Ask an Expert: Study and learning tips with Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp

well hello to an amazing wednesday live stream that i am very excited to be here with quincy larson from free code camp [Applause] wow that is exciting thank you so much for joining us quincy i can see everyone is extremely excited to talk to you everyone yeah great to see you all uh i'm in chat so i'll yeah i see your kind words thank you very much uh and i recognize a lot of the people here yeah so many people here very exciting so senator wants to let you know that the seal i can never pronounce that city so fcc discord is good real camaraderie in there that is what you want when learning to code amazing oh helps your oldest joints as well right on yeah good to see you bob um yeah seoul has a special place in my heart uh i've been there a few times and uh it's just an amazing city and uh of course like very vibrant developer community as well so um you all out there in seoul keep coming awesome yeah srianz is looking forward to this stream as am i so we have an array of things to talk about today based around kind of study tips learning learning to code and all sorts of things like that i have prepared some questions but of course if you have your own questions for quincy i would love to ask them so uh drop them in the chat caffeinated pixel says howdy folks quincy is like a god yeah totally so let's get started um with some questions if you're okay with that quincy i um would like to start by setting the scene a bit for those who are maybe not familiar with free code cam i doubt there are many but you never know and can you tell us a little bit about it and its relationship with scrimma absolutely so we have a long history of scrumba yeah i don't know probably like four years i would say maybe longer uh i'm not sure exactly like when i first uh met uh with pear and uh talked with him and hung out with him like just virtually we haven't gotten to meet in person but of course i'm hoping to meet with him uh if i make it up to northern europe at some point or if he makes it down to uh to the states uh to visit um but i just was immediately blown away by the caliber of the engineering behind you know the tools that you all built and so we very very quickly started sending people over to check out scrimba and and uh create like what i think are incredibly accessible uh both for a data perspective and from a um like everything is an element you can interact with everything it's it's in my mind kind of the future of how you would do like a an interactive uh lecture and and i do think that uh the product just continues to evolve and yeah so it's awesome we love it and uh i use periodically myself we we've taught entire courses using scrimba as like the playground that we build things in just because it's so powerful yeah that is super cool um can you tell us a bit about the background of free code camp itself how did it get started and yeah how was it born yeah so i learned to code the old-fashioned way you know going uphill both ways um i'm an old timer right uh so i used uh like mit open courseware textbooks from like the library um i i was 31 when i started 30 31 ish uh when i was learning the code and i just had no idea what i was doing uh there were some kind of like lists floating around on the internet of like oh you should learn this and then this and then this and uh people had like strapped together their own curriculum uh from different like uh open textbooks and things like that so i used all that stuff and i hung out at the santa barbara hackerspace i was living in santa barbara california and um so it was a very lonely ambiguous process i would go i would go to the hackerspace and just sit there and like go through textbooks and solve project oiler problems using python that was that was like the main way i practiced was i just tried to solve the project weather problems uh of course i didn't get even close to doing them all but um it was lonely because i'd be the only person at the hacker's face like i had a key to the place so i just go there it's their among all the dead roombas and the uh they had like this this like maker it's it's like a maker space basically uh but primarily people use software instead of hardware which i think is more fun and dynamic and there's like robotics club and everything but like these people were mostly focused with software because software is what you use to build big companies like it's hard to build a hardware company right everybody there wanted to be like big startup founder and stuff uh so i learned how to code just go on every every weekend i'd get on a train i'd go up to like you know say i'd go down to san diego i'd go over to la i'd go up to san francisco bay area or go to vegas or someplace there was always a big hackathon and i would go and enter it and every single weekend i would do a hackathon like i did like 40 of them in one year i think um and uh that was kind of like the trial by fire that i needed to like build projects over and over just build projects ship things uh get humiliated by like screwing up the git history like i learned things the hard way right and i did eventually get a job after about seven or eight months of grinding like this as a software engineer and i was like wow that's awesome like but it was hard as hell and like it could be so much easier so that was what i carried after working for about a year as a software engineer and then like just doing freelance work and doing everything else i felt like i need to make it easier for other people to get into the field because if some 30 year old teacher who has no technical background and just has like this determination that they're going to like learn to code can do it i think there are a lot of other people who could probably do it but don't have you know the luxury of being able to spend the amount of time i have or you know need additional support um so that was the genesis of the free cocaine community in my mind was like i'm going to create tools that make it easier for people to learn to code i created a bunch that nobody cared about and then eventually one weekend i stood up freecodecamp.org and i just built it in my closet and deployed it and and started tweeting about it and some people would come and use it and there was a chat room so people would stick around in the chat room and uh gradually it built up some momentum and people started uh people started contributing people started getting jobs and then it just kind of snowballed from there over the past almost eight years yeah it certainly did in a fantastic way is there anything you wish people knew about free code camp now's the chance to tell us yes so there a lot of people will say oh free cocaine just teaches like python and javascript i want to learn xyz that's totally cool we have our core curriculum that just focuses on what we think are like the the low-hanging fruit as far as getting the skills you need to be able to go get a developer job and once you get a developer job that's when the real learning starts um because you're working with a team you're working you have accountability uh you're working with like a real world code base instead of like a simple code base that you yourself are the main maintainer of um so we have tons of projects