My BIGGEST Regrets When I First Learned to Code

way back in 2014 i taught myself to code i was a self-taught programmer and actually landed my first job and looking back on it with all the experience that i have now of mentoring and coaching people who are trying to become software developers and helping a lot of them to get there i noticed that there are things that i did back then in terms of my habits choices i made that were not very good they were what i would call regrets so what i wanted to do in this video is talk about some of the biggest mistakes i made during that process when i was trying to become a software developer so that many of you guys could avoid a lot of that so that's what we're going to talk about let's go ahead and dive into it looking back on 2014 i think the the big regret that comes to mind first is just thinking that more is better when it comes to study time i think that back then i was all about hard work and the hustle culture and the ten thousand hour rule that was popularized by malcolm gladwell which basically says that when you spend about ten thousand hours doing anything you become good at it like if you want to become a skateboarder you spend ten thousand hours skateboarding you'll become like really good at it you become a master whatever you want to call it so putting these ideas together i thought that if i could study 50 60 hours per week that that would get me to my goal a lot faster and i would be the best possible developer that i could be in a short period of time and i think this idea is good but it's not great and you can go really wrong with this so one of the things that you want to make sure you're doing as you're on your journey here or in the early stages at the very least is you have to be balanced with how you approach this so what i mean is that basically at any given point during the week you're going to hit a certain threshold of hours that you studied and there's going to be a diminishing return on those hours studied right so maybe the first 20 to 25 hours you're gonna spend every week are going to be good high quality you're gonna get a lot from them but at a certain point it's just going to not be as effective either you're not going to retain the information as well maybe when you're actually studying you're not actually studying because you're opening facebook but in your mind you're thinking well if i'm from in front of the computer thinking about programming it doesn't matter what i do there's a number of things that happen as you sort of increase your time now for some of you guys it will be 20 hours or 25 hours for others of you maybe it's 35 40. it kind of depends on your life situation so if you are working or not working that makes a big difference if you have family commitments or no family commitments these things can make a big difference on how much time that you can spend but i'd say 60 hours a week let's just get that off the table i think most people can usually do about 40 hours maximum and i'd say maximum spread across seven days for many of you guys it will be closer to 20 or 25 hours but you have to figure that out i recommend tracking your time and really starting to see and being able to make distinctions for yourself of when you start to have those diminishing results as far as your time so just want to be clear here definitely want to spend as much time as you can studying but just be paying attention to when the study time actually is not effective when you're distracted when you find that the process is unbearable maybe that means taking breaks getting away from programming so that you recharge and ultimately when you do spend your time studying you're getting the maximum effectiveness out of that time the second thing i regret looking back in 2014 is just the fact that i didn't build a lot of projects so i definitely built some challenging projects like if you look at what i built back then i built a tetris app which was oddly enough the first thing i built and that was super challenging but i i always downplayed the idea of doing simple projects like an expense tracker or like a to-do app because i think my problem was that i just i couldn't settle for something that was that simple but i always made those projects much harder than they had to be so i was like if i'm going to do to do app it has to be a big ordeal but there's actually a lot of value in creating smaller projects at least early on just sort of over and over again so building something like a to-do app is definitely something i recommend it's not something you should go like well you know i really want to step up my game here um you could also build something that's similar to a to-do app over and over again right so you could build an expense tracker you could build a note taker you could build an application that tracks your favorite books your favorite recipes whatever it may be but it's okay to build things over and over again it's more about repetition and drilling down a lot of the fundamentals a lot of concepts just over and over again now i would recommend over time increasing the challenge level right to get to the point where you're building complex and challenging applications but it's not necessarily that you are only going to build one application the whole time and that's going to go in your portfolio don't be afraid to build smaller things to get your confidence going now speaking of regrets if you don't go down below and smash the like button i promise you that you will regret it so make sure to go down there and do that also if you haven't subscribed to my channel which is all about how to become a programmer make sure to go down there hit the subscribe button also make sure to hit the bell icon so you get notifications anytime i put out a new video and really i'd say my last regret is that i wasn't very confident when i went into the job hunt process when i probably should have been and this is a little bit different but kind of bear with me here so when i started applying for jobs i felt like the biggest imposter ever like who am i to go out there i'm just this guy who's been doing it on his own like why should i deserve this but here's the thing i committed my life to this like up to that point it had been about a year or closer year the very least where i was consistent i was spending a bulk of my time doing this i was doing pretty much anything i possibly could to land my first job and be good enough to land that first job and so i think the thing i wish is that i at least had the confidence to feel worthy of an interview maybe i wasn't good enough right like who knows if i was truly good enough if i met that threshold but if you've done everything you could if you put in the time if you followed the process as they say then going to an interview is you should feel that you deserve it you shouldn't feel that you're entitled to it and you shouldn't feel entitled that you should get a job but say hey i've done everything i could up into this point so just let the chips fall where they may so the biggest thing for those of you who are out there who are maybe about to start applying for jobs or getting the job hunt process and you feel imposter syndrome use the fact that you have been committed to this you've been consistent hopefully and that should be reason enough to be confident doesn't mean you have to be arrogant or cocky but just be confident yourself and like i said let the chips fall where they may all right so those are the biggest regrets i have looking back on when i was learning to code i genuinely hope that this video has been helpful definitely leave a comment if this video has helped or if you want to share anything on your journey as well all right now other than that if you are interested in getting more content from me i would definitely recommend jumping into my facebook group i will leave a link in the description below of how you can do that uh that's pretty much it for today so thank you so much as always for watching and peace out

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 15,384

Rating: 4.9795656 out of 5

Keywords: self-taught programmer, self taught software engineer, self-taught software developer, learning to program, programming, learn to code, how to learn programming, learn to program, first time programming, programming for beginners, coding for beginners, learn programming, how to learn to code

Id: PJmXuyatLEw

Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021