How To Become a Self-taught Developer (Advice and Stories From Actual Self-taught Developers)

welcome back to another podcast episode where we help aspiring developers get jobs and junior developers grow and today we're actually going to be this is actually a suggestion but someone wanted well actually a lot of people wanted me to talk about the journeys of self-taught developers because i go over coding bootcamps a lot i go over people that graduate from a cs degree but especially during a pandemic it's understandable that you don't want to risk investing money into a program you might not be 100 confident in and i want to show you that many developers make it without putting all of their money into programs like that they make it on their own so and i think that's really cool i know a lot of hiring managers that admire self-taught developers and i think there is this growing admiration for people that have non-engineering backgrounds that somehow you know some way learn what they need to do to actually make it into this field so this is what this episode is about so like normal we're gonna go ahead and start with the intros uh whitley we'll start with you cool um hey i'm whitley um i am a web developer on the design team at alert media in austin texas and so i have been there about what what i don't even know what day it is anymore time is nothing um i've been there since august uh so not the new girl but still the new girl so um but yeah and then mine i i think you said don will get into like past jobs later but but um i i've just transitioned into the into the tech industry so it's been a fun a fun journey so far and and i'm really excited about where i'm at and where i'm going and pumped to talk about it i really love this opportunity to to share you know where we've been where we're going and so yeah that's a little bit about who i am cool uh so we could actually mention during the intros uh what your previous background was too oh okay cool okay um i was actually a for eight years a middle school teacher and coach i taught um that's what i got my degree in um and i taught middle school math and social studies not at the same time but um at different points in my career uh and then i also coached volleyball basketball and track and so um i loved it i loved the kids uh but about a couple a couple years ago i just resigned in may so that was another thing i i barely i dodged the bullet of being a teacher in a pandemic which i'm super thankful for um but uh yeah i i was kind of realizing that yeah i love the kids and i love the connections and kind of the um you know i loved being a teacher and a coach but i knew this is i didn't want to make the 30-year career and you know as a as a coach i was having like 15-hour days like multiple days a week and um you know i'm also into writing and making music and and you know i'm my other relationships were suffering like i just wanted to change and so um that was when i decided to try out coding and tech and and see where that led me and i'm i'm to say happy is an understatement but i'm super happy with where it's gotten me so yeah i'm really excited for you that's a cool story thanks um i will go left to right on my screen um for me i'm technically not fully self-taught um but i am for most of what i've learned but i'm a psychology major and so cool i became a lifeguard then became a supervisor then became an aquatics director and i loved teaching swim lessons and then i managed staff that did it and i love doing it it's a very very underpaid career and um but it is fulfilling but i was um looking for different things and what i found was every day that i would be stressed and management is very stressful and i would just go home and i would code and that was my de-stressor and it blew me away why like i would actually to de-stress from work i would actually invest my time into technology and finally kind of just clicked maybe i should be doing this and the reason why i didn't was because i always thought you needed a cs degree that held me back throughout my entire psychology degree and when i discovered team treehouse that actually kind of gave me the boost of confidence and i learned about the graduates from team treehouse and people that got real developer jobs from that and that gave me some inspiration and so yeah i spent about a year and a half doing team treehouse and went to coding bootcamp but yeah i like if one thing i want to mention i'm kind of going to leave the conversation to everyone else because like i said i'm not technically self-taught but after going to coding boot camp i can for sure say that you do not need a coding bootcamp you do not need to invest a lot of money into it if i would have known what i know now if i would go back and do it all over again i would do the self-taught route 100 save myself a lot of money but yeah jeremy how about you yeah um my name is jeremy i'm a currently a principal engineer at go health which is based in chicago um and nowadays i'm about 70 percent manager but i still get my fingers into the code a little bit um i'm a little bit like you don i i code to de-stress um so if you ever look at my github profile someday you'll see a lot of random repos in various uh states of completion that's that's me uh blowing off steam um that's how i do it and before i got into a career as a software engineer i was at various times a janitor a helps a desk person manual labor there was a period of time where i had a family to take care of and i had to like move in with my parents so i was kind of homeless um but uh eventually i landed here and like quickly um i couldn't be happier about where this career took me so that's awesome that's awesome and if you want to hear oh go ahead now that's amazing yeah that's a cool story yeah and uh after this episode if you want to hear more about jeremy we actually invited him on for a previous episode of what it was like to work at google as a software engineer too so check that out all right aaron how about you uh so my name my name is aaron um i am a software developer at change healthcare um so i've been there since may of this year yeah so maybe this year before that i was a software engineer at warner media um so that was a lot of fun um got to got to dig into advertising which was very interesting um and uh yeah i started out in a couple different things started out in healthcare field first um and then kind of winded my way up into customer service um did uh customer service for apple did applecare did you know phones and laptops and things like that and then kind of worked my way up to a manager i started working at sas companies and they are kind of found um a love still had a little technology right but i really found a love of of being able to kind of help customers solve issues so um a lot of times i would see issues that would come in and i'd say you know what this is a this seems like a small bug that i probably could fix like i know i could probably do something with this like just javascript code like small things that see engineers that's like what makes them better you know what makes them smarter than me you know i'm sure i could probably do this uh so i started to learn um you know just a little bit by little bit um but yeah it was a um in the customer service industry and then uh you know just hard work and dedication we'll get into a lot long nights and uh but uh was able to to become a developer so i think uh i echo what uh whitley and and jeremy said it's it's it's awesome i love it every single day is just great that's awesome so actually i just want to clarify um what was the exact position that all of you were in right before you became a software engineer whitley i know you were a teacher right teacher and coach yeah okay teacher and coach about jeremy i was working um help desk for a a company that managed computers for small schools rural schools okay how about you um and i was a support manager for a company called salesloft okay perfect i'll probably put that in the title uh that's like exactly what i was asking too um okay cool so definitely different backgrounds that's what i loved a year and uh what i want to do is let's kind of go over