Free courses, late nights and a degree: how I really learned to build

People sometimes ask me if I'm self-taught or if I went to university.

Yes.

It's not a dodge. It's the most accurate answer I have. I learned to build in three places, in this order: free courses at night, a degree, and other people's companies. Each one taught me something the others couldn't.

And none of them taught me the thing I needed most.

School number one: the free one

I built my first website at twelve. With free online courses — the ones by Jesús Conde, if you were around back then — watched at night.

That school had no syllabus, no exams and no teacher who knew my name. Which turned out to be its best feature.

Nobody told me what to learn, so I learned what I needed to make the thing in front of me work. When it broke, I fixed it. When I couldn't fix it, I searched until I could. It's a messy way to learn. It's also exactly how the job works.

What that school gave me was stubbornness. Not knowledge. Stubbornness.

School number two: the official one

Then I studied at the UPC.

I won't pretend I remember it as a series of epiphanies. University is slower than a tutorial and less exciting than a working website. But it did something the free courses never did: it made me understand why things work, not just how to make them work.

Self-taught people tend to know a hundred recipes. University tries to teach you to cook. You need both, but only one of them helps when the recipe doesn't exist yet.

The free courses taught me to make things work. University taught me why they work. Neither taught me who would pay for them.

School number three: someone else's payroll

Before jumping into Foxnice, I worked in Barcelona. And in 2012 I was programming an API for a Barcelona startup on contract, from Olot.

That was the third school, and probably the most underrated. Working for others teaches you things no course bothers with. Deadlines that are real. Code that other people have to read. Clients who don't care how elegant your solution is if it isn't ready on Monday.

It also teaches you, quietly, what kind of company you'd like to build one day. Even if you don't know it yet.

The missing subject

Here's what none of the three covered: the business.

How to put a price on your work. How to find the next client before the current one ends. How to say no. How to keep a company alive between one invoice and the next.

That subject doesn't have a course. Or rather, it has thousands of courses, and most of them are taught by people selling courses.

So I'm learning it the same way I learned to code at twelve. Late, alone at first, then with Yeray. Breaking things and fixing them.

Which brings me back to the original question.

Self-taught or university? Right now, mostly self-taught again. The tuition is just paid in mistakes instead of fees.

P.S. The cheapest school was the free one. The most expensive is the one I'm enrolled in now. I suspect it's also the one that teaches the most.