Open Source: Good or bad for learning?

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under General, Tech

Many years ago, my now wife went on a night out with the girls. It meant I was home alone until the early hours of the morning; so instead of buying handfuls of Columbia’s finest export and drafting in a few high class ladies of the twilight hour, I decided to geek out.

At this time I was quite into dabbling with graphic design, I had my copy of Macromedia’s Fireworks and Adobe’s Photoshop; however it didn’t really grab me. So I decided to look into this web design malarkey. So I trawled the net for HTML tutorials and learning material. Armed with notepad.exe, a bucket of coffee and an insatiable thirst for learning off I went. Within the first few hours I had coded basic wee pages, by the end of the night I had moved onto CSS and I was properly hooked! I got a buzz from sitting down and coding a page, and looking at it in my browser! Soon enough the buzz of staring at my beautiful creations on my own 14inch CRT bad boy just wasn’t enough; I needed to let the world see my awesome skills. So I did the only thing I could think of, I turned to Geocities.

Keep in mind I was brand new to this whole publishing content on the web malarkey, I set about making myself a wee site; a few hours later I publish my first site. Words couldn’t explain how chuffed I was! Something I had made all by myself was online for the word to see! Ok it was only a few basic pages of HTML about me, but it was still my own creation. From that point on, I knew I was hooked totally and utterly.

“But Steve, what has all this got to do with Open Source being good or bad for learning?” Shhhhh child, all in good time, all in good time.

One of the guys I used to work with at the time had his own wee mobile DJ business on the side, and as a result he had made himself a rather funky wee website (looking back it was utterly horrible, but to someone like me it was like looking at a Picaso). He pointed me in the direction of a company that were uber cheap for domain name and hosting packages. I can’t remember their name but they were proper terrible, I had to pay for CGI/Perl access and for individual e-mail addresses. At the time though I thought that this was the pinnacle of my very young web career. So I published my first site, it was great fun digging deeper into HTML and CSS, then Java script came along.

As was the fashion at the time, damn near every site had scrolling titles, floating menus and damn near every imaginable piece of Java script in there to make the page look awesome. Now I had tried to learn a wee bit of this magical mystical coding base, however for some reason it just didn’t seem to stick. This frustrated me somewhat, so I started looking for more tutorials on Java script, and came across www.dhtml.com; this was the beginning of the end for my creative juices. dhtml.com back in the day was a bit of a Mecca for us Java script junkies, you had a search about, copied and pasted the code snippets and you were off! I could have all the shiny shiny Java I could get my grubby hands on without ever having to mess about with coding! YAY! This was my new buzz. Soon my site became a massively bloated mess of various Java scripts, but I didn’t care, all I needed to do was find the cool new feature I wanted, copy and paste and it was live! Soon after I started getting lazy with the designs, I found www.elated.com and their pagekits. I downloaded all of em, and reverse engineered them to fit what I wanted. So my site now consisted of absolutely nothing original at all, I hadn’t designed the site, I hadn’t coded any of the extras; but I didn’t really care.

At the time I was a member of a forum called thedude.org. This was the very first forum I had ever joined, and I loved the idea of running a forum! So instead of going back to learning, I went straight to open source. The first forum I ran was called Cutecast and it was made by some guys over at www.artscore.com. This was written entirely in perl, so I had to go back to learning so that I could set it all up and configure it. After a few hours (yes hours) of uploading (dial up 56k zzzzz) configuring and tweaking, my new forum was live! It felt awesome! Totally amazing that I was now the administrator of my very own forum! Little did I know, this was the beginning of the end. My thirst for learning had done a bunk with the Postman and my new Open Source addiction was here.

To cut a very very long story short, I jumped from open source application to open source application, installing bigger and better scripts to waste my time with. I have never considered myself a designer of any sort, sure my graphic skills have gotten better with time, and I have picked up some skills while working with the applications I have come across, but I’m by no means a real designer or coder. In a way I’m quite gutted that I bailed on learning so easily and so early on, I wish I had just stuck to it a little longer and taken the time to build my skills. Instead of the buzz I got from being creative, I got it from finding plug and play solutions to my problems.

This brings me to today. It got me thinking, did open source “ruin” my learning path? Well no, no it didn’t. I got a different buzz from using open source, and because of it I strayed from what had gotten me into the scene in the first place. I don’t regret it, I have been able to help so many people set themselves up online using these Open Source applications and the knowledge I have for tweaking and customising them, I have found a new passion for the dedicated coders and designers out there. I have been able to pick up on newer skills and coding languages. So after many many years of being lazy with the learning aspect of web design, open source has led me back to it. I feel the need to learn and code again, all because open source software has shown me what can be done with time, patience and bucket loads of skill.

So instead of web design, I have started a new journey with application design. Ok I’m virtually back at square one picking up on the likes of PHP and MySQL. Hopefully I don’t get side tracked again and start being lazy again!

Permalink | June 22nd, 2010

2 Responses to “Open Source: Good or bad for learning?”

  1. Johnny Morrice Says:
    August 10th, 2010 at 6:49 pm

    More learnings is what everyone always needs all the times.
    I’m sorry if it seems like I’m stalking you, but I thought you might have a techie and interesting blog and I was right :)

    Learning PHP is great for making web pages, but to learn more (I know I sound a bit pretentious, but I don’t mean to patronise) it *is* better to learn deeper computer science.

    For instance, did you know that javascript is a functional language? It has taken inspiration from the lambda calculus. http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter6.html

    Some things that I like:
    Haskell, a lazy functional language http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction#Why_use_Haskell.3F

    MIT lectures http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/

    I find getting my head around MIT lectures really hard!

    All the best, dude!

  2. Stevieb Says:
    August 10th, 2010 at 8:38 pm

    Nice one man. The web and the technologies that run the backend have always interested me. I have never realy gotten into the guts of proper programming and coding. I’ll have a look at those links when I’m back on company time. ;)

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