The Education Roads: everybody has their own!

In this episode of The Education Roads, we talk with David A. Wheeler, a lifelong learner, engineer, and current Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation, who also teaches as an adjunct at George Mason University.

David’s path isn’t a single straight line; it’s a series of deliberate experiments driven by curiosity, hands-on tinkering, and a stubborn appetite for solving real problems.

David traces his start to an early obsession with electronics and the thrill of taking apart and rebuilding devices. That practical curiosity led him through an electronics engineering degree, decades of self-directed software work, and eventually formal graduate study (master’s and a PhD completed over many years) to fill gaps and formalize his learning. He describes himself as “mostly self-taught” who later went back for degrees to round out what he hadn’t learned on his own.

David emphasizes an engineering mindset: define requirements, weigh trade-offs, and pick tools that reliably solve the problem. Not whatever’s trendy. He urges new developers to start small, learn one language well (Python or JavaScript are good entry points), but to eventually learn lower-level concepts like assembly and memory so they truly understand how computers behave.

Throughout the conversation, David returns to two themes: trade-offs (there are no silver bullets) and lifelong learning. Be scrappy, build small projects to learn, read widely, and accept feedback as fuel for improvement. For listeners who teach, build, or ship software, this episode is a useful blend of practical career advice, a clear-eyed take on AI’s place in development, and a humane view of what it takes to keep learning for a lifetime.