I Turned My Commute Into My First Million in Tech

I didn't make a million dollars sitting on a train.

I made it because of what I repeatedly did while sitting on one.

For years, I used otherwise forgettable pockets of time, commuting, waiting, sitting between things, to keep learning tech.

Sometimes it was something completely new. Sometimes it was refreshing a concept I'd forgotten. Sometimes it was learning a technology I thought would matter for the next stage of my career.

None of those sessions felt particularly important.

Ten minutes here, twenty minutes there.

But over almost two decades in tech, they compounded.

New knowledge led to new skills. New skills opened new opportunities. And those opportunities eventually helped build the career that got me to my first million in tech.

The interesting part to me isn't the million.

It's how much of the learning that helped me get there happened in time I could very easily have wasted.

Micro learning worked. But it wasn't easy.

I became a huge believer in learning in small pockets of time.

The problem was that tech learning was never really designed for it.

There is certainly no shortage of technical content. If anything, we have the opposite problem.

You can watch part of a YouTube course, read a blog post, jump into documentation, save a GitHub repo, subscribe to a newsletter, buy a Udemy course and bookmark three different roadmaps.

Some of that content is fantastic.

ByteByteGo was one of the best things I found. I loved how technical concepts could be turned into concise, visual explanations that were easy to consume.

But even something as good as that could only cover a fraction of what I wanted to learn, refresh or keep up with.

Because tech is enormous.

One month I might want to refresh Linux.

Then understand Kubernetes networking.

Learn Terraform properly, or prepare for a cloud certification, or even revisit SQL (yes, this still happens after being in tech for 2 decades).

Then learn something happening in data engineering or AI.

Then go back and refresh something I hadn't touched for three years.

And trying to do all of that in small chunks meant I had to build the learning experience myself.

Find good material.

Work out whether it was current.

Figure out what level I should start at.

Know what prerequisites I was missing.

Decide what came next.

Remember where I'd stopped.

Find a way to practise instead of just consuming.

Work out what I had forgotten.

And somehow know whether I was actually progressing or simply jumping between disconnected pieces of content.

Sometimes I had ten minutes available to learn and could easily spend half of it deciding what to learn.

That's a pretty terrible micro learning experience.

Then I started learning Spanish

At some point, I started learning Spanish with Duolingo (I live in Sydney so it'd definitely come handy!).

And yes, by now you can probably tell I'm a big fan of micro learning (I literally said it a few paragraphs ago).

But what struck me wasn't simply that Duolingo had short lessons.

It was everything I didn't have to do.

• I didn't research the best Spanish roadmap.

• I didn't decide which grammar rule I should study next.

• I didn't figure out when I was ready to move forward.

• I didn't keep track of where I'd stopped.

• I didn't need to plan when something should be repeated.

Someone else had already done that work.

I opened the app.

It knew where I was.

There was a clear path in front of me.

The next lesson was small enough to finish.

I had to interact with what I was learning rather than just watch it.

I got immediate feedback.

Concepts came back again.

I could see my progress.

Streaks and goals gave me another little reason to return tomorrow.

And suddenly five spare minutes actually felt worth using.

That was the part that stuck with me:

My job was no longer to manage the process of learning. My job was just to show up and learn.

Why can't learning tech feel like that?

That question stayed in my head.

Why, if I want to learn Docker, should my first task be researching how to learn Docker?

Why can't I open something, know exactly where I am, learn the next useful concept, practise it and move on with my day?

And why should that experience stop at one narrow part of technology?

What if there were a broader learning world covering Linux, cloud, DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, data engineering, AI, programming and all the other directions a tech career can take?

Something designed from the beginning around the idea that sometimes five minutes is all you have.

That idea eventually became SysSnack.

What I'm trying to build with SysSnack

SysSnack takes technical topics and breaks them into small, interactive learning experiences with a clear path through them.

Instead of deciding that tonight you're going to “learn Kubernetes”, you can open SysSnack and learn one small thing about Kubernetes.

Then practise it.

Make some progress.

Close it.

Come back tomorrow.

Courses live inside Skyverse, where different areas of technology become islands and learning feels more like exploring a world than working through another giant course catalogue.

There are already learning paths across areas like Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, DevOps, cloud, data engineering and AI, and I'm continuing to expand them.

And it's free.

It's not supposed to replace deep learning

I'm not suggesting five minute lessons can replace real projects, labs, documentation, books or serious courses.

They can't.

Sometimes you absolutely should spend three hours building something, break it horribly, read the documentation and figure out why it doesn't work.

That's part of becoming good at tech.

SysSnack is for the other moments.

The five minutes before your next meeting.

The commute, the coffee queue.

The concept you've forgotten.

The technology you've been meaning to start learning for six months.

The interview you're preparing for.

Those little pockets of time don't look like much individually.

I've learned not to underestimate what happens when you keep using them.

Five minutes?

SysSnack is still early, and there's a lot more I want to build.

So if you've got five spare minutes today, try SysSnack.

I'd genuinely love to hear what works, what doesn't, what feels confusing, and especially what you'd like to learn next.

You can find me in the comments or join us on Discord.

See you in the Skyverse. ☁️