From the day I wrote my first Hello World program,
it took me 2 years to land a job at Amazon and another 2 years to get into Google. That’s because
I did all this with no Computer Science degree or bootcamp. I made countless mistakes along the
way which made my path to become a Software Engineer longer than it should have been.
I watched countless Youtube tutorials, paid for numerous Udemy courses and spent hundreds of
hours learning things that didn’t add any value. If I could go back in time and undo
all the things that don’t work, I would be in the exact same situation as
today within 6 months of starting programming. That’s exactly why I made this video. Today,
I'll remove all the useless fluff and give you the fastest path to go from a beginner to
a full-time Software Engineer. Before I begin, there are 3 major mistakes that
can slow down your progress to become a full-time Software Engineer. I will also share these 3
mistakes along the way. So, stay tuned for that. As a new programmer, the first decision you
need to make is “Which programming language to learn?”. To answer that question, let’s talk about what
a beginner wants from a programming language. Number 1, The language should be easy and
intuitive to write. It should not require learning very complex syntax. It should be
as close as possible to writing in English. Next, The programming language should be versatile
and have many applications. As a beginner, you don’t want to learn a new language for every
new project you want to build. In other words, the language should have great returns
for the time you invest on learning it. Lastly, the programming language should be
fast to write. You shouldn’t have to waste time spelling out the declaration of a new variable or
simple iteration through a list. In other words, it should be concise and get the job done in
minimum lines of code. As some of you might have already guessed it, Python is the language that
solves all these problems. It’s almost as easy as writing in English. It has so many
different applications like Web development, Data Science and Automation. Python is extremely fast to write when compared with other popular languages. That's because it requires less lines of code for the same amount of code. As an example, here is the same code
written in Java vs Python. For me personally, I started out with learning Java. I used to do all my coding
interviews in Java. Recently, I switched to using Python and it improved my interview performance
by at least 2 times because it’s so fast to write. Having said that, Java and other popular
languages have their own advantages and you will have to learn another language at some point
in your career. But I do believe that Python would be
the best language to start with. Now that we know we should learn Python, let’s
talk about how to do it. And this is where most new programmers make the first major mistake that
slows them down. The mistake most beginners make is that they learn by watching others code. Let
me explain this by telling you how most people learn programming. Most newbies would go to a
course provider like Udemy and look up for Python courses. Then they pick one of these 20+ hours
courses thinking that these courses are long and detailed and hence good for them. And then they
never end up finishing the course. That’s because 20 hours of content is not the same as 20 hours
of great content. Some people will go to Youtube and watch someone else code without ever writing
any code themselves. And watching these tutorials gives them a false sense of progress. That’s
because coding in your head is very different from actually writing down the code and debugging
the errors. So, what is the right way to do it? The answer is very simple, you should Learn by
Coding. For this, you can go to this free website called learnpython.org. On this website, just
focus on the basic lessons for Python and don’t worry about Data Science tutorials or any Advanced
tutorials. That's because even if you learn advanced concepts right now, you would not
be able to remember them until you have actually applied them on a real world problem. You can
always come back to learn the advanced concepts in the future when you need them for your projects.
If you look at a lesson, each lesson first explains a basic concept and then asks you to apply those concepts to a
problem. Feel free to play with the sample code. Think about other problems you can solve with
concepts you just learnt and try to solve them in the exercise portion. Once you’re done with the
basics, you’re good to move on to the next steps. In the spirit of learning by coding, we would do
some projects in Python next. In the beginning, it’s very hard to do something on your own.
