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Key Takeaways

if i forgot everything i knew about programming and had to start over from square one what would i do differently to make sure that i became an efficient programmer as quickly as possible [Music] welcome back to web dev simplified my name is kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner in this video i'm going to give you the roadmap that i would follow if i was starting over from scratch with programming and the first thing i would do is to try to expose myself to as much programming content as possible just take it all in it doesn't matter if it's web development game development desktop development software development in general just absorb as much knowledge as you can don't let this period go on for too long but just spend some time weeks maybe even a month or so just absorbing content figuring out what's out there figuring out what makes you excited what bores you what do you like what don't you like because programming is a huge and vast topic and maybe you're super into like low level hardware programming on like you know microchips or maybe you're super into like quantum computing and like ai and all these other cool things like there are so many different topics out there so try to just expose yourself to as many of them as you can just figure out what they all are and figure out which ones actually click with you because once you figure out what clicks with you it's much easier to be like okay this is the thing that i'm going to learn or this is the thing that i'm going to focus on and once you've figured what actually clicks with you you may think that the next step is to like find some regimented program that takes you from step 0 all the way to complete programming master but the problem with that is it's kind of boring i mean you may think that the most efficient thing to do is just figure out what you need to do from 0 to 100 and you're going to be good but it'd be kind of like using a musical instrument for example where you're trying to learn how to play guitar or piano and all you're doing is practicing like scales and music theory but you're never actually applying that to cool projects and ideas instead you're just constantly drilling on all the basics over and over and over again it gets boring you kind of lose the you know awesome factor that you had when you first were introducing yourself to programming these cool concepts so instead what i'd recommend doing at the beginning is sure expose yourself to those basics you're going to need to learn them but instead of just constantly drilling them try to find some fun ways to implement those basics into your actual life so build out some really small cool project that you have an idea for don't make it big please make it small so that it's manageable but just try to find something fun that you can build and build it and you're going to struggle and it's going to be hard but you're going to be so excited about this project you're going to be just looking up things and learning things so much quicker than if you were just doing scales essentially because you're going to get bored watching those course videos you're going to go through two three four or five of them and then you're going to be like you know what this is boring i'm done but if you're trying to build a cool project you're going to watch so many videos and you're going to learn so much more because instead of burning out you're constantly applying yourself and pushing yourself further now once you've built out that basic project of whatever it is that you want to do that you thought was cool maybe start working on a second or a third project or try even something completely different just keep trying to build projects but this is when you should start to consider trying to find a route because you now have that passion and you've been able to use that passion to build something that you should hopefully be proud of even if it's small and simple it does not matter now though comes the most important step and instead of just continually going down this rabbit hole building things that are cool and building things that are fun what you need to do is you actually need to find a regimented program that takes you from zero to 100 or at least from zero to like 20. it doesn't matter you just have to have some type of guidelines that lead you from point a to point b and there's tons of resources out there i have tons of youtube playlists that are going to help you with this i have courses that will help you with this other people have courses there's free guides online there's tons of different ways you can do this i obviously recommend my courses because i think they're the best because i made them but i'm a little bit biased if you can already tell i'll link them in the description if you're interested but i also have a free roadmap you can check out if your path is web development related it kind of leads you through all the things you need to learn in a build development in order so i'm going to link that down below as too so you can download that but there's also things like the odin project that's another great resource and depending on what topic you go into there's going to be resources out there that lead you from point a to point b the important thing here is that you just pick one it doesn't matter which one it is whether it's my course someone else's course does not matter just pick one resource and stick with it from beginning to end as much as you can now if you get into it and you realize that this course or this tool that you're using just absolutely sucks yeah sure you can choose a different one but the reason you want to choose one and stick with it is because it's going to teach you all the things that you need if you keep jumping between different courses or youtube tutorials or projects or whatever it is you're going to learn bits and pieces of the basics from everyone you're going to have gaps because you're skipping between all these resources and they're not all on the same program they're written by different people if instead you follow one particular program that program will ensure that you learn all the pieces of knowledge you need so you don't have gaps in your knowledge because that's the biggest problem i see with beginners and with myself included when i was learning programming is that there's just gaps in my knowledge i didn't know things and it's hard to know things if you don't know what they even are so it's hard to know what you don't know which is why i highly highly recommend finding some type