everybody how's it go and just
want to do a quick introduction here
basically, in this video, I wanted to
Share with you the story of how I went
from quite literally never having
written a line of code in my life to
landing a job as a software engineer at
Google in just a little over six months
and as you'll see in this video I really
tried to be candid and transparent
because I want to give you sort of
accurate information I want to paint a
real picture of what happened without
leaving out important details but at the
same time without sort of adding a bunch
of useless information and hopefully
this video will be just that me telling
you what I did during these six months
so with that, I hope that this video will
be insightful maybe even inspirational
or at the very least
interesting and enjoy so I graduated
from college in May of 2016 with a major
in math, in college, I had been sort of
all over the place, I was gonna major in
visual studies at one point then I was
gonna major in economics then
mathematical economics and I ended up in
math but the point is that when I
graduated from college I had never
written a single line of code in my life
and that was largely due to two reasons
the first one is that I had this really
bad misconception that if who hadn't
been studying coding since you were a
kid or since high school you couldn't do
it in college couldn't do computer
science in college really annoys me
thinking back that I had this
misconception but I did have it the
the second reason is that I didn't like it I
had seen other people do some coding and
I was just kind of turned off by it and
I had dabbled in HTML and CSS for one
weekend in college by the way I realized
that some of you here gonna thank, oh but
you said you never wrote the line of
code in your life HTML and CSS you know
learning the fundamentals of HTML and
CSS is not quite the same thing as you
know learning how to write Python or
JavaScript or C++ I bet that someone in
the comments here is gonna be like you
you said that you never wrote a single
line of code in your life and yet you
wrote HTML and CSS you get the ideas and
I just didn't like it I did not like the
the very little amount of HTML CSS I'd
done during that one weekend and so I
just had never picked it up very quickly
after I graduated from college I
realized that a lot of the things that I
wanted to do launch my own business or
work in product management and venture
capital all these things required coding
skills and I just discovered what coding
boot camps were so I decided you know
what I'm gonna apply to a coding boot
camp and I'm gonna learn how to code and
that is really the sort of the start of my
software engineering journey or my
journey to software engineering that's
when it started in early June of 2016
a few weeks after I'd graduated from
college when I started applying to these
coding boot camps I applied to for
coding boot camps and I wrote my very
the first real line of code while applying
to them the way that these coding boots
camps work is that they don't want their
students to arrive on the first day of
in-person classes or online classes
having never written a single line of
code in their lives they want them at
that point in time to be at a sort of
very elementary level of coding
knowledge but they want them to be able
to understand basic code so in order not
to sort of discriminate against people
like me who have never written a line of
code in their lives or who had never
written a line of code in their lives
they give you preparatory material when
you apply you know you can check off the
box that says I've never written a line
of code in my life and they send you
material very basic material to teach
you the sort of fundamentals of
programming and so I remember I applied
to these coding boot camps in you know
early June of 2016 about a few weeks
after I graduated from college and I
started learning how to code from these
sort of you know online articles that
they sent me I learned about conditional
statements you know if else I learned
about loops and you know very basic
recursion I remember
recursion was sort of like you know
advanced topic and that's when I wrote
my very first line of code now to get
into these coding boot camps, you have to
pass an interview brightly's back then
when I was applying I had to pass an
interview and those interviews were very
very similar to the types of coding
interviews that you get at Google if
you're applying to Google as a software
engineer except for way easier basically you
know they'll ask you a few coding
interview questions very easy ones like
no, write a function that determines if a
a string is a palindrome the type of easy
questions on algo expert and if you pass
if you do well on those interviews you
get in and so as you can imagine in the
preparatory material that they have
given me where I was sort of learning
how to code they gave a lot of practice
problems for their interviews and I
remember I did a lot of them and I got
very into them, that was probably what
sort of pulled me into coding at the
very beginning I really liked I
immediately fell in love with this sort
of coding interview questions, I remember
loving to do the palindrome question or
to do the Caesar cipher encrypter
the question that was one that I had was
given at the time as a practice problem
and I just found it very enjoyable very
fun and so during you know the first few
weeks of June 2016 I found myself doing
a lot of these sort of you know easy
coding interview questions as I was
learning the very fundamentals of
programming so then I was accepted to
all four of the coding boot camps that I
had applied to and I decided to attend
full-stack Academy in New York City and
their program was gonna be four months
three months were the sort of immersive
in-person part of the program from
September to mid-December and then there
was gonna be one month before the
the program started in August that would
just be sort of self-directed at home
with some, you know tutorials and things
they would send me and so I remember I
spent the month of July 2016 to sort of
very excited that I'd gotten into the
program and kind of you know going back
to playing video games all day I
remember I didn't
any coding during that month then the
the month of August rolled around and I
started doing their sort of pre-work
online and during that time I wasn't
doing anything too crazy
I was following what they were doing it
were you know just a few hours of coding
per day I wouldn't say that I was doing
anything particularly more than that in
large part because they were sort of
warning you telling you do what we're
giving you not much more you'll have
plenty of coding to do during the three
months of the immersive part of the
program so I sort of just took them by
out by their word and did just that
then the immersive part of the coding
boot camp started it went from September
2016 all the way to December 2016 or
mid-December and those three months and
a half was really the highlight of my
journey to software engineering during
those three months I was living and
breathing coding and most of my peers
most of the people in the coding boot
camp with me was doing the same thing
or similar things but I was really I
really treated that as all I'm gonna do
during those three months and a half is
coding and coding related stuff because
it's really important to understand
that this was big this was sort of a
it wasn't too risky but it was a
the big thing to have done this coding boot
camp I say it wasn't that risky because
you know I just graduated from college
but it was still a big big thing it cost
a lot of money you know somewhere but
somewhere around $17,000 half of which I
had paid using all the money that I'd
saved up in college
and you know my parents weren't thrilled
that I was suddenly you know doing this
huge like rant seemingly random career
shifts immediately after graduating
college and I really told myself if I'm
gonna take this seriously or if I'm
gonna try to actually make something out
of this, I better take it seriously so
all I was doing was coding I was
basically spending I would say you know
14-hour days doing coding related stuff
I would spend the first sort of eight
hours of the
you know that the coding boot camp sort
of had structured for you
they're obviously doing their classes
and doing their projects and all that
but then I would stay at the coding
Bootcamp campus and I would do other
stuff other coding stuff I was lucky
that I was really good friends with some
of the students there and we were
kind of together in it together there
and then I would come home really late I
remember I would come home every every
night at like midnight or 1:00 a.m. and
I would still continue doing a bit of
coding but the point is I was really
just living and breathing coding I want
to highlight this next point which is
that during the coding boot camp I got
very very hooked on this website
called code Wars
code Wars is a website that gives you
these sort of like coding puzzles and
challenges they're kind of like coding
interview questions but a little bit
scary I will see you in the next one
1 Comments
hy my beast wishes to you
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