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Your Computer Science Degree is not the End of your Education

Resources for Continued Learning Beyond Academia

Introduction

A career in Software Engineering requires continuous learning. This blog entry collects resources, communities and learning strategies for continuing your education after graduation. It’s a follow up to the previous Beyond Onboarding blog entry.

Don’t try to consume everything listed here. Pick one area that interests you and explore a few resources deeply before moving on.

While much of this advice targets early-career engineers, most of these resources remain valuable throughout your career.

This is not by any means a comprehensive set of educational resources. These are resources I have personally used, followed for years, or consistently found valuable. I will update resources on this page as I learn of new resources.

Table of Contents

The Modern Learning Landscape

Academia usually defines the courses for your major, determines the content and assigns the learning resources. You’re told what to learn and in what order.

After graduation, you’re on your own. This is both liberating and a bit daunting.

Where do engineers even begin learning something new? The sheer volume of information can feel overwhelming.

Captain Obvious

At the risk of being Captain Obvious, the first stop in finding information about a new topic is the internet.

The internet is filled with educational resources. Most are free or reasonably priced.

Your favorite search engine will return more references than you can possibly consume. Someone, somewhere has certainly created a page, blog, article, course, presentation slides or video on the topic you wish to learn.

Generative AI can create a learning plan for almost any topic tailored to your specific needs.

What to Learn

Follow your curiosity, or learn something to fill a gap in your career. Ideally the same topic can do both.

Regardless, choose something that interests you. Most learning will be on your own time. Make sure it’s something that you find enjoyable.

Golden Ticket

Don’t fret if it doesn’t fill a specific niche in your career. You never know where your career might go. Something you learn today for fun, could be your golden ticket for a future opportunity.

Several years ago, this would have been my final word on what to learn, but Large Language Models and Generative AI are changing the landscape rapidly. Those who don’t learn how to leverage LLMs and GenAI will be at a severe disadvantage. Navigating LLMs, GenAI, and Agentic Coding will be the topic of my next post. (TBD)

Learning by Doing

Styles of Learning

There are many ways to learn. I will provide several references in different media.

Reading, watching and listening may not be enough. Passive learning fades quickly. Real understanding comes from applying what you’ve learned:

Reading and Reference Material

I started my career with Bell Labs in 1985. They had an extensive technical library. Members of Technical Staff were also allotted a book allowance if we wanted to purchase a book.

Our software builds could take a significant amount of time to complete. I often had a 15 or possibly even 30-minute break in my workflow while my code compiled. I couldn’t surf the internet, since it wasn’t available yet. I often worked my way through technical books several pages at a time while I waited for my code to build.

Books and Technical Libraries

Most technical books are online and readily available these days.

O’Reilly

O’Reilly gained a reputation for publishing technical books. Their corporate branding usually included a drawing of an animal on the front cover of their books.

A Few O'Reilly Book covers

O’Reilly expanded beyond printed books with an online resource available at oreilly.com. It hosts thousands of books and videos including titles from publishers other than O’Reilly. It has several other features, such as live webinar sessions. It’s a great resource, but it’s a subscription service.

Here are a few subscription options:

Skillsoft Percipio

Skillsoft Percipio is another subscription platform. In addition to thousands of books and videos, they also include codeacademy through an acquisition.

The subscription rate is less than O’Reilly.

ACM Digital Library

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) opened their ACM Digital Library to the public in January 2026. This resource is more academic than O’Reilly or Skillsoft Percipio, but there is no subscription fee. Here’s a query that returns my letters to the editor for their monthly journal.

Consider joining the ACM and sign up for their Skills Bundle Add-On, which includes a partial O’Reilly subscription plan along with a Skillsoft Percipio subscription. Annual ACM membership and the Skills Bundle total price is still a fraction of the annual subscription price for O’Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio on their own. See: About ACM E-Learning Offerings.

The ACM Skills Bundle has been fluid over the year. ACM and O’Reilly have had an on-again/off-again relationship over the past ten years. The Bundle used to include Pluralsight, but as of this blog publication, it is not part of their Bundle. See: ACM membership benefits

Blogs and Articles

Technical books tend to be hundreds of pages long, and you may not have the time or desire to read an entire book. This is where blogs and articles can be useful.