of roadmap some type of course just something to follow it can be free it can be paid it does not matter if you don't you're going to have those gaps in your knowledge and these gaps followed me all the way through my first internship into my first job and it took me years and years of experience before i finally started plugging holes in some of those gaps that i had now the next thing that's important is how you actually apply the skills that you learn because let's say you're going through a course on javascript you go from the very beginning of the course all the way to the very end you have tons of javascript skills but it's important as you're going through that course apply the skills you're learning if the course has projects in it those are great places to apply your skills but if all the projects are like walk through handheld projects where the teacher tells you what to do they're not the best solutions instead you need to be able to challenge yourself building your own projects so for example you're in a course where they have these handheld projects try to build the project before they actually even show you how to do it i actually built my entire javascript simplified course around this concept of having you build out projects and then i show you how i would do it that way you can apply your skills and challenge yourself because the real thing about being a programmer is not knowing all the skills but it's instead knowing how to figure out what you don't know knowing how to research things and google things asking the questions to figure out the problems you're trying to solve because you are a problem solver so if all you ever do is watch tutorials where people are solving the problems for you sure you're learning programming concepts but you're not learning how to become a programmer and that's the real key here you need to learn how to become a programmer and programmers are people that solve problems so if you try to solve problems yourself using the skills that you have as you're learning them so as you're going through these courses as you're going through the curriculum you're following try to build out more and more challenging projects as you go that challenge you and don't make them so easy that you don't have to think about it make them challenging make it so you get stuck and have to google or youtube or research to solve certain problems that's the key because as a real-life programmer you're going to run into problems and nobody's going to have a tutorial for the exact problem you run into but you're going to be able to research and google various different things related to your problem and be able to plug them in and solve them so if you're building your own projects as you're learning you're going to learn these skills of like how to solve problems without someone telling you exactly what to do that's the most important skill you can learn as a programmer this is something i actually did correct when i was learning how to program and i pretty much did it by accident i just enjoyed building projects and i constantly had thousands of ideas in my mind of things i wanted to build so i was constantly building them and every time i hit a roadblock i'd go to youtube for example if i ran into authentication problems i'd google a tutorial on authentication and sure their tutorial is not going to be exactly perfect i can't just copy paste it into my code i have to take what they're teaching and adapt it to fit into my project that's a key skill that you need to learn as a programmer to be able to build out your projects and adapt different tutorials adapt different documentation into how you need to build your project is going to be so important to learn now once you've gone through a set of curriculum that's kind of taught you a lot of the skills that you need from beginner to end the next step is to try to build out a larger project right now you've been building out small little toy projects that take you maybe a few hours a few days maybe even a week or two the next step is try to build a project that's going to take you a while this is multiple weeks maybe even multiple months i want this to be a large scale project that you can put a lot of time and effort into that's because the problems you run into on small projects versus large projects is much different you're going to run into a lot of like syntax problems and things like that no matter what size project you work on but things like clean code scalability and all of those other more advanced issues are things you don't run into on a small project if you're building a modal it doesn't matter how messy your code is because it's so small you can just read it all but if you're building out the next facebook the code cleanliness is the most important factor for your code now i don't recommend building a project that large that's way too big but try to find something you can fit into a few weeks or a few months and you're going to realize that as you write out your code it's going to start out pretty easy as you get more and more code it's going to get harder and harder and that's because you haven't learned those clean code skills yet learning how to write clean code is something it's hard to learn by watching tutorials on and you really just need to practice over and over and over again by building large projects making mistakes seeing those mistakes and then realizing how to change your code to fix those mistakes so this big project is going to be that teaching moment for you that's saying okay i know how to program but now i know how to program well that's a really important thing and once you build that large project you're there i mean sure there's more skills you can learn there's always more skills you can learn as a programmer but you have the base level knowledge you have the actual basics and you have some of the more advanced skills that come with building out larger projects and from here you can do whatever you want build more large projects expand on the project you already built build some small projects apply for a job whatever it is you're ready to tackle it because now you have that base of knowledge and you yourself are a programmer now if your goal is to learn web development i highly recommend checking out my free web dev road map it's going to be linked down below it covers every topic you need to learn about web development in order with tons of tutorials and projects linked and also i highly recommend any of my courses they're all great for teaching you web development with that said thank you very much for watching and have a good day