How I learned to code at 34 and changed careers (and how you can do the same)

hey everybody Travis here from Travis dot media I'm 38 years old I'm married 13 years to a lovely lady I have four kids 11 and under I'm bald I'm going bald and four years ago at 34 I learned to code okay I went from not knowing any code to landing and well I freelanced for about two years and now I work for a company as a software engineer in this video I want to tell you how I learned to code how it wasn't too late for me at 34 to learn in now 38 I also want to encourage you if you're kind of down about your job and are looking for a career change or you're learning to code and think it may be too late for you stay tuned in this video because I have a lot of great tips for you so let me give you my story real quick in a nutshell I've worked a lot of jobs in the past okay this is just to encourage you because I know a lot of us have had like a dead-end start I had a dead-end start I wish somebody would have pointed me in the right direction or maybe I should have listened when I could have but anyway from my first job at 16 as a park ranger to working in an ice-cream shop to working at Target to picking contact lenses off the shelf at Boston lung to hosting serving and cooking in a steakhouse and a bunch of other jobs data entry and things like that so around 2007 to 8 I moved from North Carolina back up to Virginia where I had grown up and I needed a job quick so I got a job at this hospital I think I was just answering phones or something something for some money to support myself until I I got something better and they found out I was a computer guy alright so oh he's a computer guy and he can type fast so they started getting me to do like data entry stuff and eventually they moved me on to the medical transcription team so I was listening to doctors talk really really fast and typing and I did that for about four to five years and then we moved to speech recognition and being the computer guy they may be systems analyst in charge of the speech recognition system which no there's no code anything like that basically I just oversaw the system made sure doctors voices were tweaked properly and all kind of stuff like that so I did that for about four more years and it was a good job and it was it was the pay wasn't that great but it was good benefits it was stable and honestly ten years of my life passed without me even knowing it I think I only planned to be there like a year whatever about six to seven years into that job I started blogging just like a hobby blog and I bought this theme and you know when everybody starts blogging they want to change things on their site they want to make things different color make things move around a little bit and so I would be like I want to change this font to red here and so I don't know how to do it I'd have to write the theme company they would send me the little piece of CSS I'll put it in and then like five minutes later I'd be like well you know I think I want it you know yellow or something I think I want it brown or something and so I dried them again how to make it brown and I kept doing this like I want to move this to the right I want to change this and it just got annoying so I decided hey why don't I learn a little bit about this and so I started learning HTML a little bit and enough CSS to where I could do some of the stuff myself and fell in love with it that's usually that's most people's stories you start to do a little HTML CSS you fall in love and I said wow this is a lot of fun and so I started learning a little bit more online and said I wonder if I can make this into a career I wonder if I could do this for money about the same time at my job my company would there was a lot of talk about people getting out sourced though nothing happened yet so I decided to enroll in a boot camp I enrolled in the block full-stack developer boot camp and I started rolling with that and it was intense I was doing the full-time program while I was working full time actually no I might have might have been the part I'm not sure it was like three to four hours a day though and that was great I went through HTML or through CSS him with the JavaScript and I got some jQuery practice and some static site practice like Jekyll and it was great I really enjoyed it I had a mentor and I learned a ton and I fell in love with coding at that point well at the same time we did get out sourced the outsource everybody but me and my boss because we got a new system and it just took everybody's place and everybody everywhere in the medical transcription world will get outsourced and has been outsourced so it was coming so at that point I said okay they've outsourced to everybody but me and my boss and we got a new system coming next year I think I got a year left I got to get my act together so I got to the second part of the block course which is the back end and started learning Ruby Ruby was great but nobody in my city is using Ruby or rails at all so I started looking around nobody's using it why am i learning rails why am i learning Ruby look like now and I guess it is valuable to know that it's a good framework to learn but at that point I was like I think I read and the fine print somewhere that if I were to quit the course about halfway through it I would get half of my money back so I was like look I can get you know half of my money back and not have to learn this language that's not important in my town and I can start just trying to find work I already know you know HTML CSS JavaScript and I can start freelance I'm gonna start picking up work and so that's what I did I quit block stopped going there and I jumped on up work and I took a few jobs on up work and just randomly apply for this job and it was an agency out in Colorado and they said hey why you want to come on as a web developer I said sure they didn't ask me to prove anything they didn't ask for any portfolio and if they just wanted to develop her and so I jumped in there and I worked there for about a year as a freelancer and so I freelance for them for a little while and then I quit my job at the hospital because I was they were giving me tons of work and I was bringing on my own clients at the same time and that job I learned a ton because I didn't I didn't know a lot they gave me stuff that I'd never done before it was WordPress actually in the back up a little bit I did I did a corset skill crush it was a wordpress blueprint course and it was wonderful I mean it was wonderful I took all the parts that I needed learning about you know loops and the template hierarchy and all the stuff you got to know about WordPress I learned a lot about PHP I learned about custom fields and all cool stuff so I felt confident when I got this job because it was just WordPress but still they assigned me a lot of tasks I didn't know so I did a lot of googling and I grew a lot they had a lead developer that was very helpful he taught me a ton and I really enjoyed my time there and I can attribute where I'm at today to that place but I started picking up lots of clients and eventually I had a lot of clients and they were paying me a lot more than this agency was and so I kept with the agency but I eventually told them hey I'm trying to grow my own business and so I left them and I freelanced for about four more months after that and did well but um