FASTEST Way to Learn Coding and ACTUALLY Get a Job

from the day i wrote my first mit app inventor project in high school it took me 10 years to become a full-time software engineer at bolt and that was six years to my first internship at slumberg another year to break into big tech at microsoft and one final year to get into startups at gusto and this was because i followed the traditional path to software engineering i studied computer science i did some internships and i recruited for full-time opportunities but can you become a software engineer way faster 100 i've spent countless hours studying theoretical algorithms that i'll never use at the job and i've paid six figures in tuition to sit in some college classes that never provided value so i often ask myself if i could go back in time knowing what i know today what would i do differently and that's exactly what i'm going to talk about today i'll remove all the fluff and tell you the fastest way to go from zero to full-time software engineer in three to six months and throughout this video i'll share the three major mistakes every beginner makes on their software engineering journey so stay tuned for those thanks to udemy for making this video possible the first thing you'll need to do is pick a programming language and in the context of getting a job as soon as possible here's my criteria we want a language that is easy to learn in that the syntax is intuitive and it feels like english but because we only have three to six months we don't care if this language has the most real world use cases we just care that there are enough applications to keep us busy and to teach us the important programming fundamentals finally we don't want a language that is verbose because we simply don't have the time to write hundreds of lines of code to accomplish very simple tasks many of you might have guessed the programming language i'd recommend if you're trying to learn coding and get a job as quickly as possible python is definitely the way to go it's very easy to write and for the most part the syntax reads like english it's used in everything from scripting to full stack applications to data science and it's one of the least verbose languages out there you can accomplish some incredibly complicated tasks in just a few lines of code this will come in handy when you're learning the language but also when you end up doing technical coding interviews where you'll only have about 45 minutes to finish the problem with me personally i started off by learning java during my ap computer science class and though it taught me all the theoretical principles like object oriented programming and abstraction and inheritance it was kind of boring java is really tedious to write and it's hard to get up and running so i'm telling you to start with python because it's easy to write and it's versatile but even more importantly it's a lot of fun you can go from nothing to seeing hello world on the terminal in less than five minutes and you can build with it so quickly people often underestimate the importance of enjoying what you're doing and having fun and you're in this for the long haul you're learning coding now to get a job in three to six months and become a full-time software engineer and potentially devote a whole career to that endeavor and if you're not enjoying what you're doing you're gonna burn out other languages definitely have their benefits but you can pick them up later remember the important thing here is not that you know everything it's that you know just enough to get that job in three to six months and then you have the rest of your career to keep growing having solid python fundamentals will allow you to accomplish all of this and much more now that we agree python is the programming language to learn let's talk about how to learn it and this is also where most beginner programmers make the first major mistake and that mistake is that they learn by watching not by doing most beginner programmers go to udemy they look up python courses they filter by reviews they find something highly rated something that's 60 plus hours of content and then they watch the entire course like it's a tv show but unlike their favorite tv show they don't finish it they don't get to the end and that's because 60 hours of recorded content doesn't equate to 60 hours of work you're going to want to pause rewind re-watch google things try to really understand what's going on that's like watching a pianist play for a hundred hours and then sitting down yourself and expecting to be able to play fur lease on your first try it doesn't work like that you learn by doing so what's the right way to learn i'll tell you first open up some online learning platform i'd highly recommend you to me because the courses there are truly top class type in python filter by the beginner level and find a course that is highly rated and has enough content and finally check out the course plan and this is really important there are three things you want to look for first make sure that there are actual hands-on exercises so you can apply the knowledge you'll be learning and second be sure that there are some mini projects that use real world technologies and third and probably most importantly try to figure out if this course is something that interests you if it excites you if it's something that you'll enjoy going back to the concept of fun if you're not going to enjoy creating a snake game or writing out a password manager app then you're not gonna finish the course it'll feel like a drag and yes i know that there are tons of free resources out there and youtube itself has some great content even on udemy you can filter by price and find some courses that are free but i personally believe in the value of putting your money where your goal is by paying for something you now have skin in the game and you're more likely to come back and keep going because no one likes to waste money if anything treat this as an investment in yourself in your future one of the best investments you'll ever make the amazing thing with udemy is that they have a 30 day money back guarantee so if you do take a course you do the work but you still believe you didn't get any value out of it you'll get a full refund but if you do take the course and you enjoy it which i'm sure you will you get lifetime access which is awesome everyone asks me what course i recommend and i'll make a more detailed video about this later when i go through all the courses and give you my topic for now i don't think you can go wrong with dr angela use hundred days of code python course it seems very comprehensive and it has some great reviews i put a link in the description below so check it out and remember practice makes perfect so once you finish up the course you have some experience under your belt it's time to look for more projects i'd highly encourage you to sign up for a hackathon to keep yourself accountable so after 24 36 hours of continuous work you can demo your awesome work to some judges and the point here is not to win prizes because you probably won't with just tic-tac-toe the point is that you've developed something and you have something to show for your efforts again hackathons are totally optional but personally i feel like they were instrumental to my success alright so where do you find these additional project ideas well there's a really cool channel on youtube called free code camp and i'd highly encourage you to subscribe they have some really cool videos around coding i'm personally a really big fan of their 12 beginner python projects course where they list out 12 python projects