From the day I wrote my first Hello World program, it took me 2 years to land a job at Amazon and
another 2 years to get into Google. That’s because I did all this with no Computer Science degree or
bootcamp. I made countless mistakes along the way which made my path to become a Software
Engineer longer than it should have been. I watched countless Youtube tutorials, paid
for numerous Udemy courses and spent hundreds of hours learning things that didn’t add any value.
If I could go back in time and undo all the things that don’t work,
I would be in the exact same situation as today within 6 months of starting programming.
That’s exactly why I made this video. Today, I'll remove all the useless fluff and give
you the fastest path to go from a beginner to a full-time Software Engineer.
Before I begin, there are 3 major mistakes that can slow down your progress to become a full-time
Software Engineer. I will also share these 3 mistakes along the way. So, stay tuned for that.
As a new programmer, the first decision you need to make is “Which programming language to
learn?”. To answer that question, let’s talk about what a beginner wants from a programming language.
Number 1, The language should be easy and intuitive to write. It should not require
learning very complex syntax. It should be as close as possible to writing in English.
Next, The programming language should be versatile and have many applications. As a beginner,
you don’t want to learn a new language for every new project you want to build. In other words,
the language should have great returns for the time you invest on learning it.
Lastly, the programming language should be fast to write. You shouldn’t have to waste time
spelling out the declaration of a new variable or simple iteration through a list. In other words,
it should be concise and get the job done in minimum lines of code. As some of you might have
already guessed it, Python is the language that solves all these problems. It’s almost
as easy as writing in English. It has so many different applications like Web development, Data
Science and Automation. Python is extremely fast to write when compared with other popular languages.
That's because it requires less lines of code for the same amount of code.
As an example, here is the same code written in Java vs Python. For me personally, I started
out with learning Java. I used to do all my coding interviews in Java. Recently, I switched to using
Python and it improved my interview performance by at least 2 times because it’s so fast to write.
Having said that, Java and other popular languages have their own advantages and you will
have to learn another language at some point in your career. But
I do believe that Python would be the best language to start with.
Now that we know we should learn Python, let’s talk about how to do it. And this is where most
new programmers make the first major mistake that slows them down. The mistake most beginners make
is that they learn by watching others code. Let me explain this by telling you how most people
learn programming. Most newbies would go to a course provider like Udemy and look up for Python
courses. Then they pick one of these 20+ hours courses thinking that these courses are long and
detailed and hence good for them. And then they never end up finishing the course. That’s because
20 hours of content is not the same as 20 hours of great content. Some people will go to Youtube
and watch someone else code without ever writing any code themselves. And watching these tutorials
gives them a false sense of progress. That’s because coding in your head is very different
from actually writing down the code and debugging the errors. So, what is the right way to do it?
The answer is very simple, you should Learn by Coding. For this, you can go to this free website
called learnpython.org. On this website, just focus on the basic lessons for Python and don’t
worry about Data Science tutorials or any Advanced tutorials. That's because even if you
learn advanced concepts right now, you would not be able to remember them until you have actually
applied them on a real world problem. You can always come back to learn the advanced concepts in
the future when you need them for your projects. If you look at a lesson, each lesson first explains a basic concept
and then asks you to apply those concepts to a problem. Feel free to play with the sample code.
Think about other problems you can solve with concepts you just learnt and try to solve them
in the exercise portion. Once you’re done with the basics, you’re good to move on to the next steps.
In the spirit of learning by coding, we would do some projects in Python next. In the beginning,
it’s very hard to do something on your own. So, we’ll take the help of experts. So,
go to Youtube and look up this video called “12 beginner Python projects” by freecodecamp.org,
which by the way is a great channel to follow. In this video,
they build 12 beginner Python projects from scratch. These projects include building Madlibs,
Tic Tac toe, Minesweeper etc. and all of them are very interesting. They walk you through
the implementation of all these projects step by step making it very easy to follow. But,
before you start watching this tutorial, there are 2 things you should know. One, You should
not watch this tutorial casually. Follow along if you really want to learn programming and become a
Software Engineer. To follow along, you would need something called Integrated Development
Environment or IDE to build these projects. IDE in simplest terms is an application where you can
write and run your code. There are several popular IDEs for Python. This tutorial uses VS code. So,
you might want to download VS code and set it up for Python before starting on this tutorial.