journeys of you know when you decided to start learning how to code until you finally get that first position and i think it would be helpful we'll kind of like turn it into a conversation after this but we'll do this one at a time uh whitley we'll start with you if you kind of just want to take us through how you got here cool so um yeah i was teaching and um i was my total teaching career was eight years but around year six is when i started getting that really burnt out feeling you know and um i said i still i loved what i was doing and i was i was passionate about the kids and just being a positive role model for them but i i realized that i wasn't passionate about becoming a better teacher and um you know how to teach the new way of math and like how to teach social studies you know and and i just really feel like if you're passionate about something you want to keep growing in it you never reach an end point and so i i knew that especially in teaching that if i was at that point that wasn't gonna help anybody especially my students so um i so this is year six around i guess what was that 20 2018 i guess um and so i was talking to some people about how i felt and um my dad actually was like why don't you why don't you look into coding like there's a there's a big need there and you've always been into technology and and and granted i was i i loved i've always loved the newest gadget and uh you know new softwares and things like that but i never i never um i never had experience with coding and so i was like okay um i'll try that that seems like something i could do and i've seen some really cool people you know on social media that are that are um coding for a living and you know i want to be friends with them so maybe i can be them so um i started with a free code camp um that was recommended to me uh before um putting any money into anything uh and so i got on there and i was hooked um immediately just with html and css i was like whoa i can design cool stuff and i can and the problem solving of it like you have an issue and then when you see it click and it and it's fixed oh there's just i've just there's little that is more satisfying than that you know just especially on free code camp you get like a big old green check mark and that's just really i don't know it was really cool for me so um about a month of playing around with that i was like okay i wanna i'm gonna do this um so i started looking into more um structured boot camps and i actually but my first my first stop was a program called thinkful um so i signed up for that and it was great um but it wasn't for me uh being in the industry now and kind of knowing knowing more than i did then i think it's it'd be great for a more backend person the way it's structured and laid out um uh it was uh it just wasn't for me the structure um a lot of success stories there i just i don't want to come off as as dogging it i just want to say that it was a great program and the mentorship was awesome i still talked to the mentor i had through that program but um i started branching out and looking for new ones and that's when i came upon treehouse team treehouse and um immediately fell in love with that program it was um you know the biggest thing between my the first program i tried in treehouse is that treehouse really broke it down kind of like free code camp it was just unit by unit and i just felt successful every time i got you know you passed or you moved on to the next level maybe it's the gamer in me but um that just really worked for me so uh treehouse started april 2019 um my whole journey started sorry i know i'm going kind of out of order here but the whole um boot camp journey started in the end of 2018 and then i started treehouse in april 2019 and then um i did the front-end web development program through then and graduated in december 2019 so fast math how many months is that nine nine months may june july august september october november december yeah no eight we don't need to count it's fine um computers are four yeah our computers are for exactly we don't need to count uh and i was i was like nobody's gonna see me count on my fingers but we're recording this so cool um anyway uh yeah i graduated in december 2019 um pretty much immediately started looking for jobs and um may may of 2020 of this year which teachers and schools of course are already at home learning at home um but i got an interview with a company in austin um for a junior level software engineer and um it was a startup and i worked there for about two months and then everybody got laid off um main reason being the pandemic but there's some other shady stuff there so it was a blessing in disguise for sure and then a month later um a very stressful month later um i was just about to start filling out teaching applications again and then um i got an intro call with alert media and two weeks later i was hired so yeah it was an up and down journey for sure but uh yeah i finally found my my my tech career home at alert media for now that's that's really cool and i'm a huge fan of that story just because of team treehouse i've aren't they awesome i advertise it all the time for people that don't want to go to a coding bootcamp it's fantastic i see yeah and it's just slick like i did a t-shirt in the bottom right too oh my gosh i know it's and it's it's like i of course i did the tech degree you know because i wanted i wanted everything and i wanted the piece of paper to show at the end um but like you don't have to do that you can get some awesome lessons for you know way less a month it's just they're so willing to suit you for wherever you are and they're just awesome i still hang out in the slack channels and stuff because everybody there is so cool that's really cool that's really cool um okay so i'm gonna share mine really quickly and we'll keep going but i so i was an aquatics director and i quit thinking i could become a developer in three months and i'm not saying you can't but i only saved up for enough for three months and i found very quickly that i actually so i started with team treehouse and it's really really good program but i did not i probably didn't put the full amount of effort that i should have and i ended up getting a part-time job teaching swim lessons because while i was quitting as an aquatics director i still wanted to be involved with children i love children i think it's a lot of fun and it kind of like i found it was a good plan for me because coding non-stop is very stressful and then uh being able to just let loose and teach swim lessons that was kind of my another de-stressor for me so but i actually you know you know jeremy you kind of alluded to some of this in your past but i ended up kind of like bounced from from home to home you know just trying to have a roof over my head and and food and because it did take a lot longer to be able to do what i wanted to do and i ended up moving back into well so a year and a half i spent at team treehouse and so before i tell the moving story i realized that i went through all of team treehouse's courses and i felt like i felt like i really knew enough to become an entry-level developer but i didn't apply it towards projects and it was a huge wake-up call because team treehouse is really good at teaching what it does and a good course will make you feel confident in what you know and unfortunately you have to um you have to expect that you probably don't know as much as you think you know until you apply it until you reinforce it and so i started applying a year and a half later with really only a few projects under my belt and i was a perfectionist and i'd keep working on the same project same problem like just trying to make it a little bit better you know and uh got a very uh i got a wake-up call that i was not prepared for a junior level position to get into the industry yet and but i love that moment i actually love that moment of getting rejected because that's when i finally discovered like what i actually need to do like like the rest of everything that i need to do i discovered from that one php interview and that was amazing and i realized i don't want to work with php as well and i've