How I Became A Self-Taught Developer

hey guys what's up so this video is brought to you by Deb mountain coding bootcamp if you guys are trying to get into software development iOS development software QA and other stuff check out the link in the description tab below they are offering courses you can actually live on campus over there they are hooked up with employers around the country around the world really and they're gonna help you try to find your first job in this industry so make sure you give them a look to have Mountain coding bootcamp and the link is in the description tab below hey guys what's up so in this video I'm you guys gonna be sitting in the driver's seat you guys are sitting shotgun with me but anyway in this video I'm talking about like how I became a programmer and how I learned programming cuz this videos talked about like at length on YouTube but if we're honest here I'm one of the first ones that was in this industry that actually did this and um a lot of the videos I actually have seen that are out there when people were talking about I became a developer this the other thing it's like oh I went to school for electrical engineering or like you know Kim to be a chemist or something like that or Chemical Engineering and like and it's like oh I switched over to like some sort of pipe at Python I I learned to be a coder and things like that well the fact of the matter is if you have a degree in no matter what it is especially if it's some sort of science degree you're gonna have a much easier time getting a job then if you don't but in my case like I broke into this industry and I'd basically kicked my way under the door I would say because um like I never even took a computer science course at all I I dropped out of Community College to get a Business Administration degree that I still haven't finished and when I took my first computer science course it was actually a few years ago I talked about on this channel and um and basically everything in that introductory course was a complete joke for programming it's like loops variables things like that and I really think that as a self-taught dev I'm the first like people should really listen to me when I say this and that's that you could learn all that basic introductory stuff like on YouTube on udemy on Coursera on any of that stuff I mean you can do it for a fraction of the price now as far as development and like since I didn't actually go to school to become a developer do I you know am I a proponent of boot boot camps even though you know obviously I have a coding boot camp that sponsors this channel I think that they are much more like in tune with the changing web developer technologies for the most part so any sort of web development like you user experience Quality Assurance things like that they're gonna be more focused on like the latest skills that you need to get into the door and sorry if I sound a little bit jacked up I have a cold but I think a lot of people also wonder about myself because it's like well if you didn't go to computer science how did you get your your how'd you get your foot in the door and one of the things that you know as I learned how to be a programmer in this video I'll talk about how I learned and also some of the struggles but when I was in an early adopter like when I first started getting involved in this stuff like YouTube wasn't really a thing but it was it was starting to make some news I think Google had you know was just looking into acquiring it like when I was first getting into development and a lot of that stuff like that was going on with Facebook and even MySpace at the time like was I thought was really exciting for me like the web development just seemed like a world of just endless opportunities and that's ultimately that's what captured me but I should also mention the fact that both my grandfather and my father before me or both programmers and have been career programmers although they didn't really teach me my father did kind of give me some you know some pointers and things like that but nobody was ever looking over my shoulder looking over my work or anything like that um so when it comes to learning how to program for me I mostly stuck with books and then I also did like a lot of like community stuff so when I decided that I wanted to build websites and that's ultimately what got me into this gig because I attended a rock music web site or a concert and I want to build a rock music website from that concert and it's a longer story than that but basically I was in a career I had a wife two kids a mortgage and I was coming home everyday from a career that I didn't really like very much and I was about 28 or 29 I was 28 at the time and and I just remembered that the lead singer of this band that I had attended the concert for was the same age as me and like he's touring around the world and I was just kind of thinking like you know even though he may not be like successful from where he wants to be like I wanted to just do something different and I felt like at the time like you know there was all this calm you know the talk about rock star programmers and like that which is all by the way there's no such thing as really rock star programmers I mean they exist to some degree and you hear about them a lot and that can actually I think creep in the the imposter syndrome type of thing so the self-taught Dev one of the struggles I had was because there's a difference between knowing what you don't know like so I struggled for a time when I thought I knew everything I thought like I could read a book and you know and be able to apply most of the concepts and things like that so then I definitely over-exaggerated my skills so that was it that was a struggle early on but then as I started realizing I was over exaggerating that's where the imposter syndrome type type of thing starts to creep into an imposter syndrome