in the curriculum uh that you can learn as well uh but but if there are not projects on the specific tools or language if you want to learn graphql or if you want to learn um you know like uh cassandra or some other database or you want to learn java uh or c or rust or something like that like we do have courses on these things not on rust yet we're gonna have that soon uh but uh they're on the youtube channel and they have projects that go with them and you can like they're like a full built out udemy course essentially and there are hundreds of them so just because it's not in the core curriculum doesn't mean we don't have it it just means that we it's extracurricular the core curriculum is a single linear progression and it's designed to be like the the fastest way from a to b a being not being a developer and b being working as a software engineer basically um the other thing i want to tell everybody is the curriculum has more than 60 projects in it if you feel like the first few projects are like oh this is just hand holding i'm just you know doing these little coding exercises it doesn't feel like real coding or i'm not retaining it or anything you will retain it once you build things with the projects just keep going through the curriculum you're going to get to a bunch of projects and we're restructuring the free code game curriculum to have tons of projects throughout like you'll basically everything you'll be doing is building projects that's been a massive undertaking basically rewriting the entire curriculum we're getting close uh you're gonna see a couple new certifications like probably in the next few months uh that go live uh we don't have deadlines as i think we might discuss later but uh yeah things are moving fast so uh just know that like we hear you like whenever somebody comments on like uh reddit or tweets or something like i wish they had this or this or this i probably read that um and i probably am actively thinking about how we can address whatever suggestions you all have we eventually want free cooking to essentially cover the you know all aspects of you know software engineering perfect yeah i'm going to have a little interlude now because i can see various people are uh tom chant for example sharing tigers in the chat and dubbed it and sharians and path and the reason for this is because we do a little thing here where if you are new please leave a rabbit in the chat and if you've been before please leave the tiger i usually do it slightly earlier but i haven't forgotten um here it is so yes bunnies and tigers all vote now we don't do anything with this it's a tradition really i suppose so yes um question i saw earlier from path which i now can't find oh here it is um why do you like programming quincy larson uh i just enjoy problem solving you know i think i've always enjoyed like solving puzzles or um figuring out like why something works the way it does like i love those engineering videos where they're like you know how do you make this you take this aluminum tube and you heat it up and you you bend it all these ways next thing you know you've got a bicycle right like i love that kind of how it's made type thing uh for me it's just like everything that is around us is the product of some sort of like evolutionary process that is in somebody's mind like they're thinking of easier ways to accomplish things more economical ways in terms of material in terms of like emissions in terms of like oh this this mineral is very scarce so maybe we can figure out a way to use this mineral instead uh and and programming is like taking all that and abstracting it to the software layer where you're limited by imagination and processing power and things like that uh but like with your imagination you can build literally anything it's unlimited you're not limited by the number of atoms in the earth that we can easily access and things like that right you're not limited by money uh you know like you can basically get like a commodity computer on like amazon or some other cloud provider azure and and you can use that to build whatever you want and and with open source it's like you're walking into a giant emporium filled with people who just want you to take their thing like please take this and use it and it's just the coolest feeling uh having somebody hand you like this big open source library and you're like okay what am i going to do with this how am i going to use this what problems am i going to address that's that's why i like programming it it's just the problem solving and the fact that it's fun but at the end of the day you're actually getting real things done that they can have an impact on people's life that can make their lives easier or provide a way that they can save money for example yeah perfect there are some more questions in the chat i will come to them after asking my next question because they kind of link on to each other so you've mentioned um the free code core curriculum and i think that might have answered my question here but i'll double check anyway is that what people really need to know to become a web developer or is there anything different you want to tell us outside of the call yeah yeah well i tell people there's no one one stop shop just use whatever resources you know strike your fancy um i would encourage you to use freecodecamp as a core curriculum because it's cohesively designed and uh everything like you're not gonna get to a point and be like oh we haven't covered this that was my biggest issue when i had like these giant lists of resources for example there'd be like big lists that would go viral on hacker news or reddit essentially it was just a list of links to like different resources do cs50 on harvard you know do the stanford database course and the stanford algorithm course stuff like that and like those were good they were helpful but there were like often like dependency mismatches right or like oh this assumes that i already know calculus and now i've got to go learn calculus oh calculus assumes that i know this you know like you get lost in all that stuff but free cocaine is always going to present a linear progression that the only assumption really is that you're an english speaker and of course we've localized frico campus to portuguese chinese spanish italian ukrainian is coming soon so uh yeah like like you are gonna be able to basically you just have to be able to read you have to have a computer now you can do a free copy final phone but it's not like the best experience we're working on our android app uh which i can talk a little bit more about it's live and the android app store if you want to download it but right now it's just a shadow of what it will be in a few months time uh we've been making really rapid progress making it easier to uh to learn on the phone yeah yeah that was something that people asked us about at scrimba quite a lot so i'm sure that will be very popular yeah so on the back of that sean ravenhill asks do you have any advice for someone struggling to find a dev job after completing a computer science certification at free code camp yeah so getting a job is really a function of three different things your skills which it sounds like if you're progressing through frequently you're building up skills don't take for granted that just