5 Reasons Why You Should Learn to Code!

Key Takeaways

hello everybody and welcome back to the youtube video so in today's video i will be discussing why i think everybody including yourself should learn how to code now i'm not just targeting this at people that want to become software engineers or get into the tech industry i think everybody can get a tremendous amount of value from learning how to code and i'll give you five reasons why in this video now before we get started let me quickly mention that the sponsor of today's video which is fast host is doing a massive giveaway if you're located in the uk and you can answer my techie test question which i'll be talking about later in the video you'll have a chance to win your ultimate tech setup including your dream pc with up to 5 000 pounds this is an awesome giveaway and i'll be talking about how you can enter later in the video [Music] so the first and number one reason i recommend people learn how to code is that it teaches them how to think and it teaches them how to problem solve these two skills are so important in every aspect of life and unfortunately i see especially in today's youth they're just being lost deteriorated and a lot of people really are not learning them at all now you can blame whoever you want for that you can blame the school system whatever it may be but i think it is so important to be good at problem solving and critical thinking and well coding will definitely help you do that when you're programming you are going to encounter hundreds of problems probably every day and you need to be able to break those problems down think about them and solve them there is not going to be anyone there holding your hand and telling you what to do although you can find answers on google to be able to even interpret those answers and understand what's being said it really requires a lot of thinking and that is one of the reasons i personally really like coding because it forces me to think it forces me to really use my brain and i cannot think of many other situations where i use my brain power as much as when i'm sitting in front of the computer and programming and of course this also happens when you're just learning how to code building a mental model of what's going on in this programming language and thinking about the tools that you have and how you can apply them to certain problems is such an important skill and you master that when you get good at programming even learning the basic concepts the basic logic really does teach you a lot and i want to tell you a quick story about when i taught kids how to code they were between 8 and 15 years old to really drill this point home so a bit of context for about five years i worked at a summer camp for three of those years i ran a coding specialty there which ran about three hours each day and the goal of it it was a week long was to teach kids basic python programming and be able to create their own choose your own adventure game or quiz game by the end of the week super successful program a lot of kids really enjoyed it and it was one of the highlights of my summer every time that i did it was really seeing these kids learning and introducing them to a new technology that genuinely could change their life because not many people learn python programming at 10 11 12 years old this was around 8 to 15 that was the age range for this specialty so i just wanted to tell you a quick story about the number one factor that led to a kid's success in this program and you can probably guess what it was but it was simply their ability to think i had kids of all different age ranges all different backgrounds all different you know some went to private school some went to public school some were exchange students whatever it may be i had every person you can imagine every type of kid in this group and the number one factor it was not age it was not gender it was not what school they went to it wasn't good how good they were at math it was simply their ability to think that affected how good they were going to be in this program and it really just opened my eyes to that fact that programming is such a good way to practice problem solving and to practice thinking and the kids they were already good at doing that picked it up so quickly they were the ones who would look at a problem on the board and go off and try to solve it themselves they would be the ones who would sit there for an hour and slam the laptop on their face and be like i can't get it but yet still not ask me a question because they wanted to struggle through and figure it out whereas most the other kids i had would give it about 30 seconds one two three minutes maybe and then immediately come up to me with their laptop and say hey i don't know how to do it can you help me can you can you fix it for me so i always tried my hardest to make sure that they thought through everything before i gave them any answers but it just really opened my eyes how important thinking was and how having that skill especially at a young age even having a kid that was say eight years old he could easily outperform someone who was 14 or 15 simply because he wanted to think so i'll just leave that with you so the second reason i recommend learning to code is because there is a huge opportunity especially right now to make money from coding the demand for programmers is so high and not just programmers that are working as software engineers at a company of course the best way you're going to make money programming and one of the safest ways would be to go get a job at some company right and get paid to program i understand most the people watching this might not be doing that that might not be a goal of theirs what you can do however though is make money on the side with your programming skills now i don't want to get into this too much because i have a whole video covering it so i will link that video in the description and put a card somewhere in the corner here that you can click on but one of the great things with programming is if you're someone who's entrepreneurial you want to start a business some kind of digital product you don't need to pay someone or get an investment to do that you can build it yourself now of course that's going to take you some time but let's say all the only reason you want to learn how to code is so you can build a website then literally just learn exactly what you need to do to build the thing that you're trying to build that's what i do whenever i'm trying to build something new i don't care about all the other stuff i just focus completely on whatever is going to help me build the project that i'm trying to build you don't need to be a software engineer you don't need to learn data structures and algorithms just learn enough to build the product you want and you can probably build that in just a few months so it's a great opportunity with really low cost maybe you have to rent a server or something that's like 5 or 10 bucks a month to try out a company to try out a business idea and hey you never know we've seen products like instagram snapchat all these things that started off really bare bones that had pretty much no crazy features that were built by one or two people that have exploded into huge massive companies where the owners now are making billions of dollars a year i'm not saying that's going to be you but that is the potential you have by learning a skill like program now if you are looking to use your coding ability in an entrepreneurial way where you're going to be hosting an app or a website or whatever it may be you may be interested in the sponsor of this video fast host is a uk-based web hosting company which offers a wide range of web hosting products and other services they aim to support uk businesses and entrepreneurs at all levels by providing effective and affordable hosting to suit any need they provide fast affordable and fully customizable cloud servers to give you power and flexibility on demand combine your choice of cpu ram and ssd storage to create a cloud server that suits your exact needs their dedicated servers provide high performance hardware with intel xeon processors and storage options including super fast nvmes this is perfect for demanding projects so now it's time to talk about the giveaway as i mentioned earlier if you're located in the uk you have a chance to win the ultimate tech setup and your dream pc worth up to 5 000 pounds to enter simply answer the following techie