Now, I've been programming for a long time.

I started maybe 600 years ago or so

and I've learned a lot of things on my journey.

I thought I would cover in this video

some of the top tips I have for you,

things I wish I knew when I started coding myself.

So stay tuned because we're going to be right back

after a message from our sponsors.

But before we get to that message,

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Now let's get into the tips.

The first tip I have for you is

to not try to learn everything.

It's going to take you forever to try to learn everything

and things keep changing all the time.

So choose what you need to learn

and focus on getting results.

You're going to be interfacing with dozens

of different technologies, maybe MySQL,

Linux, different API's, frameworks,

all sorts of different things developed

by other people that's changing all the time.

And at least for me,

I find myself often digging into various technologies,

trying to figure out exactly how things are working.

If I'm using an Apache web server,

I'm half tempted to just go read through

the entire Apache documentation

and figure out exactly how things are working

before I actually start using the service.

But the key I think is to just start using things

and as long as things are working

and it's not broken then you're fine.

If you don't do this,

you're going to find yourself stuck

learning tons of random things that half

the time you're not necessarily going to need.

One example is when I started with iOS development,

I launched my first app.

I didn't know half of how the language was working.

And I'm sure I made tons of different mistakes.

The code was probably not optimal,

it was not properly written,

the structure was probably very messy, no good.

But still, I was able to launch my first app

and just get things rolling, get things moving forward.

And that's the key to understand there

is that you're never going to get things completely right.

Nothing's ever going to be completely perfect,

and that's just how tech is.

Even in industry we often have many engineers

who know multiple languages, full-stack engineers,

and yet, usually engineers were just focused

on one certain technology and get to know

that particularly well and all the rest,

the rest of the ecosystem for other languages

are just changing all the time,

such that you can never really know a language very well

because things are just changing all the time.

You may think that you know Java now,

but in one or two years, the tooling,

the language, the frameworks,

the coding practices around that language

are going to change entirely differently.

There's going to be new technologies

that are hot that people are using.

So I wouldn't bare on saying that you'll be able

to learn Java then Python then Swift,

and after that, you'll have three languages

in your tool belt.

Now you're really going to only have one language,

that's the one that you're using at any time.

The field moves fast and the only constant is change.

And what you will always need

is the ability to learn quickly.

Now, the second tip I have for you,

is that our code is garbage.

And that's really the way to look at it.

Tech is not magic, don't sit there

and all of the technology around you,

and just so struck by how cool everything is.

You think that looks cool, it's just a front.

It's mostly just garbage code, purchased up

in a nice UI that looks shiny and neat and simple,

but in reality it's nothing good.

And as long as you keep this in mind,

you won't be intimidated.

You'll be able to go in there and start coding things

and know that your code does not have to be perfect

because nobody else's code is perfect.

It's just whatever works.

Just do whatever gets results.

If you saw the article from my last video,

it's reported that Google rewrites

their entire code base every few years

because it's just such garbage quality.

Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is actually the case,

but what I do know is that Tech engineers

also don't stay at companies all that long.

The track record isn't that great,

people stay at companies say two to four years,

and then they move on.

So when I go into a company,

my co-workers have been working there

like two years or so, maybe even less.

And so that's the amount of experience

that most people have.

Nobody really knows anything more than,

say two years of information.

Maybe senior engineers know a little bit more than that

if they've been hanging around the company longer

but everyone is sort of a beginner,

no one really knows what they're doing.

People are just winging it,

and it's funny that you may have a certain technology

that looks really good and solid at one year,

but then the next year, people find out that

they need to upgrade to the latest version of something,

the requirements change,

everything has to be real time now,

and then the whole entire tech stack

becomes complete garbage because

it doesn't fit the current feature requirements

that all the users are demanding.

People often look back at code that say two years old

and they'll say it's pretty ancient legacy code,

no one knows how it works, it's pretty much writing code.

So my recommendation is when you sit down

to create a project instead of imagine yourself

that you're going to be creating a masterpiece project,

and everything's going to be stable

and optimized and scalable and high performance,

and then you'll be able to show this code

to all sorts of people, push out to your GitHub,

show to everyone and everyone's going to say that

this is a masterpiece of code.

It's going to be better if you say to yourself,

you're just going to create a prototype.

You're going to create a prototype of a product

and just get things out there and see how it works.

And if the project really works,

then after that you're going to invest time

into making the code more structured,

more solid, make it more scalable

and everything like that, cleaning things up.

But for now, it's just going to be prototype code,

anything goes as long as it works, it's okay.

And that's really going to get you set up

and get you on your way so that

you'll feel free to make mistakes as you go,

you don't have to get things perfect.

The fact is no one has anything perfect

and software is mostly duct tape and strings.

There's always a better way to code something,

so don't let perfection stop you.

My third tip for you is to focus on

the project and not the technology.

The technology should enable you

to do something new, something innovative,

but it's going to be the project

that everybody is looking at.

Now, what do I mean by this?

Well, no one's going to care

if you spend all your time learning Python version 2.7.

And then you never use it to do anything,

when you spent all your time learning how to write Swift,

but you never launched in that never did anything with it.

And on your resume it just says that you know Swift.

It's going to be much more impactful

and much more impressive if you can say to yourself

and potential future employers that you launched

a website or an app, and it's still available,

people can download it or access the site

and see what it is, and it looks great,

looks cool, is functional,

and maybe even broaden some users,

maybe broaden in some side income,

you won't remember that software is a tool.

It's like a laundry machine or a dryer

or vacuum machine, right?

It's not something to be super passionate

and attach yourself to only saying,

while you're going to be a Ruby on Rails developer

and you love of him.

That's like saying that you just love

the Hoover vacuum cleaner and you just love that tool.

These are simply tools and for that reason,

concretely I might recommend learning

say JavaScript and web development,

because these languages can actually get you

to launch projects that are visible for other people,

though it can be highly visible and highly useful.

If the only thing you know is say Python,

then the only output that you can create

is going to be like a terminal output.

It's going to be text on the command line.

So even though Python is a very popular language

for beginners I would say that

to really make Python useful for you,

you actually need to combine that with

a web framework like say Flask or Django.