because you earn a certification from free code camp that you understand the topic definitely like do interview prep there are lots of open source tools that you can use there's like the uh uh developer interview university i think that my friend john washington created and uh that has just like it's got flash cards that that you can use and just test your knowledge and everything so there's the skills there's also the network how who you know matters uh if you have friends that work at a company it is dramatically easier for you to get an interview with that company than it would be if you were just blindly submitting your application through a web form right so build your network um get involved in communities like 100 days of code you know different forums you know the free cocaine forum experiment has communities and groups and things like that you get involved into knowing people in your city is really helpful as well if it once the pandemic has truly subsided and you can go and hang out with other developers go to like tech talks go to hack nights and participate in weekend hackathons things like that just meet your peers a lot of times it's not the hiring manager who helps you get the job it's the person who is your peer essentially just got a job like hey do you know any other people who are like you because you're awesome yeah i do i have a friend who used to do hackathons with me and then boom you're you're like in the interview right so uh network the third thing is your reputation and if people are like googling you and finding you and that you've got a linkedin uh you've got uh maybe some some articles you've published if you've got a personal website that it has like conferences you've talked at things like that those things reassure people what what people are trying to find figure out when they are hiring somebody like a hr person they're just checking boxes okay does this person publish does this person you know uh have they built projects do they actually have a portfolio did they register a domain and so whoever you know that has basic information do they have a linkedin profile like all those things so that's kind of your reputation um i would strongly encourage everybody to get active on twitter for example you don't have to like actively participate in discussions on twitter twitter can be a dangerous place to have like arguments and stuff i would never argue with people on twitter i don't think it's productive but um it is a good place to to just be supportive 100 days of code of course great twitter kind of movement that you can be a part of where you just share positive energy to other people and the world has plenty of negativity and plenty of death and destruction over the past few years um we need lots of positive energy right now and you can you can signal boost other people's positive energy and you can introduce your own positive energy there yeah totally and if your reason for staying off twitter is because you hate looking at the sidebar which is always filled with bad news which was my reason for not using it for ages there is a chrome extension which can block that out with a nice white square instead which makes everything much more bearable so there you go hot tip for me on twitter use another tip on that uh that's a great tip leon i didn't know that that existed but uh you can also just set it to a different region and so i set mine to india because i'm very interested in india so i'll learn a lot about india like like oh so and so happened you know just from seeing the the twitter sideline obviously i'm in the united states but i've learned quite a bit about india just perceiving india through the eyes of an uh an indian twitter user wow that's a really nice tip yeah yeah and if you change it to some other language that you can't read then it's effectively like like what leanne was saying where you block it yeah brilliant yeah i might try that yeah that's good um so there is a question here from devjet which touches on something that i wanted to ask you about um devnet is a self-taught backend dev running react it's hard and i have little time for this how do you cope with deadlines on learning and you have maintenance that you don't do deadlines so can you talk to us a little bit about that and what that kind of means and what it looks like yeah well deadlines there's a very famous quote you've probably heard before uh maybe shigeru miyamoto the creator of mario zelda donkey kong he said um a bad a rushed game will forever be bad but a delayed game will eventually be good yeah and i think that um it's much better to like just do your best and and not stress uh a lot of times people get whiplash from deadlines like they work really hard they put themselves on a death march they deliver on the deadline and they're too exhausted to work or or like other aspects of their well-being have suffered and it takes a while for them to kind of recover from that deadline grind and in the process a lot of times they would have been better off if they were just slowly peacefully chipping away at the work day in the day out rather than accelerating to hit the deadlines decelerating trying to gradually accelerate again right um so we don't use deadlines internally within free code camp for the reasons i mentioned before one of the ways we're able to do that is through what i call massively parallel organization where everybody's working on their own thread and nobody's blocking anybody so it's like non-blocking io you know right this is happening over here this is happening over here this is happening over here all these things are happening they're getting done but none of them are dependent on one another because they've intentionally been designed to be things that will fire off on their own right so if you can figure out a way to take the nature of your work and spread it out to where you don't have like some critical path now this is not possible i don't think you could build an airplane with this approach because at some point like hey we need to like mount the fuselage and put the wheels on like certain things aren't done other things can't proceed right but with uh running an organization a lot of things can be like in in the things that can't be instead of putting a deadline on it we just say hey we're going to prioritize this like everything else you're doing like that's an auxiliary task look your primary task should be this because this is the most important thing that is potentially blocking other people from proceeding so but we don't put a deadline on it because it'll be done when it's done and usually deadlines are handed down by like non-technical managers who have no idea what actually needs to be done and they just basically promised their boss like hey we'll deliver by this time and i was like okay we need you to do it you know in this time frame that's how death marches happen that's how you get like the game development industry which is plagued with uh you know these overly ambitious release dates how do you get cyberpunk 2077 basically these deadlines at one deadline at a time the road to hell is it pays with deadlines and i'll tell you that like if you can break free of that and figure out a way to design your work or design your day-to-day life if you're just trying to learn to code to where