spent so much time with that on team treehouse and but i did want to work with javascript and i loved uh when i dove more into even just the concept of a framework i liked cleaning up my code i liked focusing on architecture it was fun for me and so um yeah about that time about a year and a half later is when i realized i have a huge gap in javascript and i didn't at the time i didn't trust myself to be able to learn it i thought i would give up i was running low on money and so i did it's weird because i it's easier to go into debt with the loan than pay your own bills like i was kind of in that situation you know and that is so true yeah wow and yeah so i did but um and that's when i went to coding boot camp but in order to do that i ended up having to move back in with my mom when i was like 27 years old you know i had to really uh put aside my pride a little bit to do that but i'm glad i did i'm really glad i did and uh yeah i went to coding bootcamp and that kind of supplemented my knowledge but i can't stress this enough you don't need a coding bootcamp i know everything like if i could go back and redo it and just at least have a plan or an outline i mean that's that's really what people need and uh so but yeah that's pretty much how and then actually the last thing while i was learning i would live stream on twitch and i would code on on twitch and i would do it multiple times a week oh cool and i would teach developers what i was learning and i thought like no one would want to know what i know like i don't even have a software engineering position and then i average like 50 viewers for not even being partnered and it actually takes a while to get like a good number of viewers on twitch and uh i like the first person that hired me actually hired me because i took a chance to live stream on twitch and he was a gamer and it's funny because you can relate in very quirky avenues that you'd never expect with your first hiring manager and um that's why i always encourage people to put themselves out there with blog posts videos if they can audios anything like that because you never know who's going to hear it exactly yeah true that's very true yeah that's me though what about you jeremy um yeah uh stop i'm going to i'm going to betray how old i am here when i when i first wrote some code i was a kid um dialect wasn't really a thing i had an old well it wasn't all at the time that would be old it was a tandy 1000hx no hard drive you had to swap floppy drives to make anything work like this we bought a second whoa we bought a second floppy drive so we can run our operating system disk in one and then swap the the game just in the other but it came dos came with gw basic uh and so um i decided one day i don't know why i just read a science fiction book i forget the name of it but it had this sort of uh game that you could play on paper in it called conway's game of life if you hang out in certain computer science circles you'll hear about it and i decided i was gonna i played it on paper before and i decided i was gonna try and implement it in basic to see just to see if i could and um that was enough to hook me right there as a hobby to to learn to code um but it was a lot harder back then like you didn't have manuals or there wasn't the internet to go off of so um i'm a little bit jealous of some of you guys stories actually because like uh i didn't have dream house it wasn't there for me um i had to sort of muddle along on my own uh but i kept at it just as a hobby for um pretty much the rest of my life it's really still my hobby um and i don't do it in basic anymore uh i do it in much more advanced languages um although basic will always have a slight uh you know nostalgic spot in my heart because of that um i never finished college i uh i attended for three years i was going to be a virus hunter which would have been really interesting at this current time period yeah um but uh i got married had kids started working to support them and ended up dropping out due to money so i never finished and was uh sort of resigned to having a career doing like you know blue collar type work for the rest of my life um but we always had a computer sometimes i built them from pieces scavenged from the trash uh and there were a couple low periods where i wanted to sell it to like make ends meet but my wife wouldn't let me i think she knew where that was leading more than i did um so if we fast forward a little bit um i've uh we've had to move in with my parents i've got uh four children five actually at that point yeah five i have five kids wow um and uh so there's we're all living in my parents house and um my brother and i are trying to make a uh a startup work and i'm i'm doing some pearl at the time and this is when pearl is sort of on the downline like no one really does pearl anymore um it's all legacy code and there's a few places that are doing new pearl but for the most part it doesn't have buzz and it was just losing his buzz then but that happened to be lucky for me because i was building stuff in pearl i was had a website a blog that i was posting on about what i was building so i was putting myself out there we didn't have twitch at that time so blogs was what it was um and there was a company in chicago who was looking for pro programmers and having trouble finding them and so i got my first uh my first real um job interview out of that and um clicked with the interviewers they took a chance on me i worked there for a year that company got popped by google google decided to keep me around i was at google for seven years wow left google for another company um and now i'm at the uh well not vie that was the company after google but now i'm at go health i'm a principal engineer and i'm managing other engineers and um i as a hiring manager i actually do look out for people who are self-taught because i know what that's like and i know what it takes um and that's a strong signal to me of um someone who can do that it's going to be if nothing else they're going to be a bulldog on whatever like problem i put them on they're not going to give up they're going to figure it out if it takes them you know like they'll find a way because that's what it takes when you're learning to code wow cool yeah that's amazing yeah that's amazing i want to watch you guys stories are amazing too um like i don't i'm not the star of the show so imagine if your wife just said yeah sell that computer you lucked out finding her to believe that you're here yeah yeah well um i i could talk forever about how much i lucked out finding her but um that's not the subject of her on the show that sounds yeah that's that's a really inspirational story um wow okay aaron how about you yeah um i don't know if i can top that hey it's your story um so mine kind of started um years ago um so this was uh i i after high school i started um i wanted to become a nurse that's what i wanted to do um so i went to school i was gonna do that um but i realized school is not my thing like i already went to high school i don't i don't like going to school i don't like doing that stuff so i was like ah so i eventually kind of dropped out um and um i started kind of working um i kind of knew some stuff so i started working like as a phlebotomist so just doing some of that stuff and then i um went to school uh for massage therapy i was like oh well let me do some massage therapy so um so yeah i was massage therapist for uh a year or so uh doing that and then um i was like ah this is this is stressful there's like a lot of um like physical work involved i was like i don't do that anymore so um i didn't quite know what i wanted to do but i know i wanted to do something with technology so i started looking at jobs and i started doing a work at home program doing customer service for kelly services so uh doing that for a while and about that time i was like you know what i uh i had just got my first iphone and i was like you know what would be really cool if i could make myself an iphone app that would be really cool uh so i was like yeah i'm just gonna jump on i'm just gonna jump on the internet google how to make an app and i'm just gonna make it now that was