Fastest way to become a Software Engineer in 2024 | Skill Joiner
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I don’t care if you have a computer science degree or not it does not matter if you have no coding experience you will be able to learn programming if you can answer these three questions number one which programming language should you learn how to learn it really fast what are the best resources to learn it let’s cover them one by one when it comes to choosing a programming language there are two ways to think about it if you already know what kind of developer you want to become then you can pick a language based on that if you have no preference and you want to quickly start building things then you can pick one of the popular languages
Step 1: Find your interest become a Software Engineer
I’ll tell you the ones I recommend but before that let’s see how to pick a programming language based on the job you want I’ll cover the four most popular jobs here let’s start with mobile development if you want to build native apps for iPhone pick Swift for Android you can learn cotlin when I say native apps what I mean is the apps that run only on one platform either iOS or Android there is a way to write one app that can run both on iOS as well as Android this way of building apps is called crossplatform mobile developer Vel mment there are two platforms that are popular for crossplatform development react native and flutter react native is based on react
which is a popular JavaScript library so learn JavaScript for react native for flutter you’ll have to learn this open source programming language called dot if you want to do web development there is front end and backend for front end you can choose between react and angular as we discussed earlier you’ll have to learn JavaScript for react for angular you’ll have to learn typescript which is the statically typed version of JavaScript it’s not that different from JavaScript for the backend we have all kinds of choices that I don’t want to get into one of the popular options is Javascript with node so to cover both front end and back end you can simply start with JavaScript next we have ai for AI python is the Undisputed Champion
Read More: Data Science Roadmap 2024 | How to Become a Data Scientist in 2024 | Data Science | Skilljoiner
Step 2 : Find your desire skill to become a Software Engineer
Lastly we have game development if you want to develop games using Unity you can learn C for the Unreal Engine you’ll need C++ now I understand that all of this can be very confusing that’s why I have already covered it in much more detail in this earlier video if you’re feeling overwhelmed with all of this I have two recommendations for you in the beginning most people want to see some quick progress and progress comes from building things two languages that will help you build things fast are Python and JavaScript I’m not saying that other languages are bad it’s just that these languages will be very easy to pick as a beginner.
So you have picked a programming language how can you learn it really fast let’s assume that the circle represents everything there is to know about the programming language you want to learn within this circle is another smaller Circle which is roughly 20% of the size of the Outer Circle this Inner Circle contains Concepts like conditionals for Loops functions and classes Etc what’s not included in the circle are advanced concepts like generators comparators or iterators now if you pick any get repository written in the chosen language what you’ll find is that 80% of the code in this repository comes from 20% Inner Circle this is called 8020 rule of programming to move fast you need to learn these 20% Core Concepts of the language and move on learning programming and learning a programming language are two different things but when I was a beginner I did not understand this that’s why I kept doing these 30 40 hour programming tutorials again and again to give me a false sense of making progress experts call this phase of learning programming a tutorial hell if you follow the 8020 rule of learning programming you will not get stuck in the tutorial hell now I’m not saying that we don’t need to learn any concepts outside this 20% Circle we will slowly expand this Inner Circle to become bigger over time I’ll show you how to do that later in this video but for now we need to focus on finding the best resources to learn these 20% Concepts but for that we need to know the best way of learning programming which is active recall instead of casually watching in active recall you first understand a concept and then you test yourself on what you just learned with the help of exercises this will force you to actively retrieve information from your brain and this is called active recall numerous Studies have shown this over and over again that active recall is one of the best ways to retain what you are learning all of this theory is great but how do you actually apply this in practice luckily for us there are many websites that teach and test you with the help of interactive exercises I’ll tell you three of them but there must be many others for python we have learn python.org for JavaScript
STEP 3: Learn any programming language to become a Software Engineer
In the process but what kind of problems can you solve you can start with something simple and build a basic teao game once you have done that you can move on to intermediate projects like writing a program that runs tournaments or a program that schedules classes so that they don’t overlap after that you can build slightly more complex projects like an algorithm visualizer or a Chrome extension that helps you find shopping deals if you’re interested I have covered all these projects in detail in this earlier video after following all the steps that we have covered so far you will feel very confident about your programming skills in your excitement you might start applying for jobs let me warn you you might end up disappointing yourself that’s because what they ask in the interviews is very different from
(05:51) what you have learned so far in the interviews they ask you very specific kind of problems these problems look something like this given a string s find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters you can pause the video and see if you can solve this problem for most people it takes a long time to crack problems like this consistently in the remaining video we’ll cover how to become so good at problems like this that you can solve them within the interview time frame of 45 minutes
There are two steps to achieve this first you need to learn the theory behind solving such problems next you need to apply the theory and solve a lot of interview style problems so that you can become quick enough to solve them within 45 minutes let’s start with the theory all the theory that you need to solve problems like this comes from one course this course is called data structures and algorithms data structures is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently and algorithm is the steps you take where you use this data and complete a task efficiently together they form the basis of how computers handle any complex task and this is what you’ll be tested on in the interviews there are so many courses out there to learn data structures and algorithms my personal favorite is this course called algorithms 1 and algorithms 2 by Princeton University on course ERA this course will introduce you to Common data structures like arrays link lists Stacks cues and graphs Etc
it also covers all the important algorithms like merge sort depth for search and Union find why I recommend this course over the others is because it gives you an in-depth understanding of how different algorithms evolved for example why was quick sort needed when merge sort was already there this will help you build algorithmic thinking which will be crucial in the interviews the only downside of this course is that it’s Tau in Java it’s not really a downside it’s it’s just that if you’re not comfortable with Java you’ll have to work a little extra you might have to translate the code in the language of your choice using chat GPT but I think the extra effort is worth it now that your fundamentals are clear it’s time to apply and test your knowledge of data structures this website contains more than 1500 interview style problems but don’t be scared we are not going to do all of them they have this collection of problems called top interview 150 we want to start with these 150 problems in the beginning focus on the easy problems once you start solving easy problems consistently you can move on to mediums and so on whether you manage to solve a problem or not make sure you read the top three most upvoted solutions of others you will learn a lot from these Solutions when you feel confident about your skills start timing yourself to see if you can solve the problems end to end within 45 minutes because that’s all the time you will get in an actual interview
Step 4: Roadmap of software engineering jobs to become a Software Engineer
so now you know all the steps to learn programming and become a developer butmany of the people who are still watching this video will not be able to become a developer that’s because programming like any other hard skill requires a lot of dedication over a long period of time but many people want it to happen in a few months so they will keep watching videos on how I learn to code in 6 months hoping to find a cheat code unfortunately there is no cheat code to success the only thing standing between you and the career you want is that keyboard so get up right now and start coding and keep doing it for next
365 days