if you guys aren't familiar is just simply thinking that you don't belong you're not you're like basically in a in a class of people that you're not supposed to be involved with or you're doing work that you're just not capable of things like that sort of you start having this self-doubt that creaks and I think that that is actually normal for a lot of developers to experience that and I definitely did as a as a self-taught Deb but you're even more susceptible to that as a self-taught Deb because one of the things that you will struggle with this industry is that a lot of the math concepts and things that creep into computer science because it's a lot it's very intertwined so you're gonna hear people like myself that say you don't have to be a great mathematician to to even build games these days anymore you can just use Unity engine a lot of the physics and real complicated math has already been figured out for you but it still takes a fairly decent amount of math but that whole not having the proper theoretical computer science background or even the advanced math background for it for instance I really didn't take advanced math concepts in high school I graduated high school but I was a real mess up in high school like I got I got in the fight so I was doing stuff I wasn't supposed to do I had to go to night school to kind of finish the last second because I was living with my girlfriend at the time actually I was 17 and not even living at home and but basically I was able to graduate and but I did miss a lot of those core concepts of math and things like that so the good news is with in this day and age is like all these websites that are out there like even you know from Khan Academy to other things like that or even math comm will just teach you basically everything you need to know because you're gonna forget stuff right so if you're not using those mathematical concepts every day in and day out then you're gonna forget stuff and ultimately that's where my struggles would not come in it's not like a it's not like I've ever like had to hear something ten times and I still just don't get it you know I think that's probably how but for the most part that's not my struggles with math my math struggles was just simply not you know not learning how to properly break the problem down and solve it the right way right because we have you have a set of rules and things and that algorithms follow and certain calculations have to come before others and things say that obviously but when it comes to like theoretical computer science and just even things like expression statements lambda lambda little things like that right anonymous functions a lot of those things do come from math concepts that if you don't have that then you can you know you can end up struggling so I think that as like one of the biggest and most beneficial things for me when I was getting started though is that I was actually involving myself in development communities pretty early on so I was pretty involved in Django when I was first getting started not like when it was first first getting started but the first couple years that came out I was like a pretty early adopter and I really loved it and everything but web 2 pi was another web framework for Python that I was really involved in so Massimo D Piero like he's a friend of mine on Facebook even now you know after years of really not talking to him but he was a professor at a college in Chicago and uhm anyway I just you know being involved in that community was a few people Bruno over there and like and just being able to work with other programmers was some of the best experience that I was able to get because once you get your first job as a developer in the industry that's when you're really gonna realize like you don't know like you really don't think there's all these different things you have to come to grabs the grass with and one of the things I definitely struggled with as a developer is um working with other developers so there's proper you know effective communication between developers that is just something that you're going to learn on the job and you can't really learn it from books there's not getting frustrated at yourself for not knowing certain things as a self-taught developer there were times that I worked too much that was one of my biggest struggle is that I work too much there's only a certain amount of learning you can possibly do in a day before you really start burning yourself out and you're probably not doing yourself any favours you're actually wasting time from doing other things that would probably be able to recharge your brain a little bit faster and those are things that I definitely struggle with because I worked full-time and I wife and two kids in a mortgage and a dog and family life and things like that and I did my best to come home and then find time to be able to study after doing a completely unrelated field day in and day out so my struggles were real like I think you know a lot of people watch this channel be that know me because they know like I picked my way under this this industry for sure like I kicked the door down because there were definitely people along the way that told me I wasn't able to do it I had job interviews were like I built apps and they didn't even look at the app and the job interview I talked about that on this channel I didn't let none of that stuff get me down perseverance is the biggest thing with with learning programming perseverance and dedication so you're not gonna learn anything overnight you're not gonna be an expert at any of this stuff overnight like you're not gonna be an expert in this stuff over multiple years really so if you the quicker you come to terms with that the better you'll be but at the same time you also don't want that impostor syndrome to creep in to the point where it's affecting your work and your confidence and things