that was that's what i was gonna do um so i bought some udemy courses i was like okay let me sit down do it you know i had uh had uh i had realized that i need to go get a macbook so i was like let me go get a macbook i got this little like old rusty thing old macbook that's okay let me let's do that um and uh my my work fortunately allowed me to kind of use uh their stuff i was like i talked to my manager i was like hey can i can i use this like for can i download some stuff they're like yeah sure just do it on your own time i was like okay cool so i downloaded xcode i was going through it going through the udemy courses and i quickly realized that you get stuck in this thing called tutorial uh purgatory um and i was following along with the instructor but as soon as i tried to build something of my own i was like okay so we just went over loops what is a loop exactly like i would love to know i was like i want to build this app i'm sure i need a loop but i don't know what a loop does so how can i do so um yeah it was i i completely kind of failed and uh you know i kind of gave up on it um i did i i gave up one i i failed hard i feel hard so fast for a couple years get married um and uh don't have any kids by this point but i start kind of dabbling with it again a little bit um and still thinking i can make an ios app um i failed yet again second time that's strike number two failed again um fast forward again i have a kid um i'm working at some sas companies starting to work at sales loft as a support manager um and um this is kind of by the time i'm like you know what um i tried to make an ios app i said but the tickets that i'm getting in are javascript kind of front end related i was like well maybe maybe i could start jumping into javascript you know because uh you know objective c and then swift i was like it just didn't didn't speak to me you know when you have like a language that just speaks to you you're like oh yeah um so i started looking into javascript and i was like this makes sense um and i jumped on code academy first and started doing some stuff like that and uh i loved completing the stuff like you said like the check mark that was awesome um going through that going through that it was like motivational right and uh i got some inspiration from uh the engineering department at sales loft so there's a lot of a lot of great uh engineers um we're super smart people they're like you know what find yourself um you know find yourself maybe a boot camp or something like that to kind of help you and i was like well i don't have the money for boot camp those are things they're like four or five thousand dollars i can't i can't do that so i started looking around trying to figure out what i could uh do to kind of teach myself i stumbled upon treehouse um it was amazing um so i started doing the just the regular courses for like 25 29 25 a month um and i quickly found out that i that i needed something a little bit more structured um to kind of walk through so they had a tech degree it was like 200 200 bucks right and i was like you know what let me just go ahead and do that i can afford that let me go ahead and do that and it was amazing i mean they i mean it's it's very structured kind of helps you kind of teach yourself get into a slack channel with other people and that's where you kind of really kind of learn how to interact with like future developers right so you kind of think of yourself as a developer and as you start going through you complete project every project of the project um so i started that in april um april or march or april 2019 um same time items yeah yeah i went into the um i went into the full stack javascript um tech degree um and i you know i jumped in like um and i was like you know i'm determined to get this um i feel like i'm a slow learner so i feel like i need to like really just delve in so what i would do is i'd wake up at like 4 00 a.m get to work code um and then do my regular job like starting at 9 00 am and then like code at 12 i'd be like in the lunch area like bugging developers hey like i need i need help with this like can you can you help me like look at this and be like oh yeah let me let me i can help you with this um and then after work go home code until like midnight um and i would do that i did that for four months yeah from april to june july um is when i graduated the the um full stack factory so um yeah i i just yeah i was like i i need to figure this out like i need to figure this out like i just kept at it um and yeah after that um i i got some some help from some of my mentors um just kind of prepping um prepping my resume things like that um and um i wanted to stay at the company that that uh that i was at sales loft but they didn't have any uh positions open at the time so um i started to look elsewhere got a contracting job um with warner media um and that kind of the rest was history um so i uh i recently actually went back um i'm in the slack channels uh too uh like you said whitley uh yeah that's like channels as well and i recently spoke um for some uh new graduates that were coming out um and that was really cool to be able to do that um you know and i remember like being new it was like oh man am i to be able to find a job like so scared just like shaken like like just give me a chance put me in here like exactly um so yeah that's uh that's that's my story lots of failure um but persistence uh yeah beautiful i like that yeah and you you really i can already see why you got hired you have a really positive energy i think a lot of people would like working with you that's really cool to hear your story and your story is every bit as good as mine there man so yeah yeah it is um well first of all team treehouse i think it's about time you sponsor me anyone that's watching treehouse or if anyone knows anyone from team treehouse and sees this video reach out to them they are my ideal sponsor i love them i always talk about them so just throwing that out there but so i think that's really cool and actually i hadn't really met too many people in the tech degree with team treehouse too and it sounds like it's interesting because you you feel confident in what it taught you but you also like you hear about this with a lot of programs you're like but i didn't need all of this now that i know what i know it's like i could have done i think team treehouse offers like the 25 a month just to go to the courses and go to the tracks um it's it's just interesting how um i don't know it's interesting when you're on the other side and you're trying to get a position it just seems like it's impossible and that's why i really encourage you um do online meetups you know right now meet other software engineers and listen to their path listen to their story because you're gonna realize that it is very doable and a lot of people feel like they feel like it's hopeless and so you know i think your stories are really inspirational so what i actually want to do i definitely want to dive into some of the mistakes we made uh but i also i want to go over kind of a few questions people like really get stuck on with the self-taught developer path maybe you can help them out so you know one thing is when people realize they think they like coding and they're still kind of in that discovery phase what would be a piece of advice for them to solidify maybe like a stack that they want to learn a direction that they want to go the types of apps that they want to build how do you figure that out oh and i did promise to give this context they had no time to prepare i didn't give them any discussions so feel free to take a minute to think about it i i think one of the challenges when you're self teaching is staying motivated um like both whitley and aaron talked about how you how useful that green check mark in tree house is like to i did it um like i've accomplished something you want to do something else to get that that small hit um what i did was um i'd i'd pick a thing a small thing not a big thing like i was going to try and create a monster app or something but i would just pick a small thing um that did something i wanted and i'd build it like it started with conway's