I have the diplomas: a BTS in tourism, a master’s from EFREI, and a certification in instructional design. Each one taught me something real. None of them taught me how to ship.
At school I learned to answer questions someone else had written, inside a timeframe someone else had set. Success meant a grade and an ending. Building a product works the other way. Nobody hands you the question. You have to find the problem, decide it’s worth solving, and then live with it long after the “assignment” would have ended.
I learned that part online. I learned it from YouTube tutorials paused every thirty seconds, from documentation I read three times before it made sense, from GitHub repos I took apart to see how they worked, and from forum threads where a stranger had hit the same error two years before me. I learned it by shipping small, imperfect things and watching what broke.
The internet doesn’t just give you information. It gives you permission. You don’t need anyone to approve your curriculum. You can decide on a Tuesday that you’re going to understand how an AI agent works, and by Friday you’ve built a bad version of one. By the next month you’ve built a better one.
That is how most of my projects started, including SkillxTube. The idea came from my own learning habits: all that knowledge was sitting in YouTube videos, but it was scattered, unstructured, and easy to drop halfway through. So I’m building the tool I wish I’d had, one that turns videos into real learning paths.
The internet taught me to build, and now I’m building something to help other people learn from it.
I don’t think school failed me. It was built for a different goal: producing people who can follow a framework. Products need people who can work without one. That’s a different skill, and it’s learned by doing, in public, with a browser tab always open.
So if you feel like your degree didn’t prepare you for what you actually want to make, you’re probably right. That’s okay. Most of what you’ll need is already out there, free, and waiting for you to type the first question into a search bar.