you don't depend on deadlines that's going to make you a lot saner and healthier over a longer period of time yeah i think especially for going back to debjit's question i'm not sure exactly what kind of deadline they're referring to maybe it is a work-based deadline um but a lot of people i talk to seem to be under the impression that they need to learn to code or learn a certain technology within this kind of arbitrary time frame and what i've learned speaking to a lot of students is that it's different for everyone and really as long as you get there i don't think it matters too much how long it takes so yeah nice um way of looking at it i think is to not have deadlines yeah very nice um as a beginner says style the main struggle i'm having is finding a routine as it's very hard for me to sit down and just crunch lessons for hours on end any advice uh yeah my advice would be get plenty of sleep get plenty of exercise eat a good diet like obviously the kind of advice that any doctor or even like non-doctor like friend who cares about your well-being would probably give you um that is the priority right like like if you're not sleeping eight hours a night try to figure out ways that you can sleep eight hours and i try to carve away other things first because if you're not in an ideal mindset to be able to learn you should probably just go to sleep i used to think like oh well you know i'm totally groggy but i didn't code it all today i've got to do at least a little today now i just think like well just go to sleep and try again tomorrow but like really try again tomorrow don't don't get into the habit of like letting yourself off um i think just trying to figure out even like 10 or 15 minutes a day where you just sit down and have total silence and you're just coding and trying to get some forward progress i think that that will accumulate and life is long i always remind people like you know i'm 40 years old if i'm lucky i'll probably have another 40 or 50 years life and i think about like all the things that i've done even in the past like eight years with free code camp like that's just you know if i assume i live to be 80 that's just 10 of my life right like uh obviously we can't get back the time in the past when we were kids and didn't realize what was going on or anything but like if you're like in your 20s or 30s or even 40s like plan to be alive for the next 30 40 years or hope to be anyway you might as well plan unless you know that you're not going to be alive then and think about it in those terms because the difference between becoming a developer in 2022 and becoming a developer in 2023 is maybe like two or three percent of your career right and and it may make all the difference in terms of like like you're not making dramatic decisions like quitting your job to try to learn to code like don't quit your job don't quit your job to learn the code i'll say it again like unless you just have like tons of money that you've saved up and you have the luxury of being able to do that i would encourage you to figure out a way that you can continue to make some income just so you don't have to stress um take it easy really like unless you are in a dire situation where you don't have enough food or you have some sort of medical condition that you can't pay for something that is literally like a ticking time bomb then try to de-stress and just take it take it slowly i the biggest thing i see is people imagining some sort of like stressor that it's not really there like oh you know my family is going to be so disappointed if i don't become a developer within the next six months or um you know uh like all the jobs are going to go away or whatever like i don't i don't think that's going to happen so just take your time uh and you're you're going to enjoy coding a lot more what i don't want is for you to see this is a grueling process i don't want this to seem like uh like you're beating yourself up every day just trying to get get to the finish line because it should be fun coding should be fun and you know initially you're not going to be passionate about it because who's passionate about like some computer telling you every three seconds like you're wrong you're on you're on your own compiler error you know syntax error uh test failing like you know dependencies that you haven't even touched having issues having to go and reinstall things like trying to get your development environment set up properly you know all these things these are these are stressful at first it's not fun like i don't i anybody who says they love programming right when they first started i think well they're probably it probably started when they were a little kid and they've just forgotten the initial frustrations it takes time it's an acquired taste yeah totally huh pedro is asking i see many instruments in the background yeah and was music your occupation before you became a developer and if so do you still have time to do music so i um i just started playing music during the pandemic because i had like lots of extra time and uh i i was like what am i going to do during this period of time you know like for us the pandemic's still going on here in the u.s unfortunately we're still waiting to get approval for our kids to get vaccinated uh so they're not in school they're just hanging out here at the house uh we're just being really cautious uh because we don't know what the long-term effects of cover 19 are going to be on kids and we'd rather not no we'd rather just get them vaccinated and and it's okay for them to like hang out with the house and be homeschooled for a few extra months but um i wasn't doing a lot like we weren't going out we weren't doing anything so i had a little bit of extra time and i the first few months i was just playing lots of video games i'm like oh i've got time to play video games then i was just like wait a second like maybe this is maybe this time is a gift like i'm somebody who's in a very fortunate position like i'm not worrying about like food security i'm not worrying about paying rent and things like that like i could do something that like like a longer term endeavor so i just started playing music and uh just gradually started learning different instruments and so yeah i spend probably like four hours a day playing music um whenever i'm not watching my kids or working on pre-cool camp i'm playing music and uh i'm i'm working on a jazz album that i'm gonna hopefully release before the end of the year wow that's amazing yeah fabulous let us know in the chat what knew uh what hobbies you started in lockdown yeah what did i do some gardening and my husband and i we did try acrobatics one evening that didn't stick around yeah path asks what are your thoughts about ai are the bots going to take over i guess is the question yeah i get this question all the time and what i think is software development is the process of automating things so by definition software development will be the last thing that gets completely automated you don't need to worry about your job security as a developer um what i would worry about is your job security if you're not not a developer and if you also think that ai is going to be able to like you know eat the world as they say i don't think that it will anytime soon i i mean we're seeing that with