game of life because i wanted to create a game so i could play it um other like funny stories like my brother and i used to like play some games that were written in basic that came with it and i wanted to cheat so i had to look at you figure out how to read the source code so i could modify it so then i could win against my brother and then um he's he's a software engineer too now but then he would like do the reverse to me like figure out how to make it so he'd win um small things like that but they give you like a way to see incremental progress for yourself um and uh and they're going to teach you like what things you really enjoy like i'm a back end guy i like i i did javascript um back when it was way harder actually it's a lot easier now browsers used to really suck um that's understanding it uh but um i like i've always preferred to do the stuff that powered the page rather than building the page itself um that's where i gravitated to i like command line tools so i build those um so that's where i tend to be but uh i i find a lot of it like where do your interests align [Music] and that that sort of is gonna inform the things you want to build and that gives you that boost once you succeed building one thing you're like that wasn't as bad as i thought it was or maybe it was but i made it and like yeah so what's the next thing it's just a little bit more complicated that i want to improve or like do for fun um that gives me that additional like i i accomplished something i i made a goal i met that goal i made it happen um i bent the computer to my will and uh and there's a that creative act i think is is what keeps us moving on the path and that's really rewarding to solve your own problem that helps you out in life too and a lot of people like a lot of people get burned out because they're building these tutorial driven apps that they're not going to use they're not going to introduce to the user base it doesn't help them it doesn't help anyone else and it's kind of just learning it's like building out a project just so you can learn something and i do think it's a lot more rewarding to build out a project to solve an actual problem that's going to help someone and i think it's easier to start off helping yourself i think and i think it's more rewarding and because it's you know we actually i've talked about like building apps for users and it's not very motivating for people like i thought um because like the the concept of building an app and gaining user base behind it where it makes other people's lives better it's a it's a kind idea it's a really interesting idea but when you're not um what am i trying to say i think i think it's a little bit more realistic and doable to start off solving your own problem because i think people get overwhelmed think in like i think perfectionism starts kicking in when you're trying to think about what other people want and i think it's easier and more tangible to think about the simple problem that you will solve in your own life because you know that problem very very well and a lot of companies are built by you know a starting co-founder that's technical solving their own problem they're their best user they at least have that one user that can uh pri like where they can prioritize the right features and then you know additionally gain users down the road but i think it's really rewarding to build an app for yourself but the thing is no one when i ask this a lot of people say well i don't i don't like they're not able to connect technology with solving their own problems and that's where the disconnect happens and that's that's the tricky thing but that's really the question they need to start with well you need to figure that out you know how can you use technology to solve your own problem you might have to learn quite a bit but maybe maybe that's the journey you start with yeah and like exactly it doesn't have to be a massive problem right like uh and there's so many like great ways to do it now like if you want to learn javascript um create a bookmarklet just a little bit of blurb of javascript that goes in your browser bar that like solves a problem you encounter every day and you're visiting that one site that drives you a little nuts um and like it may be like a really small amount of code but it solves your problem and you learn something and um and then that gives you the confidence to go well i could do that i could do another slightly more complicated thing that i didn't think i could do before it scared me but now it doesn't scare me as much because i've learned so much in the last project um and each one pushes you a little bit i like that yeah i was thinking um i like that i think when i was starting i can't remember i didn't i didn't i think i was kind of stuck like um dom what you were saying uh some of the listeners were saying like they don't quite know they can't quite connect like how technology solved their problem um but from for me i kind of was stuck in in that kind of space where i saw how technology could solve other people's problems um like tickets coming in working at an actual company and stuff like that but i didn't see how it could solve like my problems i was like kind of figuring out like well how can i solve a problem that someone was having right um but as i started to learn um javascript more in depth you you you start to get a technical mind and you start to hear other people having issues and you're like huh i wonder if i could build an app to fix that or i wonder if i could do this um just recently my wife my wife is a graphic designer so um she was um complaining a couple weeks ago and she was like you know she's like i go to these sites like i get these design briefs and these companies want me to like make a logo for them or like you know make this make this thing for them but i need to know like what the colors of the website are so then i have to go to the website and i have to open the dev tools and i have to go in i have to look at it and then i have to do this like by the time it's like an hour i'm like well would it help you if i made a chrome extension that you could automatically just pop up and then you could just see the colors and the fonts and all the images on the page and she was like yeah that'd be great um so that's what i'm doing building that and that's like we're prototyping that and she's using it now and i'm like wow like i actually built something that somebody used like you know yeah stuff like that i think um is like if you if you don't um if you can't quite connect a problem maybe to your problem then try to connect it to someone else's right like you ask people everybody has problems right um so you can ask them like what's an issue that you're facing like something right um that maybe your friend is facing could be a small problem could be a big problem whatever it is um and then try to try to solve that with with code right like try to try to go into that mindset but i think um the the biggest thing is um like like jeremy's saying like um have those incremental wins but keep like a big why in front of you because motivational uh motivation is not always consistent right so and that it comes for everything whether you're trying to lose weight or whether you're trying to learn how to code program whatever it is motivation is not going to keep you going you need to figure out what is your big why like why are you actually doing this like what is your end goal and do you actually want to accomplish it right so is your end goal to like make a bunch of money because that's probably not going to be good enough to keep you going right like oh i'm going to make like you know six figures starting out it's like it's probably not the best thing to keep going right um but you know exactly do i want to feed my family like am i doing this to take care of my family oh okay well that's a big motivational factor right you got kids you got a wife you got like you know people that count on you or you know i'm doing this to take care of myself i'm doing this so that you know i feel a sense of accomplishment something that you can you can hold on to and kind of keep as your north star and that'll help