really fun ones too like tic-tac-toe sudoku minesweeper and they're ordered from easiest to hardest so again the barrier of entry is really low you start you can do a little bit and then you keep getting better and better with your newfound python knowledge you're ready to dive right in so far we've talked about learning how to code but what about the getting a job as fast as possible part of this video well in many ways all the work you've done so far all the projects you've worked on the stuff you've built with real world technologies that's what a software engineer would do so you're like a software engineer without the official title all we got to do is get that job now because think about it you used an integrated development environment an ide like vs code you use the terminal git like version control you put your code somewhere maybe github and this is all the stuff real world software engineers do and most importantly you wrote code a lot of code you wrote buggy code and then you debugged it you fixed it you improved it and then you rinsed and repeated and that's all that i do as a full-time software engineer and as you build out your projects you'll think of edge cases and all the things your real users will do when they're interacting with your application and this is all stuff i think about every day as a full-time software engineer so by learning how to code you're also learning how to do the job once you finish a project make sure to upload all the source code to github where you can slowly start building out your coding portfolio linking your github on your resume is also a great way to show experience and initiative two things recruiters absolutely love so the chances of you securing a first round interview at a top tech company will be way higher once you have a bunch of personal projects a banger resume and you feel confident in your programming abilities it's time to apply for software engineering opportunities but wait before you're ready to pass technical coding interviews you'll have to interview prep you see in an ideal world your programming experience would speak for itself you just show up write some code and get the job but in the real world companies like to play games with us tech companies love to ask a very specific style of interview questions revolving around data structures and algorithms and if you went to college you probably remember in your first year an exact course titled data structures and algorithms it's a bunch of theoretical stuff that you'll probably never use again but we're trying to get a job and it's necessary so unfortunately we're gonna have to learn this too lucky for us there are some really great classes on udemy that allow us to ramp up really quickly the most important thing here is that whatever course you pick you finish it you keep going since we're already proficient in python i'd highly recommend you check out the master the coding interview course which looks pretty solid you'll learn all about trees and graphs and binary search and i know all this to you probably sounds like an alien language right now but i promise once you finish the course you'll be a pro all of this will make sense but understanding the theory isn't enough again we need to practice we need to keep on doing lead code is a great free platform where you can practice easy medium and hard coding questions asked by actual tech companies the great thing with leak code is that it's a self-contained environment so they provide you with an ide and you can code in any language that you want they also have an automated test runner that runs hundreds of tests upon every code submission so you can be confident when your code is correct make an account and dedicate yourself to doing one question a day start with the easy question spending 30 to 45 minutes fully implementing it by yourself then if you're stuck you can look up a hint and if you still make no progress you can look up the solution if you do look up the solution make sure you fully understand what it's saying close out the solution and then try to re-implement the answer again by yourself once you're able to confidently solve leak code easies in about 45 minutes you can now move on to medium questions there's also hard questions but they're very rarely asked so i mostly spend most of my time on mediums there's no magic number of lead code problems after which you're suddenly ready to pass technical interviews instead i focus most of my times on doing groups of questions doing array questions tree questions graph questions and understanding the patterns so if you ever get a question you know how to solve it and this is actually the second big mistake beginner programmers make they don't know when to stop practicing and when to start interviewing they do too many practice questions the truth is interview experience matters just as much as all the theory you're learning if you want to be able to solve anything that they throw at you so i start interviewing as soon as possible schedule the companies you don't care about first so if you bomb the interviews it's okay it's no biggie the more interviews you do the better you'll get at it so as you continue doing one question a day i schedule one to two interviews a week again start with the companies you don't care about and then as you get better and better you'll start acing the technical rounds by which point you can schedule the companies you do care about all those top tech companies those dream places you want to work at if you're lucky you'll pass all your technical interviews on the first try but for most of us the recruiting journey is a process filled with many ups and downs there's some interviews where you're lucky and you get a question you've seen before or you do a simple pattern match and solve it but there'll be other times when you're sitting there for 40 minutes with no idea how to solve the problem you're absolutely stumped and you walk out of the interview dejected demotivated it's okay it happened to me it happens to all of us and this is where most beginners make the third and arguably biggest mistake they quit early they give up and they start believing that the job search or coding just isn't for them that there's some college grad that is smarter than them i've been there i felt that intense imposter syndrome but none of this is true in fact this video has taught you basically everything i learned in college and through my personal experiences so you're at no disadvantage keep your head high keep your mental strong keep practicing lead code mediums and taking more interviews focus on learning from the rejections and thinking about what you could have done better and then go home and implement the same problem again make sure you fully understand the solution and then put that rejection in the past and focus on the next interview at some point i promise you'll pass the majority of your interviews and it'll all be worth it remember consistency is key it makes all the difference that's all i have until next time cheers

Channel: Namanh Kapur

Views: 503,601

Keywords: how to learn coding, how to become a software engineer, how to learn programming, how to learn coding for beginners, how to learn programming for beginners, how to learn coding fast, how to become a software developer, how to get software engineer job, how to get software developer job, how to learn to code, coding, coding interview, programming, software engineer, programmer, software developer, coder, faang, google, microsoft, power couple, job, recruiting, interviews, namanh kapur

Id: BkzYfW1H8LI

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022