How to Become a Programmer in 2021

all right so 2020 is behind us 2021 is ahead of us it could be a year of promise for a lot of you for those of you who are looking to become a programmer this could be the year that you can do it so in this video i really want to cover how to become a programmer in 2021 in this upcoming year and i want to approach it from a high level perspective so to make it as general as possible so no matter what path that you want to go down we're going to cover it here so without any further ado let's dive into it so the first thing that you want to do before you start anything else is you want to pick a path so what that means is you want to spend a maximum one month figuring out what exact path you want to go down in programming there's so many different paths you can go down right you can go down web development which i'm a web developer i'm a full stack web developer even in web development there's many different paths there you can go with front end you can go back end you can go full stack as well there's software that you can write for hardware so like robotics that sort of thing there are many different paths that you can go down so the first thing you want to do is really spend some time and think about it now you want to be very careful about this right because i know some of you will take six months to figure it out you'll read every reddit forum you'll watch every youtube video on the subject and you'll end up not doing anything it'll be your excuse to procrastinate so set yourself a limit of one month and then just make the best decision from there now once you've picked a path then the most important thing is to create a plan for yourself a game plan if you do not create a game plan what's going to happen is you're just going to buy some books you're going to watch some courses you're going to watch some tutorials but you're not going to really know the big picture of where you're headed so you've got to sit down and do the game plan now before we proceed here i just want to stop this video and ask you guys kindly if you enjoyed this video thus far go ahead and go down there and smash the like button also hit the subscribe button if you want more videos from me about how to become a programmer and how to make the transition into a new career let's get back into it now the first part of any good game plan is to figure out what your study plan is so you have to figure out what you're going to be studying and when and also how much time you're gonna be putting in so creating some sort of schedule so you when you figure out your path you have to sit down and figure out what are the big things you want to learn on any given path and if you're wondering what those are depending on what you've chosen you can easily find those resources again i recommend youtubing figuring them out for example if you're going into web development say front-end web development that's going to start with html and css and let's say take maybe a month for that then you move on to javascript which will be the next three months of your learning you'll go into frameworks after that but that's just an example a lot of people have recommendations out there take a look at what they're recommending and then just again create that plan for yourself and say the first month this is what we're studying the second month the third month here's what i'm gonna be focusing on once you figure out that high level plan then go down and figure out how you're going to study so how many hours per day how many hours per week are you gonna study i recommend getting at least two hours a day minimum and when i say two hours per day i mean completely focused time not half focus time or you're watching a youtube video while you're you're trying to code something i mean you're completely immersed in what you're doing that's hours that count and to make a schedule for yourself to say when you're going to be studying at what days at what times and make that a habit right so once you've got that done what you want to figure out is what projects you want to build for your portfolio because now if you want to get a job as a programmer it's vital that you show companies what you've done in the past as far as a track record so once you've spent about three months in the learning phase so learning the syntax of a programming language learning the different parts of a programming language that you can learn then you want to shift your attention into actually using that to build projects because it's not enough to know syntax syntax means nothing well it's what you can do with syntax it's what projects you can build so you want to figure out minimum four applications you can build you probably want to shoot more for six eight ten even twelve for some of you guys who need to get a lot of experience under your belt and if you don't know any ideas or you have no ideas for projects that's not a good excuse again google is your best friend for this i'll even provide a link below here to a great repository that i found on github it has an entire list of projects from easy medium to advanced you can pick any of those those are all great options as well so you have to figure out what projects you're going to build and again make sure this is on paper don't let this just be in your head you have to get all of this on paper so that you can stick to a plan from there let's say you've gone through the process of learning everything you've built a bunch of projects now you're ready to shift into the job hunt phase so the first thing you want to do is create a personal website for yourself the website is going to be something like yourname.com right in my case any circles.com so that you can give this to people you can show people your website and it should showcase all of your projects right so it should showcase every project you should have a link to your github for that you should have a link to the actual working application if possible you should have explanations of what that project is it's to showcase you and to ultimately market yourself because if you're going to get a job you have to learn to market yourself in other words show who you are like explain your story explain why you're different and also explain your skills but without doing it in a boring or verbose way right so that's where the personal website can be really fun you can make it look really nice you can have interesting explanations for your applications you can even make a little bit more less formal than a resume or something like that so your personal website comes from there then you want to create your resume you want to make sure you have your linkedin all set and ready to go and then you want to start preparing for the technical interview process and the preparing for the technical interview process usually takes a minimum of one month of your time and depending on again what you're shooting for this could differ but once you've done that then you want to get into the job hunt process which means you're actively applying to jobs all the time while you're still learning maybe you're still building some projects you're still preparing for the technical interview you want to spend a majority of your time actually applying to jobs and i recommend for people who are trying to actually job hunt at that point you need to be getting at least 20 applications out there per month and you need to be actively reaching out to recruiters you need to actively be reaching out to people in your social network to see if you can get any references or referrals so you can have a leg up so you're not just trying to get in through an application you're also trying to get into what we call the back door right so you're trying to reach out directly to maybe the hiring manager at some company so that you can bypass the application process so this is the high level approach of how to become a programmer in 2021 this is every step of the process through the way that i've seen has helped many people to actually land a job even for people who haven't gone to school who haven't gotten that college degree because if you go through this if you learn it really well if you show your projects that you've done if you've built a personal website if you really applied in the right way that can put you in the driver's seat to actually get hired by a company and get that first job by the way if you enjoyed this video please leave a like and make sure to subscribe as well other than that that's all i have for today thank you so much for watching and as always guys peace out

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 80,216

Keywords: self taught programmer, self taught software developer, learning to code, computer science, software engineer, software engineering, software development, computer programming, programming, software developer, andy sterkowitz, self-taught software developer, code, learn to code, learn programming

Id: ERSfUCUsmOs

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021