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Fastest way to learn coding and eventually get a job without CS degree.

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 yesterday within six months of starting programming.

That's exactly why I writting this article 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 three major mistakes that can slow down your progress to become a full time software engineer. I'll also share these three 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. #1, the language should be easy and intuitive to write, should not required learning any 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 programming 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 job done in minimum lines of code. Some of you might have already guessed it.

Python is a 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 versus 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 two times because it's so fast to write. Having said that, Java and other popular languages have their own advantages and you'll 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 plus 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 or create 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 error. So what is the right way to do it? The answer is very simple. You should learn like 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 other 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 advanced concepts in the future when you need them for your projects, you look at a lesson. Each lesson first explains the basic concept and then asks you to apply these concepts to a problem. Feel free to play with the sample code.

So think about other problems you can solve with the concepts you just learned and try to solve them in the exercise portion. Once you are done with the basics, you are 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 help from the experts. So go to YouTube and look up this video called 12 Beginner Python projects by Freecodecamp, which by the way is a great channel to follow. In this video, they built 12 beginner Python projects from scratch. These projects include building mad libs, 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 two 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.

There are Several popular IDE for Python. This tutorial uses VS code, so you might want to download vscode 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 will debug it and repeat it over and over again. This is exactly what a day in the life of a software engineer looks like.

#2. You'll 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 spam filter and algorithmic trading engine and an ecommerce website. Now you have a great resume and you're 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 kind 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 the 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 your facility. And the best part is that this course is taught in Python. In this four week course, we'll learn about different algorithms related to searching and sorting. We'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'm sure that by the end of this course you'll be a pro. For that, just keep two 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 every day and make regular progress to make sure you complete all the exercises that give you in this course. As I've 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 $100,000 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 courses 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 this website called lead code. On lead code you will get interview style questions. You can write your code and test your solution right there on the website. Read code is great for beginners because all the questions are tagged easy, medium or hard based on difficulty level. If you get a premium subscription of the website, you can also filter questions by the tech company that ask 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 the medium questions. When you start solving mediums in 45 minutes, you can start applying for software engineering jobs. If you're lucky, you'll get the job right away. For most people fill me a process full of disappointment and rejections and this is where they make 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 again 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 that 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, so please stay with us. We will continuous writting different articles about the computer science.

Thanks ✨🌻

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