like that of of knowing what you can and can't do so I guess there's a fine line between being you know having impostor syndrome and then being an arrogant because there's few people I think in this industry that can be truly arrogant and um and that's another thing I struggle with as well as a programmer everybody has opinions right and there's this there's this phrase I don't I heard it as a kid like it's really a terrible phrase I've always thought it was terrible but it's basically the phrases opinions are like right everybody has them and most of most people most of them stink right so that is what programming is as well - people are very very passionate because nobody wants to admit oh I spent two years learning a technology that's never gonna pay any money and really I probably wasted my entire time because I could have spent two years doing something else for instance like so why do people watch me well I think a lot of people have gotten motivation for me because I literally came from nothing and I was able to basically make a lot of money in this industry now there's just a full-time developer but I mean I've made a lot of money on this YouTube channel like this YouTube channel is related to the programming and and everything and it's just that is one of the best things about programming opinion is that the possibilities are endless and I saw that a long time ago I saw years ago even with like you two been talking to other people I was like you know I you know I saw an opportunity there and obviously I capitalized on that I saw an opportunity to become a developer and I capitalized on that I mean this is one of the few industries I think that is that exists in this day and age where you could truly you know the sky is the limit and you don't have to have a piece of paper to say hey this paper tells me that and that I you know I'm legally allowed to be a programmer you know unlike being a lawyer or a doctor or something like that now eventually that might change and even today like it still is a problem because I would say probably 40% of all developers are self-taught in some regard and when I say self-taught that probably includes people that have unrelated degrees that have tried to that have transferred into like a stem field but yeah anyway that's just just all kinds of all kinds of struggles so I think in this day and age for anybody that's following my channel I've said before you shove a github account if you're trying to get your job your job in this industry if you're if you're not going to school at all like you obviously need to learn the basics of some sort of programming language I mean I would pick one or two and just stick with that like Python and JavaScript probably or maybe an object or anything like c-sharp or Java and replace that with Python maybe if you wanted to although pythons gonna be easier to get started with but then from there like for me like I had to have personal projects so I had those personal projects were the goals that and they were ultimately like you know they were it was a goal that consisted of you know 500 puzzle pieces right and each puzzle piece was a challenge and I actually had a lot of satisfaction out of you know get solving those individual pieces and then being able to connect them all together and as things started connecting together in my brain and making sense like ultimately the project's became more and more advanced but you have to start with something very very very basic and some of my most basic starter programs were just these console apps that you had to ask questions to and it was just constant loop of just you know you said this and that and it did this and that and then I did like bash scripts where it was like not really bash scripts but also like console type out the scripts where you taken command-line arguments to do some sort of automation like checking emails or you know basically scraping data writing data and things like that so once you have those personal projects in place I think it's really important but then then you have something to actually start to showcase right so then once you have - once you have something to showcase then you have the whole other set of challenges as a developer especially self-taught of interviewing right interviewing has now become its own skill set like there's books on interviewing there's websites dedicated to interviewing for computer science there's like things like hacker rank for you know stupid-ass whiteboarding algorithm said that companies want to put people on the spot for in front of a roomful of strangers and and things like that so those are unfortunately things that we have to learn and and I think that you know the quicker you're able to spend time on that the better but you shouldn't focus on that obviously before you have basics of programming in place and then some personal projects to be able to show off but beyond that like yeah those are those are definitely the probably some the best three pieces of advice I can give is simply learn learn something either from me or somebody else and then and then start building those personal projects and then and then practice interviewing as quickly as you can because interviewing is gonna be a nightmare half the places will be like these are this crazy process of building apps for them and the other half might just be questions and things like that which is what I prefer but you know it's it's one of the crappier aspects I think of being a developers is trying to interview in this in this field so another thing that working in actual corporate environment is that there's no question that we know that in every almost every success story you've ever heard about if you think of anybody in like business or IT or whatever everybody knows that you have to get in order to get to a certain place you know people you have to step on people or you have to piss people off