How I Learned Programming

Key Takeaways

hey guys and welcome back so in today's video I'm gonna bring you through my journey learning to program over the past six years so for those of you that don't know I started programming when I was 12 years old and I'm now 18 close to turning 19 and I'm a computer science major so I consider almost everything I know because I'm self-taught and I go online and I look stuff up and I do research and all that and I'm just gonna walk you through why I got into programming how I got into it and how I kind of reached the level that I'm at today so as a kid I was always one of those kids who did very well in school but had to put very minimal effort in and I'm sure you guys know those kids or are those kids yourself now this was great in elementary school because it meant I never had to do homework I didn't have to study I never had to worry about doing poorly on a test but at the same time I never felt challenged in this led to me just being bored in class and just really you know not having much to do to be honest so as a kid what I would do is I was always interested in how things worked and why they worked so one day I think I went online and I just searched how did a computer work and watch through a few videos and kind of was like wow this is really interesting and through researching this and looking this kind of stuff up I eventually came to programming now programming to me was something completely new I'd never heard of it my teachers never talked about it my parents didn't do it it was just completely new to me so I started learning HTML and CSS I think I went on some New Boston tutorial online that was the first language that came up so I was like alright let's learn this now after doing it for probably an hour too I became immediately addicted this was the first time for me that I felt slightly challenged and it was just an amazing feeling for me because I was actually having to think and think logically and just do awesome things on my computer so I started learning it almost every night I would come home from school watch one or two new Boston videos program along on the side try to tweak with some things mess with them things and I just absolutely loved it so over the course of a year or two I got really good at learning HTML CSS JavaScript and PHP and by the time I eventually reached that JavaScript level and I was doing some dynamic stuff with my HTML I really loved JavaScript and I was like I'm not a creative person I'm not very artistic I don't really like the design aspect of web development but this JavaScript stuff the backend you don't really see but does everything that is what really interests me so I started looking up stuff that was similar to JavaScript and figuring out more things I could do with it now back then javascript was not nearly as used as it was today I don't think they had no js' or maybe they did all that stuff anyways I didn't know about it so I didn't realize you could create like crazy stuff with JavaScript so I actually ended up going and learning c-sharp now this was off a recommendation from one of my dad's co-workers or colleagues or friends or someone he knew he said c-sharp oh that's a great language you should learn that don't know if I completely agree with him on that one but anyways I started learning c-sharp and this was my first real programming language and this was where I just became immersed in different programming concepts and actually started developing computer science skills and getting good at real programming because in my opinion HTML and CSS it's a good starting point but it doesn't teach you kind of that logical foundation that you need to be well a programmer so I started looking at c-sharp I did this again every night after school it was something I was super addicted to and I would create these little applications I remember creating some applications that would solve like my equations in math just doing some really interesting stuff and I think I got to the point where I was at like objects and classes in C sharp so I understood kind of functions and some of that different stuff but I was not really at an advanced level and keep in mind this is when I'm like 14 years old so now I'm going into grade 9 and I figure out that there's this programming class or a course or after-school thing at my school so I'm like okay I'm gonna join that and see what it's like so I go to a few meetings and I quickly realize that what this is is it's actually competition for the University of Waterloo programming competition it's called Canadian computing competition and it's a set of questions and you get graded based on how many things you get right so I asked the guy who's running and I'm like so what language can I write this in can I write it in c-sharp because that was the one that I knew really well and that I had been programming in for like the past year and he's like no unfortunately they don't support the that languages but if you want to learn one and you want to do this you should learn Python and this is what started my Python career and almost kind of this YouTube channel as well so picking up Python any of you that have gone from like a language like Java or C sharp to Python know that Python has so many amazing things that would take you like 10 or 20 lines to do in c-sharp like functions that just do it for you so I immediately fell in love with Python and I started learning it and learning it but by the time that competition came I didn't feel confident enough to do it looking back I probably should have just done it and just see how well I did but I didn't know Python that well I still had to look up some of the syntax and I was like you know what I'm not gonna do the computation so I skipped out on the competition but I continue to learn Python and use Python on a daily basis as well as kind of doing a bit of c-sharp as in the back so then grade 10 comes along and I enroll in a actual programming course in high school now this course taught ActionScript now ActionScript I don't know if any of you guys know it it's the language used with flash so you can actually do like animations that you draw the animations and create objects then you can move them with ActionScript no one uses ActionScript completely use this language but that's what we were learning programming it so this was super simple for me I completed every assignment in like half an hour because I already