5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Programming

what's up everybody how's it going in this video I'm gonna be sharing five things with you that I wish I had known before I started coding now I see a few other youtubers who've done videos on this topic and I wanted to put my own twist on things so in this video the 5 things that I'm gonna be sharing are things that you've never heard of before except probably the first one you've probably heard the first one also typically my videos are at least 12 minutes usually even more than 15 minutes I wanted to switch things up a bit because you know my middle name is the experimenter Clemen to the experimenter Mihai Les Deux so in the spirit of living up to my middle name I want to do an experiment and make this video very short and sweet bite-sized if you will so I'm gonna try to keep it under 5 minutes spoiler alert I went over 5 minutes ok so the first thing that I wish I'd known before I started coding and this is the one that you've probably heard of before but it's always good to hear it again is that there is no age passed which it's too late to start to learn how to code if you're in middle school right now watching this video and you want to start to learn how to code great that's a great time to start if you just started college and you're worried that you've never coded in your life before and can you start to learn how to code don't worry that's a great time to start if you guys graduated from college and you never did coding in college or before that don't worry that's a great time to start that's when I started if you just turned 30 that might be a bit too late at that point no no no no if you just turned 30 that's a great time to start if you just turned 40 50 60 whatever age you are it is a great time to start to learn how to code you don't need that much to start to learn how to code you just need a bit of passion and a bit of grit the second thing I wish I had known when I started to learn how to code has to do with what operating system to pick when you're learning how to code I remember when I was starting my coding journey I was really stressed out because I kept reading these articles or hearing some people telling me listen if you don't go with Mac OS you're gonna have a really hard time everything else is garbage next to Mac OS blah blah blah listen I'm about to dispel the myth for you right now if you're just starting out coding there are three main operating systems that you can pick from there's Windows there's Mac OS and there's some variation of Linux let's go with Ubuntu for example you can use whichever one you want whichever one is most convenient to you and it won't affect you that much all three of them have a small downside which I'll go over right now but overall it's not a big deal for Windows the downside is that most coding tutorials online are typically done on Macs or on Linux machines so it's a bit harder to follow most programming tools out there are typically really tailored for Mac OS or for Linux so it's a little bit harder to sometimes get things to work on Windows so you might need just to have a little bit more patience and a little bit more willingness to look around the web to figure out how to get things to work on Windows that's it with Linux the downside is gonna be that Linux is a little bit sketchy in the sense that if something goes wrong with your computer like the computer as a whole you're kind of on your own to figure out how to make it work I would know cuz I dual booted Windows and bun two for the first two and a half years of my programming career and then finally the downside of Mac OS is that while you're using Mac OS seriously does anybody actually like finder the third thing I wish someone had told me about when I started coding was how loosely the term API is used in the industry like seriously people use API for everything I think the best way to explain what an API is to a beginner is to say that an API is basically the blueprint or the instructional manual that defines how you interact with a thing so for instance if you've got a front-end component for a button literally a button that you put on a website and you can plop that button in a bunch of different places and maybe you can specify the buttons color or the action that's gonna happen when someone clicks on the button that's the API of the button the color that you can specify in the action that you can specify for the button those two things constitute the API for that button or for that front-end component if you've got a back-end service like for instance take Twitter that support functionality to post tweets to comment on tweets to retweet tweets all of these functionalities are things that you can achieve by interacting with some sort of back-end service in a specific way for instance for a tweet you probably have to hit an endpoint and pass a specific type of data like for instance 200 words or 200 characters or however long a tweet is you can tell I don't use Twitter that much and all of those things that define how you use these functionalities are the API for the Twitter back-end service when you're cooking something and you've got a recipe that recipe is sort of like the API for the dish that you're cooking when you're watching one of my videos and you know that you have to smash the leg button otherwise the universe isn't gonna be happy that's an API for watching Clement me les Q's YouTube videos but seriously the term AAP really theory but seriously the term API is used extremely loosely in the industry be ready for it number four I wish that when I was starting to learn how to code someone had told me about algo expert oh just kidding I just needed a way to plug in my company algo expert if you're preparing for your coding interviews check out algo expert do use the promo code Kuenn see Liam for a discount on the platform the real number four is that I wished that when I was starting to learn how to code someone had told me once and for all that there is no difference between a software developer and a software engineer those two titles are the same thing I remember being genuinely confused about this when I was looking into coding boot camps and some of them were saying that they were preparing you for a developer role others were saying that you were gonna be prepared to be a software engineer and I was like is a software engineer more legit than a software developer no no no no no no no no repeat after me no no no no no no no no one of you is gonna comment down below no no no with the right number of noes and you're gonna get a heart from me and you're gonna get like 200 plus likes but seriously software developers software engineer they're the same thing where things get a little bit different is when you start to specialize like for instance if you say back-end engineer or front-end engineer those are just software engineers or software developers that specialize in one part of the stack and by the way even their web developer is basically a front-end engineer typically these days if you say that you're a front-end engineer that means that you are working on the front end and typically we're talking about the web here therefore you are a web developer the fifth and final thing that I wish someone had told me when I was starting to code is that there is no best programming language to learn seriously I hear people all the time talking about the best programming languages whatever programming language you started with if you like it if you enjoy it if you feel like you're learning it's really good there is no best programming language apart from I guess maybe JavaScript JavaScript I guess would be the best programming language cuz you know it's both on the front end the back end it's really versatile so I guess aside from JavaScript there is no best programming language and I guess Python would come in as a close second cuz you know machine learning and data science so I guess if you put aside JavaScript and Python then there really is no best programming language I guess golang would come in as a close third one cuz I mean you know Google and it's all so versatile and I guess C++ after that it's really fast certainly not Java and we're not here to like hurt ourselves right then I guess Pete that's gonna be it for this video I really hope that you enjoyed it let me know what you thought about these five things in the comments below and let me know if you enjoyed this shorter format for a video and if you even remotely chuckled at any point in time during this video you owe me a smashing of the like button I'm talking to you the lurkers here cuz even in one of my recent videos where I had like 30,000 views and we had 3000 people smashed the like button that means that 90% of you did not smash the like button and I refuse to believe that 90% of you did not enjoy that video so if you think that you're too good to smash the like button that used to be me I used to be one of those people who didn't smash the leg button on any YouTube video I used to never do that I was like yeah I'm just a lurker I just consume content I don't snatch the like button no longer it ends today with this video what am I doing with my life

Channel: Clément Mihailescu

Views: 1,068,591

Keywords: 5 things i wish i knew before programming, 5 things i wish i knew before starting programming, 5 things i wish i knew when i started programming, things i wish i knew before programming, things i wish i knew before coding, things i wish i knew before starting programming, things i wish i knew before coding bootcamp, what you need to know before programming, what to know before coding, what to know before learning programming, what to know before learning to code, clement mihailescu

Id: 3NndCfFQNHA

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019