you drive through whatever challenges you may face that helped me that was good i'm motivated build something right now and figure out my why you're gonna have to keep me updated on that extension because i could really use that for what i do so yeah yeah it's called uh my my wife named it i named it i'm horrible at naming things horrible at navy things i was like i was going to david like the javascript background you know something and my wife was like no no no name it theater and then like i'll design a logo for it and then like name it get her i was like oh i was like yeah because you have like characters on css you just get whatever you want yeah yeah oh she's good yeah yeah she's very good she's very good so it's going through prototyping and adding new features and things like that and um so hopefully it'll be released at some point um yeah sweet that's awesome you know you really i didn't think about it like this but i like how you said well sometimes you really emphasize sometimes people can't connect technology with solving the problems and we were talking about that a bit and then your recommendation was well maybe just dive into the fundamentals and as you dive further into the technology you have more knowledge to be able to relate that technical stack to actually solving a problem and um i think that's really good advice something i never really thought about though that's cool yeah i'll mention also um so for a while conway's game of life was my learn any language thing because once i did it a couple times i understood it really well like how it was supposed to work what the basics of like creating one of these was and so every time i was going to learn a new programming language i was like i'm going to do that i'm going to implement that because then i don't have to worry about the problem like the definition of the problem i'm trying to solve that's already well understood all i'm wondering about is how do i express this in that language that i'm trying to learn right um so getting little things like that like um pet problems is what i used to call it these are my pet problems um like they're not they're solved already in some sense but i like to keep them a wrap because they're useful for getting to know or understand a new framework language or whatever if i can figure out how to express it in that then that i'm a little bit faster at learning that new thing so those those i think can be helpful very like i'm this class of things like i like to use these as my you know figure out how to do x in a new technology that i'm exploring i like that yeah that's really awesome yeah it's good advice for transitioning into a new language not having to worry about that same problem again what about okay so i i have a few extra things that i wanted to tackle but time is flying by um so we have 25 minutes left at max uh let's dive into the mistakes we made where'd we screw up like if you had to go back and redo some of the things becoming a software engineer just to make it a little bit easier to get that position a little bit faster what would you do differently oh man i could start with just one thing i would do differently a year and a half went by without me applying to any positions whatsoever and i i thought i was on the right path i thought i wanted a php position and it wasn't until i met other php developers and i went into a php interview that i realized first of all what i definitely did not want to do for the rest of my life and what uh i was still lacking even in that php interview i didn't do well at all and i wasn't really sure what employers were looking for i wasn't sure how they even tested me right you can read articles online but every one says different things it's data structures it's uh you know going over a specific challenge or like going over the fundamentals of specific syntax of language or it's a take-home project and like like what i can't study for everything like how am i supposed to prepare for all of this and i wish i would have went to interviews a lot sooner i think i didn't have enough confidence to do it and i kicked myself for it but i would i would recommend people if you have your first project up three months into it start applying to a few different companies see if you hear back you might not get it but um you can at least you can at least develop a system like kind of like a benchmark where you can measure how much responses you're getting compared to the knowledge that you currently have and what you have to showcase and i think it's you know healthy to have that to be able to measure and have that incremental progress that you can see yourself progressing through so i wish i would have interviewed sooner that's for me um yeah that's good i probably this is maybe a little bit related um what i would have done differently knowing in retrospect is um i would have joined some user groups i like that they're they don't cost anything they're very welcoming um there's one for any language that you can pick imagine right if you're in an urban center um like there's probably more than one that you can find and just like you know do google search for like if if you're a javascript programmer javascript user groups um and they're they're gonna be meeting somewhere and you will get an opportunity to talk to some people who do it every day and find out like what do they like talk the lingo essentially right um because developers we have a language and we talk it to each other and we use weird terms like foo and bar and everyone who's not a developer is looking at us like what is that yeah right so like but also you're gonna learn what your gaps are and as you form those friendships you're going to build a network of people who are like hey that jeremy guy's not that bad and he's on the market why don't we hire him and it's completely free for you like there's i used to not because i thought uh they're gonna know i'm a fraud like i didn't want to go because i didn't want to show all those those really smart programmers all the stuff i didn't know um but the reality is that like all of us uh developers like we love teaching other people what we do especially if that person is interested um it's it's actually kind of hard to find if they're not other people who aren't developers yet who are like into what we do or are going to do the work to understand what we do and so um they're very welcoming environments and i highly encourage anyone to like find one they don't care if you're a paid programmer or developer you're still welcome if you're interested in what they're doing that's all they really care about and they're more than happy to teach you in that environment what it is to be a developer in that language or framework or whatever i like that yeah i think looking back on it i think i would have i would have if i if i could change my mindset i would have put more emphasis and i think you touched on this don um i would have put more emphasis on the projects and the actual application of of like what i was learning in treehouse i was so i knew where i wanted to get to i wanted a job and so i get you know in up until this point you know i i had been in school i mean technically my entire life and it's always you know listen to the teacher do your homework turn it in and get the grade and so i i couldn't get out of that mindset of like i just need that certificate and to show the potential employer you know and and that wasn't that that wasn't what was going to get me the job it might it might get me a second glance maybe like oh she did you know she did study something but honestly i think um if i if i had to go back and do it again i would have slowed down on the projects and i would have maybe um you know treehouse allows you to do kind of the basic like here's the standard bulleted list like make sure you have this and then it has the kind of it has the kind of um what do you call it extra credit if you will just a teacher and me um and i did i did most of the time i did do the the a little bit extra but um i don't know i feel like i could have gotten a lot more if i just would have slowed down and and um and really took it took those projects step by step