Many software professionals share their experience and knowledge via blogs and articles. Search for almost any software topic on the internet, and it will surely yield many references.

Here are a few:

Structured Learning

Many of us did well in academia, because we liked the structure it provided. That structure is still available after you graduate. Better yet, you can take almost any course you want, possibly for free, and not worry about the grade.

MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were all the rage about fifteen years ago. They started when Stanford opened an AI course online for free, but without credit. Over 100,000 people signed up. Academia saw online access as a means to educate those who could not easily receive a first-class education, such as: those who couldn’t afford it, those who couldn’t dedicate a lot of time toward it or those were not did not live near a university. Students only needed a device, such as a smartphone or PC and an internet connection.

Courses were mostly an online version of the in-class university courses. Students watched videos and completed online quizzes and tests. Since a session could have tens of thousands of students, it was impossible for the instructor to help students individually. Many MOOCs have discussion forums, like Slack or Teams, where students can post questions or other comments. Community TA volunteers and sometimes the instructor would address these posts, but most often, other students would get involved. Students learned from each other.

I was a voracious consumer of courses on Coursera back then. I estimate that I completed more Computer Science courses via Coursera than I did for my Computer Science BS and MS degrees in the early 1980s.

Coursera is where I first learned several data structures that had not been presented in my college courses, such as Union-Find, A* Search, K-d Trees, and Red-Black Trees. I learned additional algorithmic techniques, such as: Greedy Algorithms and Dynamic Programming. I learned technology that arose after in the decades after I had graduated, such as: Python, Computer Networks, Android and Cloud Computing. I completed a few courses outside of the traditional software arena, such as: Game Theory, Roman Architecture and the Music of the Beatles.

But the MOOCs weren’t fulfilling their original promise in educating those out of reach of traditional academia. While thousands signed up for these courses, most never completed them. Completion rates were 5% to 15%. Since the courses were free and without college credit, there was no incentive to complete a course unless a student really wanted to.

I don’t know about other platforms, but Coursera did some analysis on those who completed courses. They found that almost all students completing courses already had an academic degree. They had misidentified their actual users. Their actual users were those with an academic degree who were either learning for the love of learning and/or trying to extend their education.

Coursera adjusted. These students probably had family and business obligations. Devoting several months to a course might not be as feasible. Rather than follow an academic model, where a course could be ten to fifteen weeks long and offered once or twice per year, they split courses into month long chunks, which could be completed sequentially or with gaps. A new session for each block started monthly.

Student professionals could complete a course sequentially, or complete it in phases, especially if taking a break for family or business obligations. It’s akin to a full-time student who completes a degree in four years versus a student who takes a few gap semesters to travel or work. The new Coursera model provided more flexibility.

MOOCs also struggled financially. Some platforms offer certifications for a price. Some platforms require a subscription or enrollment. However, some platforms may have a no cost audit feature, which allows you to watch the online content for free. You won’t get any recognition and may not even have access to tests or quizzes. The audit option may also be difficult to find, but if you hunt around you may find it.

Here are a few MOOC resources:

Many universities offer online courses as well, some for free:

Here are lists of more options:

Corporate Courses

While similar to MOOCs, there are some non-academic course offerings. These require a subscription:

Code Tutorials and Challenges

Learn and practice programming languages, data structures, algorithms and more via coding challenge websites. These are platforms that present problems for you to solve. Learn by doing.

Bob Martin has advocated learning a new programing language each year. I certainly didn’t achieve that standard in my career, but I did learn and use multiple programming languages including C, C++, KornShell (I knew Dave Korn and worked with him professionally a few times), AWK a sweet little language every developer should know, and Java.

Subsequent languages are easier to learn. BASIC was my first language and knowing its basic constructs gave me a head start in my Computer Science courses in the early 1980s when I was exposed to the same constructs in other programming languages such as PL/I and Fortran. Seeing the same constructs in different languages helped me understand the concept without depending upon its design and implementation in a specific programming language.