test question what year was the basic programming language invented you can submit your answers and enter the giveaway by hitting the link in the description and get started on your next project by checking out fast hosts now the next reason i think you should learn how to code is because you can automate repetitive tasks i think this is a really underrated reason but you can actually build some really cool projects and tools that automate things that you might do on your average day that take you a long period of time now it's hard for me to come up with great examples because this is really specific to what you do and what you're working on on a day-to-day basis but say you do a lot of data entry it's probably the best example and you take one excel spreadsheet and you have to take some columns of it or some rows from it and put it in another spreadsheet or make a graph of it or something like that well rather than doing that yourself you could spend maybe half the time it would normally take you to do that to just program out a really basic tool that can do it for you i know personally for me a lot of the time when i used to get given data entry jobs i used to work a long time ago when i was probably 14 for an automation company funnier enough it was a home automation company and they needed me to do some like a really monotonous data entry it was going to take me like two weeks i had to look through like 5 000 lines of this spreadsheet and i had to look for all of the companies that had like a certain code beside their name and put it in another spreadsheet anyway something basic like that and after i was doing it for like an hour or two i was like this is taking a really long time i know how to program let me see if i can come up with something that would just do this automatically it wasn't super complicated what i had to do and within about two or three hours i was actually making a fully functioning bot that could automatically do all of the data entry i was supposed to do so i hand back to my boss you know at the end of the day i'm like yeah i finished it and he's like how did you do that like that's impossible like did you give this to someone else with someone else working on you i'm like no this is just a script i wrote that did it right and then all of a sudden the next day i didn't have very much work to do right so just basic things like that if you know how to program it opens up your ability to create these really cool tools that can save you honestly hours maybe even days of time so the fourth reason i think you should learn how to code is because coding is the language of the future what i mean by this is more and more people are learning how to code more people know how to code today than they ever have before and while i can only imagine that trend is going to continue upwards i know here in ontario they've implemented coding into our school system as early as grade two i know it was in my high school system in university i know a lot of people in majors not related to computer science that had to take programming and well i can only imagine that as the years go on it's going to become more required and more mandatory and more people are going to assume that you have an idea of what programming is i think back in the day it was given the wrap that only the really smart people were programming only the nerves were programming whatever it may be but now programming is becoming something that is much more mainstream i have no idea where it's going to go or what's going to end up happening but i just want to make an interesting comparison for you to consider so in school we learn about geography history math biology we learn a lot of basic things and gather a lot of knowledge that most people assume we all know right if you go in a room and you ask people what country do you live in most of them know the answer to that right now i know that sounds like a stupid thing to say but think about it the world we live in right now is so digital that i'd say about 50 of our time every day is spent in this digital world we're on a computer we're dealing with a web browser we're you know searching the web on our phone we're calling someone texting someone yet how many people understand how any of that works and what any of that really is i would say a very small percentage of the population and i would think just with common sense if we're going to be living in such a digital high-tech world it would make sense to have some kind of understanding of how that world operated right just like you learn about the physics of like i throw a ball up it goes down maybe we should understand the physics of this digital world that we're living in more and more that's kind of my only point here with this one here but i just think that you're doing yourself a little bit of a disservice by not learning to code or at least having a very basic understanding of what that actually means now the fifth and final reason why i think you should learn how to code is because it makes an impression on people and it looks great on a resume let me expand upon this by first asking you to consider the following situation so say you met me you had no idea who i was and you asked me the question hey oh you know what program are you studying what courses are you in blah blah blah you asked me something like that related to school and i told you oh i'm actually in astrophysics that's what i told you i'm in astrophysics what would your immediate impression of me be just without knowing anything else just being able to see me and hearing that you would probably think oh he must be smart right and anyone that tells you they're in astrophysics unless they have some other crazy quality about them that you know you probably think that they are smart anyone who says they're in applied mathematics or advanced physics or whatever it may be you probably think that they are smart these are the stereotypes we associate with certain degrees with certain people now the same thing happens with coding if you tell someone that you know how to code and if they don't know very much about that subject they're going to assume that you have a certain level of intelligence now that level of intelligence is going to be based on whatever their bias is whatever they've seen and know about coding if they know a little bit about it they might know oh okay you don't have to actually be that good to be good at coding and maybe that doesn't mean anything to them but for a vast majority of people especially ones that know nothing about tech they're going to assume that you are smart and that is only going to be to your advantage if you can make a good first impression on people i'm not saying go out and tell everyone you know how to code but more in say like a job interview situation or on a resume that is a huge advantage if you're applying to a job that's not tech related at all yet you know how to program and that's front and center on your resume and people can see that well that is going to be an advantage for you and it's going to make you stand out another thing too right is that if you go to the interview and you say oh this is a cool automation tool i made to speed up my workflow not only does that show that you're taking initiative to be more efficient and productive but it shows that you know something that almost no one else who's applying here does and that's something that the interviewer is going to remember about you right so that is just another reason to learn to code honestly it just makes you look good i can't tell you the amount of people i've told them i'm in computer science and immediately our conversation the tone of it drastically changes maybe they were talking down to me before maybe they thought i was dumb whatever it may be now all of a sudden they have a different perspective of me because i'm in computer science so just something to keep in mind and the last thing i wanted to bring up because i think it is a huge asset especially if you're applying to jobs and it's not like your main skill it's something on the side that you can talk about so anyways that has been this video don't forget to answer that techie test question all the information is in the description if you're in the uk and be entered to win your dream tech setup worth about 5 000 euros so anyways if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you leave a like subscribe to the channel and of course i will see you again in another youtube [Music] video