Hello, World!

Hello! One quick introductory paragraph and I will get to what is important. My name is Jason Bentley. I have been a software engineer for nearly 20 years. I have worked for small businesses and Fortune 50 corporations. During that time, I have developed document management systems, project management systems, mobile apps and software used by realtors, utility workers, accountants, teachers, executives, and the general public. I LOVE DEVELOPING SOFTWARE! I have absolutely no idea how I got lucky enough to fall into a career I love but I feel both blessed and thankful.

There are two points in the first paragraph that I want to go further into in this one. First, as I said, I love developing software. I love starting new projects. I love the way it feels to start a new project and build it from nothing. Unfortunately, I am not so passionate about finishing projects. Especially personal projects. In the past, I have lacked discipline. I have finished a few but I really don’t know what caused me to finish those and ship the rest to the graveyard of broken dreams. There are three different systems I have started over on about a dozen times. Crazy, right? I know there are others out there that do the same thing. I am a serial starter and a terrible finisher. However, there are two of those systems that I have restarted for the upteenth time that I just feel really strongly about. I think they could be amazing if I, you know, ever get around to finishing them. Second, I fell into this career somewhat accidentally. I didn’t go to school for it. I didn’t finish college at all. I went for a while and got bored or lazy. I am not sure which. It was a long time ago. I went the self-taught path and I have no regrets. Stay with me, this is going somewhere.

Lets move to formal education. I disliked my own formal education but really enjoyed figuring it out myself. It took me about 2 years to really get up to speed in my own time between working 40-60 hours per week, raising kids, and sleeping. It took me two years to learn enough so that I could go into a programming interview and not embarrass myself. If I had only known exactly what I needed to learn, I could have probably done it in 9-12 months fairly easily, I think, and been an asset when I was hired. That is why I am making Edumacate.me. I don’t intend for it to be just another site for learning to program. There are dozens of those already. There are hundreds of career paths that can be laid out in an easy to follow set of instructions that can lead to a life of fulfillment and purpose and there are thousands of secondary skills we all need in our lives such as sales, marketing, branding, writing, and so on that will enhance our professions and lives in many different ways.

I can imagine woodworkers getting instructions on creating cabinets or hand-cutting dovetails. I can imagine software developers building projects to learn a new framework. I can imagine teachers learning new ways to educate. I can imagine entrepreneurs learning how to properly create brochures or presentations or a business plan. I can imagine people from all walks of life learning all manner of things. This is the first time in the history of mankind that virtually all of the world’s knowledge is freely available at our fingertips.

What we lack, however, is organization. I can’t imagine a topic that normal, every day people would want to learn that isn’t available on Youtube or available on a thousand different pages available to everyone for free. You have to know what to search for, however, and in what order and how to distinguish between bad sources and good sources. Organizing the Internet’s knowledge is completely doable. This is what I hope to grow Edumacate.me into: a flexible framework for the organization of the Internet’s collective knowledge into learning plans and project plans to accomplish anything!

Stay tuned.