10 Years of Development - My Journey and the Lessons I've Learned

so welcome back to new video um this time a little bit of a different video here um i think this might actually be very interesting for some of you so in this video i actually want to talk a little about my journey as a programmer because now um next year i'm turning 23 and then it's about 10 years where i'm into coding and there was really a lot i learned in this time and i just feel like i should share that with you so basically the the biggest lessons i learned in in my journey as a programmer here and just for those of you who are interested i'll just explain how i got into programming how i learned back then how i learned today so this will probably a little bit longer on video this time but it will be really interesting i think so back then it all started when i was 12 i got my first pc i remember it was christmas and that was basically the the best christmas in my life so i was really happy to actually get that pc and back then i don't really remember but it has it had four gigabits of ram so back then it was a real monster um and there was no android studio so four gigabytes of ram was totally fine there and when i think about that today that some smartphones actually have eight gigabits of ram that is just incredible but back then that was a pretty good pc but when i was 12 i didn't really directly go into programming i still was gaming a lot and just playing around with pcs that was just something that was always really fun for me but when i was 13 i actually got this book here from my mom so thank you mom maybe without you i wouldn't sit here or without this book and that book was about c plus it was a german book and the title basically meant playfully learn c plus it wasn't playful at all so it was basically a book that was about a pre-written game and you learn programming by navigating a bug or something like that through a maze with commands like bug go left go right go top and nowadays i even think this can be a good way to learn programming but back then i was just totally confused because i really didn't understand where this game came from because we just included some dll files and then we had that game and i was just thinking it can't be that easy to to code a game just by using commands like go left go right and yeah it was basically a pre-written game and that's what i really didn't understand back then so frustrated little philip put the book away and that is actually the first lesson here that i can tell you that's at least from my experience there is no general advice here but in my experience it's not really helpful to learn programming with books i tried that several times in my journey as a programmer to learn with books and every time it went wrong because you if you don't know programming you have a really hard time to to determine where to actually put the code that you read in the book so in my experience that was just really frustrating and also the reason why i then put the book away but luckily i didn't completely stop programming back then instead what i did is i researched for easier programming languages because c plus is really not the best language to start with it's a really hard language and then with a little bit of googling i stumbled over a programming language called visual basic and visual basic was used inside of visual studio and that came with something called windows forms and i was really amazed by that so it was basically drag and drop ui views and you can build a full windows application with that so that really made more sense to me and i felt like i actually do something there and i can actually design a program from scratch so i really started building simple programs here i put everything into a single file i didn't know anything about object orientation back then and i also didn't really care because i just had fun programming and here's lesson two actually if you're a beginner then really focus on the fun part of programming you will see so much on social media on youtube that your code quality is important that you should use the best practices in every case and yes that is true if you're really if you really want to make a complex program if you want to make a program and really want people to use that but if you're just starting to learn programming you should really focus on the fun part of it really code quality doesn't matter it completely doesn't matter i put everything into a single file and it was just fun i learned programming really well with that and you can still focus on code quality later when you're able to build simple applications so i ended up making really cool programs like this party program here where you could simply decide how you want these single squares to look like how they should flicker it was really fun i had a lot of fun back then just coding whatever i liked i had this fully responsive program here where which basically drew a house grid so that was i think with turtle graphics that i just drew these houses and i could determine how many i wanted to have and yeah it was just fun and my personal highlight was actually a chat app and sadly i don't find this program anymore but this was actually not a normal chat app instead it used ftp if you don't know ftp that is a file transfer protocol it's not a chat message transfer protocol so what little philip actually did there is whenever somebody sent a tag uh the text message here then i uploaded the entire chat history as a text file to an ftp server and the other side had like a timer running and every second that whole text file was downloaded and set to the text history text box basically that was so terrible i think there is no worse way to actually make a chat app but in the end it worked and it made me happy back then and that's really all about it i didn't plan to publish this anywhere i didn't really care it was just fun for me and that's what i just what i can just suggest to you just have fun doing something you really don't need to um write the perfect program right away and you also won't this just won't happen and all that stuff all that fun stuff i discovered back then um made me decide to study computer science later so i was 14 or 15 and i knew that i wanted to study computer science when i'm out of school and i also didn't only stick to visual basic back then i just watched a ton of youtube tutorials back then so besides of visual basic i also learned java i learned c-sharp i did a lot of stuff with c-sharp that also had windows phones and since i got into java at some point i also got a little bit into android development but i never ever took it really seriously i also never really understood what i was doing back then so i didn't understand the concept of activities of the life cycle it was just so much new stuff that didn't have anything to do just with a plain programming language so that's why i actually quit android back then and didn't spend more time with it one thing i got more into was actually game development so for my whole life i love to play computer games and it was a little childish dream to actually be able to make your very own computer game and since i knew c sharp pretty well back then i discovered unity so unity is a game engine that just helps you to make games very easily with g-sharp and then i also discovered that you could also make android games with unity and then i made a game called infinityrunner which was basically just an endless runner i published it to google play i borrowed my dad's credit card to actually create that developer account and yeah then i actually put all the ads out there into this app and try to make some money well my whole school ended up playing that game well