of time. I don’t know when the switch occurred, but at some point I started to realize that the end of Hacker School was definitely not going to be the end of my autodidact adventures.

After 16 years of school and 2 years working, it took this unstructured 3-month program for me to finally learn that I don’t need institutional incentives to keep learning. All I need is a supportive environment and the freedom to work on whatever I want. This means (I hope) that Hacker School wasn’t just a 3-month program, but rather a starting point for a lifetime of continued learning. I think I get it now — Never Graduate.