had the fundamentals of programming down I new variable as I knew loops I knew about all this stuff worked so I was way ahead in the class so what I ended up doing in that class was just working more on Python and working more on my own stuff now after ActionScript and after completing that course I'd still been doing Python consistently after school and learning it and learning it and getting better and this is when I started my youtube channel I was like okay you know I see these people on YouTube like the new Boston and centex and all these amazing guys that I look up to and some of them that I even get to talk to you today and I'm like this is awesome I want to do something similar to this so I started teaching Python the very basics on my youtube channel this was completely no schedule I had no plans to actually do this full-time it was just like you know what I'm gonna do some videos on Python and maybe it'll help out a few people I like teaching this it's kind of cool so I'm like alright let do it so I start doing these videos on YouTube with Python not really going anywhere not really doing anything I forget about the YouTube channel I just keep working on Python and getting better and better and better and learning making different projects and programs and all of that stuff now grade 11 comes up comes along and now we're in a real programming course and this is using Python so you guys can imagine that what ended up happening here was I knew everything that we were learning in this course so same thing as the last course with ActionScript everything was just super simple super easy and what ended up happening was I would sit beside some of my friends in that class and I would actually start teaching them Python because the teacher that we had he was doing as good as a job as he could have but for a lot of kids they were having trouble understanding the concepts and since I I already knew it and I was one of their peers they were not hesitant to come up and ask me questions so as I started doing this I would finish my assignment in like 10 15 minutes and then help out my friends and teach them Python and programming they started saying to me like hey man like you're doing a really good job teaching me like what he just said makes no sense but you just made it super clear and now I understand it and I never had any kind of intention of being a teacher or doing any of this stuff but apparently the way that I explain things and was I don't know teaching people stuff worked really well so this is what I started doing more and more of and people would just know if they need anything in class you go to Tim you ask him he'll help you out so I figured you know what I had done these few videos on YouTube I was getting a few positive comments on them I had like maybe 100 subscribers something like that so I started doing some more and I was like if people my class can benefit from my teaching then maybe people online can as well so I kept doing it kept doing it and I took a few breaks I wasn't really going anywhere and then I got better and it just was like on and off YouTube until eventually I created this one video that did really well and this was my PI game programming series so I did this PI game series I didn't even do the rest of the videos I just did the first video and you guys have probably seen this video that might even be why you're subscribed to my channel and as I kept doing these PI game videos I was getting more and more subscribers and I was getting all these positive comments and people practically begging me to keep teaching them online so I was like you know what maybe this is something I wanted to do and I did more and more videos like once a week and just continually kept doing more and more and getting better and better and here we are today so anyways that's kind of my programming journey I skipped over a bunch of different parts but this is something that to me is super interesting and that I think a lot of you guys maybe can relate to in the way that you learn programming and be challenged and all that so to quickly summarize kind of everything in just my last thoughts on this today I absolutely loved programming as you guys can't tell I'm learning something new almost every night and then I'm teaching it as well on YouTube and this is a great way for me to not only give back to you guys and help you know teach you and other kids that were once in my footsteps learn programming and learn the fundamentals from what I consider a good teacher and a good foundation but also to reinforce my skills in those so what I do usually when I do a YouTube video is I start the day or two before I learn the concept I practice it I apply it and then I teach it on YouTube to make sure I actually know what I'm talking about and it's really easy to tell when I don't because I'll start teaching and I'll realize hey you know what you have no idea what you're talking about go back relearn try again so anyways this is something that I'm really passionate about now and looking back at this I just want to help out the kids that were like me that weren't challenged that if they were introduced to programming have an ability to be to do something amazing and to just you know challenge themselves so that's why I'm so passionate about this and I put out these videos I try almost every day to help out programmers mostly in that beginner area get a strong foundation and just keep learning and doing better every day I also teach programming at a summer camp so I work at a summer camp that's really close to my house and a while ago they started this coding specialty so I actually teach Python programming to kids that are between 11 and 14 years old and I can tell you it's a super rewarding feeling being able to see kids that never would have been introduced to programming or never would have seen this kind of computers or what not just absolutely excelling and loving what they're doing so with that being said I'm sorry if this video was a little bit rambling or it went on some different tangents or whatnot but I hope that you guys can get some value from this story and I'd love to hear your stories as well how you guys got into programming if you can relate in any way and yeah I just love to hear that in the comments down below so if you guys enjoyed the video make sure you leave a like and subscribe and with that being said I will see you guys in another Python programming tutorial