ended up taking a software engineer role at a company out of DC called flex wind and that's what I'm currently doing and I absolutely love it if you want to find out why I did that or see how my journey is going I have other videos about that so check it out but I want to just give you a quick rundown now I started that at 34 I had four kids so I had to juggle my full-time job this bootcamp and my family my wife was very supportive about the whole thing and so that was helpful but it was tough and so my whole point in telling you this is that I was 34 when I started learning to code now I'm 38 it's not too late I made tons of bad choices I went what 14 from 18 to 30 16 years of kind of kind of doodling through life finally I found out hey I love coding and I can get a job in it and it pays me pretty well and it's remote so I am flexible and things are wonderful so so now that I've given you my story let me take a minute to tell you how you can learn to code and get a job or change jobs or whatever you want to do at 30 something 40 something 50 something whatever there's a series of steps you got to follow and if you follow them nobody can be stopped and here's my shameless plug and I'm totally unashamed because I put a lot of time into and I think it's very valuable I put together a blueprint a six-month blueprint for anyone that wants to start off learning to code and go from that all the way to being a confident coder ready to have that job to start taking interviews it's called the learn to code blueprint course and you can find it at learn to code blueprint calm it is very cheap for the value you get and I put a lot of time into it and like I said it's broken down week by week on what you need to learn it has it has the courses out there to take for each week and it just leads you in succession all the way through to becoming a confident coder it also has lots of videos from myself helping you with certain challenges and offering some tips and tricks that I've learned along the way finally and most importantly there's a slack channel where we talk their way through this we help each other we encourage one another and we see every student make it to him that's school and ultimately again it is very cheap for the time and effort that I put into it so in this video I'm gonna go ahead and give you the structure of the course and you don't have to take it you can just take my advice right here and run with it so here's what you gotta learn first of all you need to set a time limit you need to be like I'm gonna give myself 8 months let's say I'm gonna give myself 8 months to learn the code you need to get a calendar you need to set day 1 and you need to set the end day and you need to time out every week from start to finish what you need to do and you need to go in this order you start with HTML go out and find a HTML course and work all the way through beginning to end once you're done with that do not visit HTML again HTML is one of those things you're always working with you'll always be practicing so once you finish it don't revisit it again once you got HTML move on to CSS which is making your HTML your structure look pretty don't go learning CSS grid or CSS animations stick to the basics the fundamentals be able to make your HTML look great and understand the CSS selectors and all of that stuff so find a CSS course do it start to finish and move on next you want to do job a script you stay on this front-end for a while you want to do JavaScript you don't need to worry about advanced topics like prototypes and the fetch API and things like this make sure you learn the syntax and make sure you're very comfortable in Dom manipulation the Dom is everything so take find a JavaScript course take the course and start to finish don't say well this course didn't working for me I'm gonna try this one then I'm gonna try this one is I like this one better and then your ten courses in here a year late so find one course do it start to finish do your JavaScript now at this point you can explore the backend like PHP WordPress that's a good way to go find a PHP primer it's a lot like JavaScript except for it's server-side but the syntax is very similar so you can do a short course on PHP you can learn WordPress something like that but at this point you're gonna want to choose a specialty so here's what you need to you need to find out in your city or your target location wherever you want to be living wherever you you live or want to live you need to find out what's in demand so you need to go online you type up the big businesses the web agencies all that stuff look for job openings and find out what the technologies in your area are then from that info find out which one you like most take a week and kind of look around play with them a little bit find out the one you like most and then spend about a month specializing in one thing that kept I thought that could be react that could be a Java that could be angular or something something like that something an extent will maybe that job you didn't do anything before something a JavaScript extension or PHP extension or Python anybody can pick up Python so take a month to get a specialization down now take another month to build two significant projects with your specialization so you're not gonna go copy somebody you know you're gonna come up with two unique yet easy projects that you're gonna work from scratch from start to finish you're gonna do two of those you're gonna put them on your portfolio and it's gonna be great and then your final month you're gonna put your resume together and you want to do a you know a little course here and there on interview practice and public speaking that kind of thing to get your confidence up so that's it HTML CSS JavaScript maybe a little PHP WordPress pick a specialization make two significant projects get your resume ready and start sending out hundreds a day also somewhere in there I do this in my course somewhere in there you need to learn get the basics of git and github and that's it that's all you got to do if you're 45 years old what's 8 months you start out at 45 you go 8 months you're still 45 if you're 35 and your pick hey it's gonna take me 10 months start out at 35 ten months later you're still 35 unless you had a birthday so anyway the main thing is to pick a time limit set a schedule and stick to it don't get sidetracked and if you need help with that check out my course at learn to code blueprint comm learn to code blueprint calm and is a video there that explains the whole thing and we're a slack group and we have lots of fun in it and I'd like to see you in there but if not follow this pattern that I just gave you go all out and you can learn to code I did it I didn't do it that way I kind of stumbled around for a long time I wish I would have if I stumbled around and anyway I hope this was encouraging to you again I'm not 20 I'm not 22 I didn't start out right I started out doing the wrong jobs and now here I am 38 finally getting somewhere where I should have been 16 years ago so best wishes to you subscribed with the channels gonna be lots more videos like this I have a lot to talk about and wish you the best

Channel: Travis Media

Views: 12,428

Keywords: learn to code, learn web development, how i learned to code, software developer

Id: UAgUmy7OMQs

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019