The Self-Taught Computer Scientist

Data Structures
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other relatives in Canada, so he bought a bus ticket and started tracking them down. It took a nearly 
2,000- mile bus ride for Musk to find a second cousin who offered him a place to stay. Still a teenager, 
Musk worked on a farm in Saskatchewan, cut logs in Vancouver, and cleaned out boilers.
Musk described cleaning boilers in 
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future 
Ecco, Illustrated edition (January 24, 2017): “You have to put on this hazmat suit and then shimmy 
through this little tunnel that you can barely fit in,” he explained. “Then, you have a shovel, and 
you take the sand and goop and other residue, which is still steaming hot, and you have to shovel it 
through the same hole you came through. There is no escape. Someone else on the other side has to 
shovel it into a wheelbarrow. If you stay in there for more than 30 minutes, you get too hot and die.”
In 1989, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario. In college, Musk told a friend, “If there 
was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get 
nutrients without sitting down for a meal.” Musk’s drive continued to push him. He built and sold 
computers from his dorm room. “I could build something to suit their needs like a tricked- out gaming 
machine or a simple word processor that cost less than what they could get in a store,” Musk related.
He also spent hours playing games like 
Civilization and thought about a career in gaming. After 
transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, Musk began to gravitate toward business and technology. 
Although gaming had been his passion since he was a boy, Musk wanted to have a larger impact on 
the world. “I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much 
effect would that have on the world,” Musk wondered. “It wouldn’t have a big effect. Even though 
I have an intrinsic love of video games, I couldn’t bring myself to do that as a career.”
In college, Musk knew he was a quick learner. He was already interested in solar power, space, the 
internet, and electric cars. After earning bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics, Musk moved to 
California to earn his PhD in energy physics at Stanford. Silicon Valley quickly drew Musk’s attention, 
and he dropped out of his doctoral program after only two days.
Instead, Musk launched Zip2 Corporation, which made online city guides. He sold the company 
in 1999 for more than $300 million. Since then, Musk has been involved with many other successful 
companies, including PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and The Boring Company. The drive that pushed 
Musk to learn to program on his own helped Musk become one of the most successful entrepreneurs 
of all time.

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18
Next Steps
For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn’t even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all 
that will change. Let’s get the whole world coding!
Eric Schmidt
Nice work! You made it through all the technical parts of this book. Your hard work is paying off, 
and you are well on your path to becoming a software engineer. I want to thank you for choosing to 
read my book and being part of the self- taught community. I can’t believe how big our community has 
become. It has been terrific getting the chance to meet so many inspiring people, and I cannot wait 
to read your success story next. In this final chapter, I will cover what you should do moving forward 
and provide some resources that might help you.
What’s Next?
First, let’s take a second to celebrate how far you’ve come as a self- taught programmer. You not only 
know how to program, you also understand many fundamental computer science concepts. You know 
how to write algorithms to solve various problems, and you can look at two algorithms and quickly 
decide which one you want to use. You can write recursive algorithms to elegantly solve problems 
and search and sort data in various ways. You are familiar with a variety of data structures, and you 
don’t just know what they are: you know when to use them as well. Overall, you’ve become a much 
more knowledgeable programmer with so many new tools in your toolkit.
Not only have you significantly increased your programming knowledge, with a little bit of prac-
tice, you can pass a technical interview, which means you are well on your way to landing a job as a 
software engineer. So, what should you do next? That depends on how much professional program-
ming experience you have. If you already have experience, you can skip the next section. If you don’t 
have any experience and want to improve your odds of getting hired, read on.

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