and and that happens full full circle right so there's been times where I just I've worked with people I didn't get along with that they they either didn't like me or I didn't like them our communication wasn't that great there's a lot of territorial programmers is what I would call some people that have knowledge bases of certain projects business things like that and they can be considered gatekeepers so having to deal with like gatekeepers and you know just conflicting personalities can be very very difficult working across cultures right computer science is a very multicultural thing we have a lot of people in this industry that come from other places like non-english speaking countries not from the United States at all you know so there's obviously that probably applies to every single different country but you know as an American where you grow up with like with American culture or the English language is your first language and then you know you're working with a bunch of people that that's not their first language and that can happen in any industry cuz that was like that with construction as well when I did that but um you know I think that actually helped me when it comes to communication with with other programmers because I had to communicate with a lot of different you know non-native non-english speaking people when I did construction and I think that that that probably helped me a little bit with IT but you will you will have that as well an IT I mean that is something that you you just have like you know sometimes you're like what what did they just say they were like but yeah that that's that's common another thing too is like with the theoretical stuff like big o-notation stuff like that a lot of things that they really pound and drilling in computer science schools and things like that you're not going to get that as a self-taught dev and for the most part when that wasn't really a lot and you know even for older drivers that didn't have to deal with a lot of that type of a lot of those types of questions and things they can still get tripped up even in this day and age you can have a fifteen-year programmer that's gonna be asked the same questions in the job interview process so that's something that I think as a self-taught to have you end up struggling with a little bit more than maybe other people so then finally the last thing I'll say on the imposter syndrome thing is that like that is like a common thing and when I first got into this industry I thought that I was basically gonna be surrounded by like what I thought was like the prototypical lab coat type of thick glasses like nerds that like we're just talking like in a language that I didn't understand and and when it comes to that Rockstar programmer status like just like musicians or whatever else out there or NFL athletes or how many people play sports and how many people suck at it right or how many people are just serviceable right and it's the same thing with coding or even musicians like everybody wants to pick up and play guitar like I play guitar and I am terrible at it but when it comes to programming I don't have impostor syndrome to any sort of point run bug I can't be a programmer I can't be sufficient like I know for a fact that I've made so much money in this industry so far that I I know for a fact I can be a programmer and I think eventually like you you get to some point where you're like well certain certain people might accuse you of not being the best programmer and there's gonna be times where you're not gonna be doing your best work but also as a senior down there's a certain point where you also know that that's the case and you also know that there's more important things in life than you know constantly working all the time really really so picking and choosing those technologies and you know where to spend your time is one of the biggest challenges that I think I faced for for many years getting into this industry and now like I think I'm much more in tune and aware of like okay I'm gonna really invest some significant time doing this and that and like and these other things I might just gloss over right because I do want to have a wide array of knowledge and I think we all should but there are certain things that you should probably pinpoint and be like okay because of this field that I'm in and where I feel like I'm gonna be in five years things like that I'm gonna be focusing on this this and this and I might read about that and that you know these other things but I'm just not gonna you know I'm not gonna have that be something that I have to like think about and start to like intertwine that all into like how I'm gonna get my kids to their scheduling and like do this and that also that's something I should probably talk about more as well like you're talking about a guy who has a 17 year old daughter in a twelve-year-old son and and and raises both of those kids by myself so like that is that's something that I think I could talk about quite a bit like I've been able to be quite successful in this field by working really really hard and at the same time I'm also a good father to so I'll be the first to admit that all right I'm just doing I'm note I'm a good father but anyway guys that's really all I got in this video but like just your perseverance don't listen to people when they say you can't do it everybody's gonna struggle you're not gonna be good overnight it's gonna take a long time and ultimately there's a good field to be in because we all have so many different opportunities to do whatever we want to do

Channel: Chris Hawkes

Views: 34,206

Rating: 4.8960629 out of 5

Keywords: self-taught developer, self-taught, degree, computer science, how I learned, courses, stem, software engineering, human resources, interviewing skills, job tips tricks

Id: FGmPbIk7UdM

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 26 2018