So, we’ll take the help of experts. So, go to Youtube and look up this video called “12
beginner Python projects” by freecodecamp.org, which by the way is a great
channel to follow. In this video, they build 12 beginner Python projects from
scratch. These projects include building Madlibs, Tic Tac toe, Minesweeper etc. and all of them
are very interesting. They walk you through the implementation of all these projects step
by step making it very easy to follow. But, before you start watching this tutorial, there
are 2 things you should know. One, You should not watch this tutorial casually. Follow along if
you really want to learn programming and become a Software Engineer. To follow along, you would
need something called Integrated Development Environment or IDE to build these projects. IDE
in simplest terms is an application where you can write and run your code. There are several popular
IDEs for Python. This tutorial uses VS code. So, you might want to download VS code and set it
up for Python before starting on this tutorial. Once you have completed this tutorial, you
are ready to work on your own projects. Working on building your own projects will
help you in multiple ways. Number one, it will introduce you to how Software Engineers
work in the real world. You will write code that will fail and you’ll debug it and repeat it
over and over again. This is exactly what a day in the life of a Software Engineer looks
like. Number two, you will build a portfolio of projects by doing this. You can host your
code on Github and put the link in your resume. This will help you attract recruiters and get
your resume shortlisted. Lastly, building your own projects will give you confidence that you
are ready to tackle new challenges as a Software Engineer. But, what kind of projects should you work on? You can think of any projects that you
find interesting but here are some examples I found. You can build a Web crawler, or an Alarm clock, or maybe an app that gives you Wikipedia article of the day. Some example projects that I built were a Spam filter, an Algorithmic
Trading engine and an e-commerce website. Now you have a great resume and you are
confident about your programming skills. Let’s start applying for Software Engineer
positions. Wait a second. This is actually the second major mistake new programmers make. You see, in an ideal world, having good programming skills and a great resume is all you should need to become a Software Engineer. But unfortunately for us, tech companies like to play games with us in the interviews. They ask you specific kinds
of programming questions in the interviews. If you don’t prepare for these questions, you might not
get the expected results. So, let’s see how to prepare for interviews. All the
interviews are based on this one course that is taught to all Computer Science graduates. This
course is called Data Structures and Algorithms. Fortunately for us, Google has created this course
and made it available for free on Udacity. And the best part is that this course is taught in
Python. In this four week course, you’ll learn about different algorithms related to searching
and sorting. You’ll learn about data structures like maps, trees and graphs. Don’t worry if you
don’t know any of these terms right now. I am sure that by the end of this course, you’ll be
a pro. For that just keep 2 things in mind . One, be regular and finish this course. As I mentioned
earlier, most people start courses and never finish them. So, make sure you take small steps
everyday and make regular progress. Two, make sure you complete all the exercises they give
in this course. As I have already said many times, the only way to learn coding is by doing. So,
implement the algorithms by yourself if you can and finish all the assignments. Trust me when
I say this. When it comes to interviewing for entry level jobs, this course is the only
difference between you and someone who dropped more than a hundred thousand dollars on a computer
science degree. So, if you finish this course, you’ll be pretty much on par with someone
who has a CS degree when you interview. After completing this course on Data Structures
and Algorithms, you have all the foundational knowledge you need to tackle the interviews. In
order to sharpen your interview skills further, you need to practice some questions that have been
asked by tech companies in the past. For that, you should use a website called Leetcode. On
leetcode, you will get interview style questions. You can write your code and test your solution
right there on the website. Leetcode is great for beginners because all the questions are tagged
easy, medium or hard based on difficulty level. If you buy a premium subscription of the website,
you can also filter the questions by the tech company that asked them in the past interviews.
You should start with easy questions and keep working on them until you can solve them in
45 minutes. Once that happens, you can move on to medium questions.When you start solving
mediums in 45 minutes, you can start applying for Software Engineering jobs. If you are lucky,
you will get the job right away. For most people, it will be a process full of disappointment
and rejections. And this is where they make the third and the biggest mistake of all,
They quit. The main reason people give up early is because they overthink and complicate the
interview process. After every rejection, they replay the interview over and over in their
head to figure out why they failed and take every rejection personally. To avoid this, stay inside
your circle of control and try to influence the outcome of your interviews but never get tangled
in the things you can’t control. In other words, do your best to crack the interviews but try to
be detached from the outcome of the interviews. If you want to learn about how I became a Software
Engineer without a Computer Science degree, watch this video at the top. If you
want to see my 5 year coding journey in 5 minutes, you can watch this other video.
I will see you in the next one.
