And today I thought I would tell you about how I personally learned to code and achieve the row of staffs.

Offer Engineer with a salary of $500,000 per year.

But I wanted to keep this room, especially for defecating and programmers out there who are looking for career advice.

Now, why don't we head on over to my lengthen profile and I'll walk you through some of these experiences?

Quick pubs?

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The first thing, though you need to understand, is that I had pretty much begun programming in elementary school.

I was working on cue.

Basic visual basic making a bunch of games and gaming is probably what motivated me.

I had always wanted to be a game programmer.

In high school, we had the AP computer science class, and I was probably already the top student.

By then, I went over to a community college to learn C plus plus, and that was tough because I didn't know about pointers at the time, and I remember even crying over it because there was such an obscure topic.

But once I figured it out, it wasn't that bad.

Through good grades and graduated valedictorian in high school, I was able to get into UC Berkeley under the Geeks department, Elektronik Engineering and Computer Science.

And that's a very competitive program.

Half of all students drop out in the first class, and that was still just making hobby games for me and my brother to play with randomly in my spare time.

Now, here's where things get interesting.

The computer science programs.

They don't really teach you much.

They teach you actually really obscure useless languages like list scheme, assembly code, some java, but without the Web frameworks, Do you need to make a practical?

They don't even touch Java script or python.

And so I would go looking around that random languages like pearl flash regular expressions.

Most of these are outdated by now, but what it did for me was allowed me to create Web applications that would lunch the entire school class schedule Organizer's event finders a dating site for the school.

And over time, the smart pet projects.

They cut the eye of a local school tech administrator who offered me a job and that there's some random work for him here.

And they're doing a Web scraping using Python pro.

And then my aunt, who was a director at Juniper Networks, referred me into the company.

I passed the interview for an internship, and I was doing like cleanup of technical documentation, using pro scripts, regular expressions.

And this was really a pretty basic job.

Nothing to write home about.

But they're too important.

Lessons first is I accepted help from somebody else.

I didn't try to do it on my own, and a lot of people go out there and they say they want to do under own.

They don't need anybody's help.

They want to be a self made man, and I just don't think that's the way to go about.

Everybody gets help from somebody.

Accepting help from friends and family for referrals or even seeking it out is completely fair game.

So many engineers and think that's actually how they get in.

The other thing is, I focus on project work, a lot of the languages that I learned for the sake of learning.

They didn't really get me anywhere.

I just learned them and that forgot them.

They went away.

But it was the project work that I did that actually went on my resume and had lasting impact, even though the underlying language, like Pearl pretty much faded out in my senior year.

I studied abroad in Japan, which I highly recommends that then the brother is a great experience.

It really opens up your mind then perspectives.

When I came back, actually, it was pretty difficult for me to get a job.

Even with credentials, like graduating out of UC Berkeley while I was able to get interviews that Microsoft or Google, the interview process was so tricky there was no leak coat.

It was a bunch of brain teasers, questions that would be banned by today's standards.

So instead, I decided to just applied to grad school, get my master's degree and plus I really wanted to do computer graphics right.

I wanted to be a game programmer, and I felt that I had only taken one class and computer graphics and neither more knowledge anyways.

So I applied the UC San Diego and U C.

L.

A.

And got into both.

And that chills UC San Diego because I wanted to be closer to the beach and their computer graphics department was also just much stronger.

Personally, I had a lot of fun in grad school.

It's like a second chance at college, and I was able to hone my skills and say, Advanced algorithms, fans, operating systems, computer architecture just really get more into that.

Th for databases and computer graphics took some more classes in computer rendering Computervision, and by the time I finished, I had also completed internships at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Essentially, just having a graduate degree opens a few more doors, gives you some more time to apply to internships.

So, in my opinion, is not a bad option if you just want to buy yourself some more time, especially these days, if you want to get in to say, like machine learning, having some additional knowledge in these events areas augmented reality, virtual reality, computer graphics stayed the basis security networking, it could be beneficial.

And that degree, it sort of follows you throughout your lifetime.

Not The funny thing is, after this, I was still not able to land the job at think.

The interview process was still so tricky.

I remember getting tricked up on stacks and cuse, which they never taught us over in any of the computer science programs.

We just don't use those that much.

And yet, in tech an industry you end up using stacks and Q's a lot these days, we know that.