and understood what i was doing each step of the way that at least would have helped me with the new lingo because that's honestly transitioning into this career or training is transitioning into any industry you're having to learn a new language and and you know no pun intended but we're learning a new language but we're we're also learning new languages and vocabulary i mean people you know in interviews and in the job i have now they abbreviate words that i've never abbreviated before you know like what is prod oh product okay like i you know it's just like i i think i i i would have if i could go back i would change my mindset and slow down a little bit and just um build build build build and apply what i'm hearing and learning does that make sense yeah one thing that that reminds me of is like team treehouse kind of sections the courses out in different categories and it does it really well and it breaks it up very well and you know kind of pretty much what you're saying is um stop going so are you pretty much saying like stop going through the course material so fast and start reinforcing what you're learning as you go and you can even come up with like small projects like how did the course how did the lesson i just learned how could that solve a problem in real life exactly build a mini little app with it it doesn't have to be super complex it'd be very small and very specific but i like that yeah i mean like i just wasn't it's easy to say this now but i wasn't used to that you know you go into a teaching interview and they want to see that diploma and they want to see that certification and you know um that goes a long way um but you know when you step into a tech interview they want to see what you can do and um sometimes right then and there or sometimes they just want to see a project or walk you through they want you to walk them through something that you built but um but yeah exactly what you're saying um yeah cool i'm going to go on on a tangent if i don't stop so yeah it's it's so easy to like um put yourself out there for the stuff you build um like one of the things i ask hiring um to collect for me before i even like view the resume or interview the person at work is do they have a public repo somewhere github get lab bit bucket like the platform itself doesn't matter so much so long as there's they've written something for themselves that's out there that i can go look at and um and that is a like a that's a strong signal to me that um they're motivated about the the craft of creating software and i can go see what they're motivated to solve and how um and how they approach it and uh like here's the here's the funny secret about interviewing um if you can compose a function to solve a problem posed in the interview on a whiteboard you are better than like 70 of the other candidates who are going to go through that room it's it's just the reality when you start interviewing you begin to realize like i was the first time i interviewed someone i was worried he was going to be smarter than me and how do you interview someone smarter than you well actually you just hire them because they're smarter than you and that's enough but i wasn't thinking that at the time and after like about my 10th interview i was like wait a minute um for some reason like 70 of the people would struggle in the interview where i wouldn't and so that that was kind of eye-opening um in some ways so uh the build the more comfortable you're gonna be taking a problem that's given to you and translating it into some a solution in some way um and i think that's a skill that's really valuable in the interview room like we tend to think go through your algorithms and stuff and those are important but the thing i look for the most in an interview is can they take a problem break it down and then express the solution to that problem in code for me and like if they can do that i'll forgive a whole lot of other things i'm not going to care if they forgot a semicolon i don't care if they misspelled the name of that api what i really care about is could they break down the problem and express it in code and solve it um and the more things you build i think the better you get at that i really like that i like your insights too just i think it's really good bringing you on just with your experience as a hiring manager as well you you bring a lot of neat insights a lot of um a lot of very encouraging insights and it very much like relates to i had a head instructor at full stack academy that you know he really we didn't believe him but he's like you're you're above like 90 of people that you're going to be competing with i don't think you realize you know all the people like people come from all sorts of different backgrounds and a lot of people they they don't code you know like 40 to 60 hours a day like you've been doing through this coding boot camp and a lot of them um you know they're trying and they'll eventually get there but a lot of people that go through interviews um you know a lot of them struggle to they screw up on a a simple loop let alone like trying to explain how recursion works and show that in a solution and um [Music] it's just i don't know i i find it very inspiring to hear um that because i was always discouraged i had no confidence in interviews and it was very inspiring to hear that as long as you put a good amount of effort into you know working on projects and having an interest and motivation for continuing to solve these problems you're going to continue to get good enough to where you're going to be extremely competitive and i i think people had you know your mindset jeremy of like worried about the other person in the room being smarter than them and um most people that are motivated to code most people that really enjoy it just they end up doing really well once they start applying to positions and they realize they're almost there even if they don't finally get that position they're like they're so close to finally getting it um i think i'm just like rambling right now like i said lately i do that all the time but it's just inspirational it's inspirational just to hear your sight from the the hiring side of things that's all i'm saying agreed i think um i've been sitting here and thinking um just uh trying just trying to figure out like what what kind of mistakes i know i've made a lot of mistakes right um i think for me it kind of boils down to three things um that kind of i think both of you kind of touched on all of you touched on um for me it was uh i would would have started building projects sooner um definitely started building projects sooner um and then being being more vulnerable so um i started blogging but not as soon as i should have um so i have a blog out there um just blogged about just stuff that i was learning but i should have started as soon as i started learning um that's when i should have started blogging but i didn't and i was thinking well i don't know enough to blog um but you'll be surprised how much information is repetitive out there but um it's repetitive in a good way because the way that one of my mentors told me this like the way that you write may influence someone differently than the way that someone else writes so you may be able to explain how you're learning something in a different way that resonates with other people because we all know going through and learning something is is hard but it only takes that one person to write something in a certain way that you're like oh that's a loop like i've read like five different articles but this one just breaks it down so well that now i understand what a loop is or i didn't i never understood what a closure was before like oh okay now i understand what a closure is or i've never understood what promises were things like that um that you can that you can write down and kind of think through as you're as you're learning them and writing them down um and the third thing for me would be um being comfortable being an imposter um and i and i say that because uh you will believe that you were an imposter for a long time um and i've met senior devs with like 30 years of experience and they'll tell me the same thing