not the whole school but a lot of people inside of my school my friends and they battled against each other in break basically and that was really fun we had like an online high score list and it was just about who becomes the best in phillips game and a lot of my friends just intentionally clicked on these ads just so that i could make some money and a lifetime i made about sixty dollars with it which is not enough to actually um get that money because there's like a seventy dollar border on on admob so you need to earn at least 70 dollars to be able to get that money on your bank account and also just put this link to this app in this video description so if you want to try it out then check it out but that's actually lesson three now here if you want to publish an app don't have any expectations and with expectations i mean regarding income in 99.9 of the cases you won't make a significant amount of money with an app that you publish if nobody actually knows you and that's really no issue i mean i don't say don't publish an app just go for it it can be real it can be a real achievement for you but it's very unlikely that you will make significant amounts of money with that and then i started to study computer science so i really did it i said when i was 15 i will study computer science and when i was 19 i actually did it and there were tons of things i actually learned in university that i never really got into before so things like git or hardware stuff that were just really interesting to me and after some time so that was last year in july or august my friend actually started an instagram page about recycling trash and i really liked the way how he designed those graphics with a website called canva which i also use for my instagram posts nowadays and i thought wouldn't it be cool if i do the same with something i'm interested in and that's when i actually launched my instagram page that was in september last year and i had to think about which topic i actually want to make this page about and i actually said okay i will go back into android development in the end in native android development not with unity just plain android development and i didn't know anything when i started my instagram page so i didn't know anything about mvvm about activities about lifecycle well i've heard of activities before but i i never really was much into android so i just started this instagram page without thinking much about it and also without expecting anything from it it was just fun for me to show other people actually what i learn and with this instagram page together i actually started learning android development and i spent a lot of time actually doing that and i remember when i started the page i just put into my bio that people can ask me with their questions and then when people actually asked me i just googled the solution and helped them out so i remember the first guy who was actually someone who wanted me to help him with a syntax highlighter and i had no idea of that but i quickly searched in google and with the help of stack overflow i could actually help him out and i really wrote a little program for him that that really helped him and he was really happy so that is my next lesson that i've learned if you want to grow as a developer on instagram youtube or wherever really do something for people really try to give as much as you can the the content is really only a small part of your success um if people actually feel you really want to help them then you will grow as a developer on social media and i also remember that people started messaging me about mvvm live data and all that stuff and as you can imagine for somebody who was never into android i had absolutely no idea what this was about what the is live data what the is mvvm is that guy misspelling something is that a typo i didn't really know but i still tried to help them out i looked into their projects but i didn't understand anything but yeah i just kept on posting every single day i learned every single day and that really helped me to learn android development very fast so that is actually my next lesson i think it's lesson five now if you really want something you're always ready for it so you will actually learn everything you need on the fly if you really want it and at the same time lesson six was there is no way you can learn something faster than by teaching at others because when you teach something to others you're kind of responsible for the content you actually teach them and that responsibility makes you learn it yourself much better and that's what i noticed so i i learned it so quick and i got into mvvm very quickly and all that typical android stuff so that when i started my youtube channel in november so after two months after i started my instagram page i was already pretty comfortable with android and i mean now it's pretty much a year now from where i started youtube and there's really a lot i learned in this time and that's just because i i went into teaching and i just learned every single day it's all about consistency in the end but i also have to say that i would have never been able to learn it that quickly if i wouldn't have the years of programming experience before so if i wouldn't have started with 13 there was no way i could learn android development in in a single year so that's also what i always preach really focus on your problem-solving skills because if you're a good problem solver you can learn anything in programming really quick because that is the foundation for everything everywhere you need good programming uh good problem solving skills and really just stop focusing on the perfect framework on the perfect programming language and start focusing on really learning what is behind programming what it's all about about logical thinking and i would really say that in this single year since i started youtube i learned more in regards to programming than in my or let's say than in for five years combined i would easily say that not in regards to computers in general but in regards to programming and code style and architecture i really learned so much and i can just recommend anybody out there to start your own brand to really start making content it's really fun and you learn so much you will have it easier to find a job you will have it easier to earn some side income and just to help and inspire people and that is just something that really fulfills you so thank you everybody for watching this far and i'm really thankful for every single one of you who supports me with their likes with their comments just with their views on my videos and of course those who support me financially by getting my premium courses on my website without you i couldn't really do this in the long term and all this just makes me so happy to be able to to help a lot of people here while still doing something i love and i hope this video was so interesting for some of you and these lessons that i learned were just helpful for you you can apply them to your life um if so please let me know that below and also let me know below what were your biggest lessons that you've learned in your journey as a programmer i'd be really interested in that and yeah just let me know that below i wish you an awesome day see you next video bye bye

Channel: Philipp Lackner

Views: 6,501

Keywords: android, tutorial, philip, philipp, filipp, filip, fillip, fillipp, phillipp, phillip, lackener, leckener, leckner, lackner, kotlin, mobile, programming, advice, motivation, coding, experience, programmer, developer, coding advice, programming tips, programmer tip, tips, tip, beginner tip, beginner, newbie

Id: KbohMZKDUS4

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020