self-driving there was all this hype oh you know every car is going to be self-driving by like the 2020s and everything and if you talk to like an expert at like tesla or an expert at like uber or or some of these other companies that have big self-driven at google they'll probably say oh yeah we're making good progress but it's probably still like eight or ten years away uh and i was stunned really like it seems so close but it turns out like it's a lot harder than we thought it was and i think it's the same thing with uh i mean it's impressive when you see like gpt3 and things like that it's it's impressive but then you realize it's impressive within very specific domains and the work in order to be able to to get the machine to do what you wanted to do is work itself what does a developer do they tell machines what to do right we manage machines um if the machine could just manage themselves you know humans wouldn't need to work in general we just live this life of luxury now i i'm a little bit less uh i'm a little sanguine about that i don't think the humans would just magically like figure out a way to like peacefully just redistribute wealth and like everybody would just be able to have this utopian existence i think that we'll still have some sort of you know grind and it'll be like the jetsons like you'll still have to go to the office and press the button that starts all the robots right and you'll still have traffic and flying cars you'll still have like flying car drivers and stuff i don't know uh but yeah i wouldn't worry about it like i i'm excited about artificial intelligence there's a lot of risk associated with it um we just published uh a video check it out kylie ying just published a video don't watch it right now because i don't i want you to listen to what i'm saying but uh kylie ying from pre-co camp she's published like a talk on uh like artificial intelligence and ethics um on the freako camp talks channel so google free cooking talks subscribe to that channel we've got lots of conference talks in there but uh yeah i think ai is just going to be like or machine learning the reason they call it machine learning is because artificial intelligence had such hyped up uh promises that it didn't deliver that that like you couldn't raise money as an ai company anymore so everybody's like oh let's rebrand this machine learning who knows maybe they'll rebrand it again because machine learning is exciting as it is there's still a lot of hype that has not been delivered upon and uh you know people people just assume magic's going to happen without realizing how long it takes to get these things going yeah i like the idea of rebranding ourselves to uh machine managers right that abuses me so yes path no need to worry about the terminators taking over yet so good news can i add my free code certificate onto my cv ask sonny most definitely uh and a lot of people ask do certifications help uh it's not it's not the same as getting like an azure certification or an aws certification um which by the way we have uh courses that will prepare you to take those exams if you want to like full-length you know 15-hour courses everything you need to know to pass the azure exam for example like the many different azure exams the many different aws exams uh even google cloud we recently published that but um it does at the very least it shows that you care about learning that you're actively learning um a lot of people in industry will recognize like oh free code camp yeah like we have a good reputation and people are not gonna think like this is like some they you got the certification where cracker jack box right like they're gonna know oh well these are 300 hour certifications this is indicative of time spent learning the real value of a certification is the time you spent learning to earn it uh the certification itself is not going to carry you uh and i think a lot of people just go and like bang out the the certifications as quickly as they can to get the the test passing without really appreciating that like the actual learning process is important yes you can quickly get the test to pass we do have an academic honesty policy that you have to sign in order to claim the certifications and we do audit projects uh for plagiarism and other forms of cheating so don't cheat we will eventually identify you as a cheater it might take a few months but we'll like null your certification and like basically like set you as cheater in our system uh which uh so but but as long as you're honest and you're not cheating and you're not plagiarizing yeah go go for it earn those certifications put them on your cv we even have like a button on the certification that you can add to your linkedin and if you add it to your linkedin i think it puts you into our alumni network we have more than 500 000 people around the world who are learning the code and who you know uh listed freaco camp on there on their linkedin that is handy yeah clayton asked how do you balance your time between work family vision etc yeah uh well i can give you a pretty granular breakdown so i sleep eight hours a night uh i spend about four hours a day with my kids like breakfast nap time getting ready getting ready ready for bed uh reading books and stuff so like kids uh and then i work about six hours a day seven days a week so i don't like i do it a little differently instead of taking weekends i just work less every day and then that is like a consistent a lot of people might be like oh quincy you're you're like a workaholic but no if you multiply six times seven you get about four to two hours i don't work crazy out i used to like when freako camp was first getting up i was working like 120 hours like like all i would do is sleep and then crawl over to my computer and start coding and or start streaming or start doing something that would build up momentum within the community and i think that's normal like if you're trying to start a non-profit or uh if you're trying to start uh a startup or something like that like you should be working like crazy to get that that up i but once you get some momentum on it i think you should pull back and focus on sustainability long term so uh you know like work-life balance is very important for me uh everybody at pre-co camp like i explicitly say hey don't work more than 40 hours a week if you work more than 40 hours one week work slightly less than 40 hours next week just try to balance it out around 40 hours a week and i do the same myself and then like basically the remainder of the time try to go to the gym three days a week uh i try to uh i take my kids to the park every day and just go walking for about an hour to get some exercise and then you know i spend like all the rest of the time i've been playing music i don't have time for video games anymore i don't really have time for anything other than family sleep work and music but that's how i want it yeah lovely answer thank you for that and linda says i will be finishing my responsive web design next week then i'll move on to my next course how many courses do you feel i need to complete before i can start applying for work as a junior dev so the free cocaine curriculum is structured in a way that like you can hop off at any time and start applying for jobs or just keep studying while you apply