they're like uh i worked with one uh now and he'll come to you he'll be like hey does this this code look good to you and i'm like you got way more experience than i did this looks good like like he asked you he's like no no no he's like just sometimes i second-guess myself you seeking against yourself yeah oh there's no way you sing against yourself but it happens right like we're all we're all human no matter how many years of experience we have or how many languages we know um so being comfortable i i wrote an article about this too um like that impostor syndrome that you get so like being comfortable being an imposter you're not right you're not an imposter um but you will feel like it for a long time but it's it's trying to get comfortable being that impostor until you're no longer imposter you don't feel it as much right um so i think those are the things that um i probably would have done um i definitely would have built more projects i have projects on github now in different languages um but i only learned that like after right like after treehouse i was like oh well the projects from treehouse are enough you're right you know right they people know um but they don't right they they look at that and they're like yeah what have you built um yeah you know so uh shortly afterwards i started building this project called recommend it which um was a still in development it's always like in development um but uh it's it's an application that allows um companies um to um have people inside their company like uh recommend things to each other right so like in if you're in a company pre-pandemic right you you probably come into a brand new company not know anything not know where things are probably right but you'd be able to go to this place where other people have recommended there's the best place to get your you know your car washed or this is the best place to get your oil changed or this is the best place around here right so um that was something that um i saw a problem uh at my company that i was at and i was like like everyone has all these recommendations they're recommending but like how would anybody know you know great things and you get great things from from all different people um so having it in one place would be awesome to be able to see like you know i think you could like them you could share them all that stuff so like still in development there's a the website is up you can technically use it but i haven't i haven't uh i haven't done a lot to it uh since recommended.netify.com but you know um but yeah those are the things that i i would have i would have done um had i known what i know now yeah cool i really like that um i really like that we really we focused on first of all okay i'm gonna i gotta sum this up first of all everyone here did a really good job of being able to show the vulnerable parts of their story and i think that's those are the kind of stories that people really connect with and they because it's it's very easy to when you don't meet other software engineers to not see your path as this path that's going to lead to becoming a software engineer because it's messy and it's you have uh bumps of motivation and then you lose it and sometimes you give up for six months and life happens and it's very easy to think well i'm just not meant to be a software engineer and many people that share these vulnerable stories and share that they you know sometimes they almost gave up sometimes you know they couldn't even put a roof over their head some you know like they had family to take care of these are real situations this is how self-taught developers like these are probably more common situations than you realize for self-taught developers and um so hopefully this was encouraging for everyone i appreciate you sharing your stories this is all really good we are out of time um so before i break my promise to you let's go ahead and end this within four minutes let's go ahead and jump right into our outros feel free to shout something out um you know if you have a website if you've instagram anything like that shout it out but whitley if people wanted to where could they reach you um i am mainly i'm on linkedin um but a newer passion of mine in this new kind of chapter in life that i'm in is to help people that are wanting to change careers that are that are that are kind of getting that itch you know to learn how to code or you know and um so i i definitely share a lot on my instagram um about that and you know another piece of advice that i would give is find a mentor um find someone that is doing what what you want to do or um you know in the tech industry uh not not just a mentor to teach you how to code but a mentor to tell you on those imposter days that that they've been through it too you know what i mean so that being said um i i have a passion for mentorship and that kind of thing so i'm trying to do that over on my instagram which is whitleybone.png um and then uh my company alert media if you're in the austin texas area is actually hiring their hiring spree so a bunch of developer positions open if you want to find me on linkedin i can send you that i can send you that link to to get you started there so yeah very cool thank you and if you ever have any questions about uh just like i don't know where you're going to take the mentorship but happy to tell you what not to do oh excellent the mistakes you need to be my mentor you can be my mentor and how to mentor that's good so uh for everyone watching thank you so much definitely subscribe we're gonna keep doing videos like this um and keep suggesting videos if you like this video like it um if you have advice about the video or you just uh hey if you if you like the video also comment it helps with the algorithm i found that uh youtube algorithm is is a really tricky thing but where you guys talk in the comments uh youtube loves my videos keeps promoting it so keep doing it thank you but yeah just let me know what you think of this and what you want to see in the future how about you jeremy yeah um thanks for having us on don i enjoyed the last one and i enjoyed this one quite a bit too so if you ever have another topic feel free to invite me if it's something i know about um uh i'd love to oh i'm as i said i i'm a principal engineer at go hell we are hiring pretty aggressively in the chicago area um so uh if if any of you are out there looking for a job maybe consider applying there that sounds good if my business ever fails your company is one of the ones i'm going to be applying to thank you aaron how about you yeah um some on several different platforms linkedin obviously um and i'm on twitter uh abdevelops um us on instagram i post some things on there too a b the coder um on instagram and um i think that's about it um yeah my uh my company's not hiring um but i know of some other companies that are sales loss is hiring and i think terminus is also hiring too they're sas companies both great companies to work at but yeah i love it because every software engineer wants to see others succeed you're even just offering companies that you don't even work at it's really cool all right well everyone thanks so much for watching really appreciate this of course we're gonna do more videos um i have a bunch queued up what i'm probably gonna start doing within a few weeks is releasing two videos a week so look out for that but yeah i really appreciate you watching subscribe whitley jeremy aaron thank you so much for coming on thank you man this is awesome thank you yeah this is great [Music] ladies

Channel: DonTheDeveloper

Views: 64,862

Rating: 4.9633589 out of 5

Keywords: web development podcast, self-taught developer, self-taught web developer, how to become a self-taught developer, self taught, how to code, web developer, software engineering for beginners, software developer career, self taught programmer vs bootcamp, software engineering day in the life, web development 2021, teamtreehouse review, teamtreehouse, self-taught programmer, self taught programmer, learning to code, donthedeveloper podcast, donthedeveloper

Id: _ORc-ckmgHw

Length: 75min 7sec (4507 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021