Learning programming languages, data structures and algorithms are not quite as important as they used to be with the recent advent of AI. Learning for the sake of learning can still be valuable.

As software developers move more toward AI generated code, then developers can still use these coding challenge websites, but instead of writing the code by hand, they can use them to practice and hone their AI prompting and specification skills to generate the code to solve these challenges.

Here are several options/ Some are free. Some require a fee or subscription:

Video-Based Learning

I am a visual learner. MOOCs worked for me, because much of it involved watching videos.

Much like books are long-form and blogs and articles are short-form, MOOCs tend to be long-form educational experiences, while standalone online videos are often short-form.

Videos

Some software professionals share their experience and knowledge via online videos.

Videos span many types from how-to videos to educational videos. Many conferences have a video channel posting their content as well.

Here are a few suggestions:

Conferences

Conferences expose you to ideas you may never encounter inside your own company.

They compress years of experience into a few days of talks and conversations. Good conferences do more than teach technology. They expose how experienced engineers think about tradeoffs, architecture, teams and software development culture.

Conferences are a great way to stay on the leading edge of technology. In-person conferences allow you to see presentations in person and make connections with other attendees; however, they require time, travel and money.

I only attended one professional conference in my career: O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2016 - New York, New York. It was my first serious exposure to Microservices where the concept started to click for me. Microservices was the buzzword of the day just as Object-Oriented had been a buzzword several decades ago and LLMs/Generative-AI/AI-Agents/Etc. are the buzzwords today.

The internet is an enormous archive of conference presentations available for free on YouTube and Vimeo.

You can watch talks from internationally recognized software engineers that previously required expensive travel and conference admission.

I often watch online videos at a faster playback speed. This is particularly useful when I am already somewhat comfortable with the content, or the speaker is a slow talker like Bob Martin.

Don’t just consume conference talks endlessly. Pick one idea and try applying it. Pause the video and take notes. Rewind and watch again if a comment doesn’t quite click. Discuss the topic with coworkers. Consider aggregating the ideas of several conference talks into your own presentation.

Here are some conference resources:

Conference talks vary wildly in quality. Some are deeply technical. Others are inspirational or promotional. Learning to distinguish substance from hype is part of becoming a senior engineer.

Community and Social Learning

Learn from other practitioners.

Podcasts

Podcasts allow you to pick up new information on the go. Turn idle time into something productive. You can listen in the car, while exercising or elsewhere. They are portable.

I rarely listen to podcasts at normal speed. Faster playback can dramatically increase how much material you can cover during commutes or exercise.

Podcasts appeal to audio learners. Listening to podcast hosts in your ears creates parasocial connection with them. I have even become internet friends with several podcast hosts through their social media channels, Zoom calls, etc.

Podcasts allow conversations to wander in productive ways. Guests often reveal lessons learned, failures and tradeoffs that never make it into polished conference presentations.

Many podcasts also have websites for subsequent reference.

Many excellent software engineering podcasts are no longer active. That’s okay. Software engineering discussions often age better than framework tutorials.

Here are some I follow:

Webinars

Online Communities via Slack, Discord, etc.

Share your experiences and learn from others. Develop and build relationships. Here are a few Software Engineering social media groups I’m a member of along with my username:

Social Media

Social media can be good resources, but they can also be cesspools. Some platforms let you create lists of accounts you follow. I have found that these lists tend to have little or no unwanted content inserted in these feeds. You mostly see only what you want to see.

While curated lists filter content, they cannot filter what’s posted by those you follow. Some people use their accounts to post computer related content only. Some also use their accounts to post their personal and often political views. Your only options are to compartmentalize and ignore posts that do not align with your personal views, or don’t follow these people at all.

Here are some curated lists:

Building Your Own Learning System

There is an enormous amount of educational content available. You may want to curate your own personal education.

Consider:

Summary

Your degree is not the finish line. It is your entry ticket into a profession that reinvents itself continuously.

The best engineers I worked with throughout my career were rarely the people who thought they already knew enough. They were the people who stayed curious.

Technology changes. Tools change. Languages change.

The habit of learning is what endures.

You do not need to master everything. You only need to keep learning the next thing.

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