for jobs the further you get in the curriculum the the more likely you'll be able to get a good job and the broader of the skill set like i consider a front-end developer to be like probably the best you know entry-level type developer role because with html css javascript maybe some knowledge of like salesforce or wordpress whatever like the jobs are requiring i would look at those jobs there are tons of job postings just just come through and figure out what you want to do if you're already building your reputation if you're already building your uh network and things like that then then uh just start applying when you feel ready it's one thing i always tell people is like it's not like if you bomb an interview like that person's gonna phone every other coach or every other hiring manager in town and be like hey you know this person don't hire this person they they didn't know how to reverse a linked list or something like that right like don't worry about that uh what uh what you should worry about is just time like you're spending a whole lot of time applying for jobs that you could be spending learning and if that can be a grind also you can get discouraged a lot of people i talk to who get really good jobs it was like their 120th job application or the 240th job application where they finally got through the interview process and got a satisfactory offer and sometimes you you know like i this this is something we published time and time again on the free code camp forum and the career section people will talk about how like all of a sudden they started getting offers and they got like three or four offers at the same time basically within like a week period after months and months of like you know getting rejections and stuff so uh you can hit kind of a tipping point uh but my humble advice would just be do it sustainably start sooner than you think uh so if you think that you're ready to like get a job like a local company like doing front end development or um doing wordpress development or whatever it is they need you know just figure out what they need try to interview uh be candid about your skills but don't you know don't sell yourself short just be like yeah i've i've been very actively learning the code and i've built this project in this project in this project and i think i could help you maintain your existing web apps and potentially build out some additional features you know something like that and i think you'll you'll be surprised at uh how much of getting a job is just being somebody that they like and also having a bare minimum like threshold of skills that they need for you to be able to start working now the first few months on the job i don't think anybody has the illusion you're going to drop in you're going to revolutionize their web like the first few months on the job you're going to be kind of a net negative in the sense they're going to be putting more resources into you than you're they're going to be getting out in terms of like you know code that that works really well or or you know increase revenue isn't as a result of the code you've written or something like that but just just accept that and uh and do your best and and don't stress it's a very stressful process uh trying to get a job particularly stressful as a software engineer because you know so much money is online and companies are very risk-averse um just try to get whatever foothold you can if you can get a freelance client anything like that that's a foothold and just try to build from there your first developer job will be the hardest job to get after you get that it can be relatively easy the more experience you accrue pretty soon people won't even be interviewing those would be like hey can you come work for us you know i i'm not exaggerating like uh that is a that is kind of the future you have to look forward to if you stick with this and if you put in the time and energy to build your reputation your network and your skills yeah on the topic of reputation michael larocca um he um is a person who writes a lot of blog posts um for scrimba and other places and he's watched and shared your fantastic copeland conference 2017 talk on writing technical blog posts do you have any additional advice or tips on the subject yeah he's also yeah it's boot camp yeah is a great place to write um i think you know scrimba might have a blog as well lots of companies have blogs see if you can write something and get on their blog like that will increase your readership and also that'll be a proof of concept and you as an author when when people apply to become an author on free code camps publication uh we're pretty selective and it's hard to to get to get uh i guess permission to be able to submit posts uh so what i encourage you to do is just go out and write like as much as you can on the open web if you can create your own blog that's a great way to start and uh just try to build up momentum there um publish like don't be a perfectionist try to get things out there this is where having your own social media presence helps because you can tweet and maybe some of your friends or family will go in and be like oh that was helpful like great job and that is important because you're a human being you're not a robot you do need positive feedback in order for you to feel you know galvanized to keep going if you get discouraged you're not going to be writing a lot so just keep those human factors in mind as well yeah perfect excellent advice there on perfectionism perfect is the enemy of done is what i always say and that is a seasoned perfectionist talking yeah hey interesting question from perry what strategies or tools do you have for organizing current and future tech projects yeah um trello is an underrated tool i use it for pretty much everything you can get really fancy you can use like notion you can use whatever tools you want uh my to-do list i just use a text editor and like delete lines when they're done things like that uh yeah starting with the boilerplate if you're building a code base just getting like a a good boilerplate like nexjs or something like that and using that can do a lot of the decisions for you ruby on rails was very popular for a long time it might still be somewhat popular and one of the reasons was because it they made a lot of the decisions for you so you can focus on what makes your app special rather than the routine stuff that most apps include you know authentication email notifications things like that right so your your writing code that is relevant to the specific problem you're trying to address and not just reinventing the wheel over and over to you know like like i don't know very many car manufacturers that manufacture their own tires right so yeah there was a question actually on twitter um i think yesterday that was said um is it cheating to use frameworks or templates it's like well of course not right it's efficiency so yeah great uh joseph asks and well says first of all i appreciate the tips delivered perfectly my question is is it viable to learn intermediate js css and react at the same time yeah i mean you can learn as much as you want at the same time like with music for example i learned first i learned bass and then i learned piano and guitar and drums and a lot of that there was overlap between those