I'm learning programming on my own. I don't have a formal CS education and cannot afford it. Do I need to pursue all this curriculum to become good at coding? It seems overwhelming, but I'm not against learning and am not in a rush. Currently I'm not a professional programmer. I started answering at Stack Overflow and Reddit a couple months ago and am doing really good. I like C and Python, but I regularly write in the latter. My GitHub repo has some programming exercises, has about 300 stars and 50 forks and it happened within a month's time and I'm releasing some more exercises soon. I had to discontinue my education after 10th grade, but my love for English and math has never faded. I had worked in health information for about 15 years, had a passion for it, excelled in it. My employers never asked about my formal education. They wouldn't believe me if I told them the truth. I quit my previous job for learning programming full time because I like this more than anything now. I want to spend the next 15 years programming and learning math. These two and I are inseparable. Born in a village in a third-world country, I learned English by listening to BBC Learning English and VOA Special English radio stations. As a kid, I loved grammar, syntax, punctuation, vocabulary. This is not my best writing :) I have another handle on HN and it took me about 250 days to reach a 14,000 karma here.