But I landed the role as Sony Pictures doing special effects for movies, mostly working in Python C plus plus doing computer graphics.

Sh aiders And it was a great role is a lot of fun, and I was doing almost exactly what I wanted to do.

It wasn't the game industry, but it was the movie special effects industry.

And that was just as good, if not better, in my opinion, because Game industries, they don't pay us well, and I easily could have said that that job for my lifetime, probably things were good, But perhaps fortunately for me, I started getting into Web development.

At the time, the whole Facebook platform APS business was starting to take off.

Some of my app started taking off as well, and eventually I quit the whole graphics gaming industry and got into Web technologies.

This shift into Web technologies is really what brought me to Silicon Valley and brought my salary range probably into, say, the 120 k range.

From there, I've worked on my own absent games.

As an indie F developer, I joined the field startups of work.

That's a larger companies like Groupon played them, which was later, quite by Disney.

And this was a risky time for me.

I was jumping in and out between jobs hopping around and for my projects.

I tried to do two things.

I would never just learn a language for the sake of learning.

Usually that ends up in disaster, like I once learned to Swift because I thought it was cool.

I never used it, and that just forgot that I've learned half a dozen Java script frameworks, but I never used those either.

They just wasted the way so I would encourage project based learning where any time you're trying to learn something you're also trying to develop a project that goes onto your resume in this manner, anything you learn you can put on your resume twice.

Like if you learn typescript, you can put the language on there, and then you can also put in the field for whichever project you developed on and can talk about the impact that the head, as I mentioned earlier.

This also ensures that even if the language fades away or if the company doesn't have used for the specific language, they can see what accomplishments you had and those accomplishments, the amount of impact you were able to drive that still has retaining value.

It's much better than listening a laundry list of languages like a s p dot net on your resume that many companies may not care much about.

As independent app developer.

I did pretty well.

Actually, I was already a self made milliner by writing technology trends like if the iPhone came out of Facebook at platform came out, Twitter platforms came out.

I would just start build the apse for those as they came out, and then people would be eager to try out these new APS.

My basic technology Stack is fairly old school.

It's like clinics Apache, my sequel.

PHP some J Cory CSS html.

That's pretty much it.

And I could get very far with that.

Throwing some men cash and CD ins for scalability and they integrate with a bunch of other micro service is their online like Google maps Twitter AP eyes Facebook AP Eyes Chat Service is EMS on AWS for their e mail service.

Is I really just integrating with a bunch of other platforms and bringing in their functionality can help you launch features quickly.

This is essentially full stack Web development.

It's probably my favorite area to be in because the impact is so large, you just throw up a website and anybody can access it through just a euro.

But at some point, I wanted to also get into mobile IOS development because I had a bunch of absent games.

I wanted to bring them to the Iowa's platform natively.

So I taught myself objective seep again.

It wasn't just for the sake of learning the language.

I had a project in mind that I wanted to lunch, and I knew that if I could get this done, I would be able to put objectives down my resume with the list of projects that I knew, I would be pushing out at least four games.

So I traveled around working remotely, teaching myself mobile development.

And you'll notice that even if the project felt, I would still have learned mobile development and that is valuable.

So several months later, when that was the point of jobs again as going for full stop Web developer or IOS mobile developer Google at the time happened to need.

I was developers.

They were really ramping up their mobile offerings and I was able to land a job there because the opportunity fit my skill set.

And probably also because I had just been doing so many interviews along the way that I pretty much knew what they were looking for.

At this point.

I spent three and 1/2 years working there on the YouTube IOS up and then switched over to Facebook, working in the video work under mobile platforms.

And that's pretty much my career trajectory and you'll know this that I did try to guide my career along with in the same type of domain like user phasing Web mobile app features.

I could have jumped into crypto security Database administration, but I think that especially in this field where it's quite broad, then you can go in the number of directions that you tried to develop a little bit of a narrative, a story about the technical background and skill sets that you bring.

It's just going to make you a little bit more of a fit.

So that, though for me over on my big takeaway is to try to do project based learning.

I see a lot of people learning python for the sake of learning path on, and they don't have a project in mind or they ask questions like which language is the best?

What should I learn?

And you should really have a project in mind such that you can put that project on your resume and then the language is a tool that you used to accomplish that project.

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Let me know if you have any more questions in the comments below or what helped you in your career path.

If you like the video, give it a like and subscribe, and I'll see you next time, Thanks.