like you're there's gonna be a lot of overlap between like state management with javascript and with react for example uh and it doesn't hurt to try like just know that you're learning a lot of things at the same time and don't get frustrated if it's hard because you're kind of doing it on hard mode if you want to do it on easy mode just follow the free cocaine curriculum uh and work through each certification in order we do have you know responsive web design is the first certification then we do javascript that then we do front end libraries which is like react and redux and stuff like that we recommend learning that sequence but there are no rules like free codecamp we intentionally make it so you can just skip around and you can start wherever you want as long as you build the projects you can earn the certifications you don't even have to actually do the lessons the projects are what matters the rest is just there to prepare you for the projects so um just the most important thing is you're having fun because learning is all about having fun i'm gonna grab a glass of water real quick i'll be right back yeah all right thank you for all your lovely questions here alex says uh jazz album after like a year wow that is impressive yeah totally i am looking forward to hearing that i'm sure michael is too michael enjoys jazz and he's reporting that he was into baking during the first lockdown and piano during the second what you forgot to mention there michael is our other hobby of hairdressing during both lockdowns so yes we gave that a go yeah wonderful and question for you now about quincy i want to talk a little bit about 100 days of code how did it come about and in your opinion how does it help people to learn to code yeah so 100 days of code has a really interesting history and if you google like history of 100 days of card i wrote about it um basically this gentleman from russia who was living in uh toronto named alexander callaway wanted to learn to code and he needed a commitment to like he's like oh i know that i'm the kind of person who will just sleep in you know i don't have some sort of very clear framework within which to get things done so he created the 100 days of code challenge and basically the challenge is you code at least a little bit every day and you tweet about your progress and uh you you also support other people who are tweeting with the progress you're supposed to tweet and then you're also supposed to go out and like congratulate two people or like their posts or something who are also doing the challenge so if you think about it like that's good because on average you're going to get at least two people giving you positive feedback on your your daily announcement um but it's a powerful commitment device because if you can code for 100 days in a row that's probably like a sustainable habit you can build up and carry with you indefinitely yeah yeah it's really nice to see people encouraging each other with 100 days of code and what i like about it as well is how um you can find out things that you didn't previously know or even find out about technologies you hadn't heard of before so it's a it's very interesting thing to keep up with i've found um some people though struggle with what to do for a hundred days of code have you got any tips on choosing the day's code or does it not really matter i mean the idea is just you're coding and as long as you're coding you're winning because that's the name of the game it's just coding like like anything practice makes perfect i think people underestimate the amount of practice that's necessary to become a good developer uh i mean it's it's like a lifelong pursuit uh doing the free cocaine curriculum i think is the most common uh thing that people do a lot of people will will take courses on scrimba they'll take courses like a lot of independent course creators have courses you can do um and doing those is just is good but if you're looking for something simple and structured i mean free code camp like obviously i'm biased because that's the project that i'm associated with uh but um yeah like we like it was kind of born out of the freako camp community the prequel camp the the hundred days of code bought um was created by aman mittal and uh you know it's like it's open source by the way it's probably one of the most popular twitter bots on twitter i think it's got like 100 000 followers um but it just basically retweets what other people are tweeting about like related to 100 days of code and that's open source if you ever want to build a twitter bot grab that but uh yeah like like we don't own 100 days of code like i think that somebody had tweeted that before alexander callaway tweeted it so it's we're not trying to claim invention of it but i can tell you that like in many ways 100 days of code like it exemplifies the kind of virtues that that our community holds dear which are you know supporting one another and being persistent and you know making a little bit of progress every day yeah perfect debjit has an interesting question i learn new tech when i get into trouble or my project needs it i think that's the case for a lot of us it fills a lot of learning gaps in my knowledge is it normal to learn just what is needed and learn the rest of tech later on as the need arises actually this is interesting because on our podcast a couple of weeks ago my colleague alex spoke to ali spittle about how to remember everything you learn and one of her tips was basically to learn things that you either like or need uh so what's your take on this quincy i mean i would i would agree with ollie there like if you have some sort of emotional connection to it you're gonna retain it a lot better um yeah and and it's gonna if it's fun you're gonna you're gonna do more of it and doing more of it reinforces it so you know follow your all your passion and if your passion isn't for coding it will be with you know familiarity uh gradually you'll build up an affinity for different technologies as you use them yeah i agree um bob is mentioning that in his upcoming react course uh he spends a fair amount of time with playing css and js challenges so going back to joseph's question earlier about can you learn things in tandem essentially that's what bob's doing in his upcoming react course he thinks it's good to overlap things a bit so i hope that helps um chose it yeah wonderful i wanted to talk a little bit about learning to learn a buzzword we've heard a lot of lately one that michael um says occasionally never really been clear on what it actually means uh what does it mean to you quincy yeah uh strategies and techniques for retaining things for organizing concepts in your mind there's a there's probably the most popular online course of all time uh barbara oakley uh she's a professor she she created this course called learn how to learn uh i'd encourage you to take it uh it covers like mnemonics it covers like all different facets of how humans actually learn as a developer your primary job is to learn you're going to be learning for the rest of your career uh the the interesting thing about being a developer is because code is infinitely reproducible if you had already solved the problem you would just reuse the solution from that old problem so you're by definition you're constantly