Once you have completed this tutorial, you are ready to work on your own projects.
Working on building your own projects will help you in multiple ways. Number one,
it will introduce you to how Software Engineers work in the real world. You will write code that
will fail and you’ll debug it and repeat it over and over again. This is exactly what
a day in the life of a Software Engineer looks like. Number two, you will build a portfolio
of projects by doing this. You can host your code on Github and put the link in your resume.
This will help you attract recruiters and get your resume shortlisted. Lastly, building your
own projects will give you confidence that you are ready to tackle new challenges as a Software
Engineer. But, what kind of projects should you work on?
You can think of any projects that you find interesting but here are some examples I found.
You can build a Web crawler, or an Alarm clock, or maybe an app that gives you Wikipedia article of the day.
Some example projects that
I built were a Spam filter, an Algorithmic Trading engine and an e-commerce website.
Now you have a great resume and you are confident about your programming skills.
Let’s start applying for Software Engineer positions. Wait a second. This is actually the second
major mistake new programmers make.
You see, in an ideal world, having good programming skills and a great resume is all you should need to
become a Software Engineer. But unfortunately for us, tech companies like to play games with
us in the interviews. They ask you specific kinds of programming questions in the interviews. If you
don’t prepare for these questions, you might not get the expected results. So,
let’s see how to prepare for interviews. All the interviews are based on this one course that is
taught to all Computer Science graduates. This course is called Data Structures and Algorithms.
Fortunately for us, Google has created this course and made it available for free on Udacity. And the
best part is that this course is taught in Python. In this four week course, you’ll learn
about different algorithms related to searching and sorting. You’ll learn about data structures
like maps, trees and graphs. Don’t worry if you don’t know any of these terms right now. I am
sure that by the end of this course, you’ll be a pro. For that just keep 2 things in mind . One,
be regular and finish this course. As I mentioned earlier, most people start courses and never
finish them. So, make sure you take small steps everyday and make regular progress. Two,
make sure you complete all the exercises they give in this course. As I have already said many times,
the only way to learn coding is by doing. So, implement the algorithms by yourself if you can
and finish all the assignments. Trust me when I say this. When it comes to interviewing for
entry level jobs, this course is the only difference between you and someone who dropped
more than a hundred thousand dollars on a computer science degree. So, if you finish this course,
you’ll be pretty much on par with someone who has a CS degree when you interview.
After completing this course on Data Structures and Algorithms, you have all the foundational
knowledge you need to tackle the interviews. In order to sharpen your interview skills further,
you need to practice some questions that have been asked by tech companies in the past. For that,
you should use a website called Leetcode. On leetcode, you will get interview style questions.
You can write your code and test your solution right there on the website. Leetcode is great for
beginners because all the questions are tagged easy, medium or hard based on difficulty level.
If you buy a premium subscription of the website, you can also filter the questions by the tech
company that asked them in the past interviews. You should start with easy questions and keep
working on them until you can solve them in 45 minutes. Once that happens, you can move
on to medium questions.When you start solving mediums in 45 minutes, you can start applying
for Software Engineering jobs. If you are lucky, you will get the job right away. For most people,
it will be a process full of disappointment and rejections. And this is where they
make the third and the biggest mistake of all, They quit. The main reason people give up early
is because they overthink and complicate the interview process. After every rejection,
they replay the interview over and over in their head to figure out why they failed and take every
rejection personally. To avoid this, stay inside your circle of control and try to influence the
outcome of your interviews but never get tangled in the things you can’t control. In other words,
do your best to crack the interviews but try to be detached from the outcome of the interviews. If
you want to learn about how I became a Software Engineer without a Computer Science degree,
watch this video at the top. If you want to see my 5 year coding journey in 5 minutes,
you can watch this other video. I will see you in the next one.
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