Hello Jow Forums, part time lurker here with a question: How did you learn about technology...

IDK, if you're white, then get a truck drivers license and haul merchandise to stores and watch the low-IQ plebs unload it from your truck

>How did you learn about technology?
I got a computer when I was 7 or something and immediately started exploring everything I could about Windows 98, checking all programs, tools, directories, trying to understand how does this work. And that's pretty much how it was since I remember. Few years latter when I was in primary school I found a book about Visual Basic and read it all. I've self taught VB and Baltie at the same time, making games and stuff. I didn't knew anyone who was programmer, or what programming even is. I was just making games and calculators and stuff.

>How did you guys become experts? What expanded your knowledge the most? Any books, podcasts, movies etc? What advice would you give to someone trying to sponge as much information about modern technology as possible as efficiently as possible?
By playing Garry's Mod, to be honest. But to be precise, not exactly an expert but something I can really find word for. The point is I have exceptional intuition in programming and math, in a sense that I have much higher productivity and capability to learn and adopt than anyone I know.
The thing is that Garry's Mod is the ultimate sandbox game, which allows you to do anything, including programming anything you want. And that was I did, I programmed embedded systems, controllers, automated cars, space ships, automated drones, interfaces, games and so on. But it was all self taught, no one told me to intent my code or not use cryptic variable names, I had to learn it the hard way through failures. I also managed to reinvent few things. Eg. I was using trigonometry without even knowing was function is. I didn't knew their relation to triangle and angles, I simply plotted their values and figured out how to use them. It was really astounding to discover sin and cos can be used to form a circle.

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Similarly I started making raytracers by plotting results of builtin function that allows to trace simple ray. It was a depth camera, but my friend told me to checkout dot product and normal vectors and I managed to reinvent phong lighting model(without specular lighting though). Made it recursive(or technically iterative because E2 doesn't have functions) and I could do reflections - whitted style raytracing. Insane technical limitations forced me to write efficient code and I managed to touch literally every aspect/level of abstraction of programming I used in the future(maybe except for logic programming). When they added functions via E2 core, it was like a huge deal because we could put some abstractions over our code. They were first class citizens, so we could pass them to other chips(scripts) and use them not just as execution units but objects with methods. Of course no one called them methods because neither of use knew OOP. Similar Quaternions were like a magic and using PID controller for physics was like higher sorcery. It was long process but it was surely worth it for the skills I learned and best a part of crew that rediscover computer science. After that I moved to real languages and technologies, but it all was just piece of cake when you have actual documentation that tells you everything.
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>What advice would you give to someone trying to sponge as much information about modern technology as possible as efficiently as possible?
It all depends on what you want to do, really.
You could go for gamedev because it fun and easy but it pay less. Sysadmin is pretty comfy but you might need to be quite savvy. Modern webdev is comfy but you might not like all the normies and faggots who stick to it. Embedded might be more challenging and interesting. Just stay away from Java, PHP, wordpress or you will start to hate your life. It might give you stable job but you'll mostly likely have to maintain some shitty legacy project and deal with pajeets. However Java is not that bad for hobby projects, modern features are pretty nice, but many (old) libraries suck ass.

Friend accidently borrowed me a Knoppix live CD instead of win xp when I was a teen. Kind of escalated from there.

>How did you learn about technology?
when I was a kid, there were these magazines about computers and technology. I didn't have a computer at the time, but my school had some. I became fascinated with them, and I tried to use them when I could. growing up, I went to uni, where I saw I learned programming very fast, and I loved messing with other OSes, software and network stuff.

>How did you guys become experts?
by reading and practising a lot. by being interested in them, and spending most time doing stuff with computers. for me, it's a matter of doing what I like, then sort of developing a "sense" of how things work, and finally checking my beliefs.

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That makes sense. Thanks for the input.
I don't feel competent enough for programming, I've always been articulate and creative but absolutely god-awful at math and numbers. I'm enjoying learning about hardware and networking though, it seems to fit in my mental framework more-so than when I attempted to learn basic programming.

you probably want to get a IT help desk position, without a degree it'll be harder to get a sys admin pos.
I think A+ is the one you want, and network+ to start.
Certs are a lot more valuable for sys admins than programmers. so study for all of them.
then probably pick windows or linux, some companies will have you do both, but not always.

That's all in my current plan, that's good to know. I'll most likely have to move out of my bumfuck town to get a helpdesk position though.

Are there any projects I should work on to look good on a resume?

i've only had sys admin coworkers, so this is just best guess. sys is less about projects, and more about knowing troubleshooting.
so know your network command line tools inside and out, netstat, ping, etc. know the whole boot process, i once ran into a problem where our servers wouldn't boot, and the error messages were shit. so knowing exactly what goes on at each step you know which part is having a problem, failed hard drive, or corrupted boot loader, you figure it out.
active directory for windows, permissions... probably everything i said is just covered in the certs

I was in your exact position a couple of years ago, and my life is exactly the life you seem to be looking for. I work in a datacentre and I recommend you look for jobs there too. They don't mind hiring total failures because lots of the work is horrible (if you're willing to work 12-hour night shifts crawling about under the floor and plugging in cables, you will never go hungry, and while I don't do that, I do have literal janitorial duties sometimes) and working there will teach you pretty much everything except programming. I got the job with just the CompTIA A+, and now they want me to get a CCNA (I've finished studying for it but haven't done the exam yet).

I'm taking the first half of the A+ next week, and I already know the basic cmd line tools. I will focus on what you mentioned outside of the cert study. Thanks again.
Honestly that doesn't sound bad at all. I don't mind taking a tough or basic job at first if it gets my foot in the door and allows me to prove myself. Everyone in my family works retail or manual labor and I know I have the drive to do better. Thank you.

i got a job