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The First Ten Years

gregorygundersen.com · 5,650 words · saved by 2 readers

In 2012, I started teaching myself programming. Around this time, I read Peter Norvig’s essay, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Norvig’s thesis is that learning to program takes much more time than people like to admit. I found this a comforting voice of reason in a time when “just learn to code” felt like a cultural mantra. Norvig gave me license to slow down. Slowing down allowed me to focus on mastery. In his talk Let’s Teach for Mastery – Not Test Scores, the educator Sal Khan compares the modern educational system to building a house even after discovering cracks in the foundation. We place artificial time-constraints on learning and measure gaps through testing and then just move on regardless of the grade. The idea of “mastery learning” is to ignore how long it takes to learn something and to focus instead on completely understanding the material. Slowing down gives you permission to honestly ask yourself if you understand. Now over a decade later, I can say that I have

The First Ten Years --> Home Blog RSS The First Ten Years A retrospective on a decade of teaching myself programming. Published 30 January 2025 In 2012, I started teaching myself programming. Around this time, I read Peter Norvig’s essay, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years . Norvig’s thesis is that learning to program takes much more time than people like to admit. I found this a comforting voice of reason in a time when “just learn to code” felt like a cultural mantra. Norvig gave me license to slow down. Slowing down allowed me to focus on mastery. In his talk Let’s Teach for Mastery –

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