going to be tackling new problems that you've never explored before or nobody's explored before so you're going to be learning constantly learning how a subsection of a legacy code base works so you can you know maintain it or build new features on top of it learning how a new library works so that you can incorporate it into whatever solution you're building you're going to be a learning machine and that's good news because humans are learning machines like evolutionarily learning is the key adaptation that has allowed humans to flourish for better or for worse and yeah embrace your inner human and become like a true learning machine and uh it's definitely worth like investing you know 10 15 hours however long it takes to get through that course like hearing from an expert strategies for learning and uh it's probably going to bring incredible dividends over the coming decades of your life perfect that is fantastic tip yeah in your view what can people do to make learnings a code easier and i suppose by this i mean do you have any quick fixes which can make the task seem kind of less onerous and intimidating absolutely yeah i have two two pieces of advice one try to code at least a little bit every day um again that momentum will help you it's a lot harder to uh to restart the process of learning if you've taken a week or two off you forget things the the speed of forgiving is incredible as you've probably seen lots of web comics and things like that jokes about people like looking at their code from six months ago might as well be somebody else's code you know because you forget so quickly but uh by learning a little every day and coding a little every day you you build up some momentum and you kind of strengthen those learning muscles um my other piece of advice would be to just hang out with other people like get involved in the community if you're if you're tuning into this uh live stream you're already in you know among friends people who have similar goals who want to learn to code who want to increase their skills who want to be able to do meaningful work who want to be able to provide for their families um get involved in your local community uh there are professional groups uh there are university clubs that you can potentially be a part of even if you're not a university student a lot of them will accept you meetups hackathons any kind of in-person thing that you can safely do during a pandemic i would encourage you to get out there and make friends and find your tribe and when you you know follow people on twitter who are positive and energetic and uh have like a love for learning um you can take a look at who i'm following on twitter if you want some general like tips for who to follow but uh like i said like positive energy is very important and um i think that positive peer pressure that you can get from a tribe will uh will help propel you forward yeah i think that's lovely artor is thrilled to have been able to catch you live yes lovely to have you here at all and um i have a question here which is slightly in our own interest here at scrimma and that is which tutorials are currently missing from the online learning space in your view yeah so i think that there's a lot of room for new courses on php java c plus courses that a lot of the best books and forum posts and stack overflow answers things like that were written like 20 years ago yeah that sort of stuff can be refreshed uh i have people constantly like oh like all my job books are out of date or like you know they're boring like we're gonna find something that is dynamic and exciting is what you see in the python community or the javascript community for java right and i think there's a huge opportunity to create learning resources around that so free cooking we're trying to do that we're just um just writing lots of java tutorials lots of c plus plus tutorials we published a course last year on cobol you know which is technology that is like 40 plus years old 50 years old i don't know um and and that was surprisingly well received like a lot of people are interested in mainframe development in 2021. so i think a lot of these technologies that are older that are more mature but are still widely used those are good of course like when you have new technology people often rush like they're probably 1001 graphql tutorials or kubernetes tutorials and things like that and it's fine if you think you can write a better tutorial on those topics or take a different angle than the things out there but give php some love you know give wordpress salesforce a lot of these ecosystems you know that there are uh a lot a lot of um a lot of people that are trying to learn these that are just googling into oblivion and finding you know 10 year old stack overflow threads with no answer right things like that so uh that that would be my humble advice if you really want to help people uh and you want to maximize the impact like some of my most popular articles i've written about have been about the most pedestrian mundane unsexy concepts that people just happen to google a lot um like ascii codes and things like that right yeah yeah totally yeah that is really good point there php doesn't get a lot of love but it ain't going away so maybe we should be making courses about it yeah well i can't believe um but our hour is already up quincy that is really quite amazing i have really enjoyed speaking to you it's been wonderful finish off i would really like to give people a little tip on what they can do for 100 days of code and that is uh the latest weekly web dev challenge on scrambler some people actually do do this for 100 days of code i've seen which is lovely the current one is um this pomodoro timer yes that you have to wire up it's a lot of fun and um i've got lots of nice submissions i like this big tomato one um yes so add yours to the list you have until next monday at one o'clock british summer time to send it in yeah so fabulous quincy thank you so much for coming along and for giving such wonderful answers to all of our questions it was really fantastic to talk to you thank you for the thoughtful questions and uh everybody who's listening i hope you uh you have fun remember to have fun remember you got plenty of sleep and uh just focus on the long run yeah absolutely and if you enjoyed this please consider hitting one of the buttons below preferably not dislike subscribe and or like and then you'll be the first to hear about more ask an expert live streams and with that i will say goodbye to you and hopefully see you on friday for mine and michael's live coding session yes until then have a lovely coding half a week [Music]

Channel: Scrimba

Views: 1,244

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: web development, coding, learning to code, coding tutorial, learn web development, web development 2021, web development tutorial, front end developer, frontend, learn coding, web dev, software development, freecodecamp, learn to learn, study tips, learning tips, quincy larson, coding bootcamp, javacript, css, html, react, how to learn to code fast, how to code, programming, how to start coding, learn programming, coding for beginners, how to program, how i would learn to code

Id: ysA2D-EP6yU

Length: 61min 22sec (3682 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021