My Journey Learning How to Code

I began learning how to code when I was still in school, studying computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa. The pandemic put everything on pause for about a month, and after that, I moved back home from school due to the lockdowns. This shift allowed me to continue my education remotely and learn more programming languages like Go. At this time, I also started working on the YouTube channel, which had gained around 150,000 subscribers.

After leaving my internship at Microsoft, where I worked on the Python extension for Visual Studio Code, I returned to school for my first semester of third year. However, due to financial constraints and a significant amount of revenue generated from the YouTube channel, I decided to drop out of school. This decision was not taken lightly and had been thought about for a long time.

During this period, I continued working as an algorithms instructor at Algo Expert, which allowed me to develop my knowledge in algorithms and data structures. I also started getting into front-end frameworks, learning React, and improving my styling and CSS skills. My focus shifted towards creating full-stack web applications that I released on the YouTube channel.

One of the most significant projects I worked on during this time was Programming Expert, an entire platform to learn how to code. The idea for this project had been conceived as early as February of the previous year, and we signed all the logistical contracts before starting its development. The curriculum was planned out, and the platform was built over a period of about a year until its release just a week ago.

As a side note, I moved out of my parents' house to my own place at the beginning of the year, which was a huge milestone for me. Now that this video has come to an end, I'd like to share my plans for 2022. My main goals include improving my front-end development skills by learning more about JavaScript and CSS. I want to learn more about front-end frameworks and be comfortable working on the front-end of websites since I think I have a solid grasp of back-end skills.

I also plan to continue improving Programming Expert, find it from the link in the description, and work on blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. Specifically, I'm planning to release a series where I'll teach you about Solidity and how to host your own smart contracts and work with cryptocurrency. That's all for now; thank you for watching this video, and I hope it gave you value. Don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a comment with your journey learning how to code, and I'll see you in another YouTube video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody and welcome to another youtube video so in today's video i'm going to be going through everything that i have learned over the past 10 years of programming now i started to program back in 2011 when i was only 11 years old obviously not doing anything very complicated but this is kind of where my journey began and you're gonna see this has been a long journey with lots of difficulties and it makes a very interesting story anyways hopefully as i go through this video i'll give you kind of a curriculum or outline of things you may want to learn however if you are new to programming or looking to upgrade your skills you should check out programmingexpert.io from the link in the description this is a brand new course that i have just released with the algo expert team we've been working on this for like six months it has a ton of awesome content and it gives you a complete structure and guide on one page of pretty much everything you need to know to master program any support you guys could provide would be awesome i'm super passionate about this and again if you guys are new to programming or just trying to get better definitely check this out programming expert dot io anyways with that said let's go back to 2011 and i will tell you what i remember back then when i was learning how to code all right so the details in the first few years here might be slightly inaccurate because my memory is not that good but i do know that back in 2011 this is kind of when i started to realize that i wanted to get into some type of stem related field i really hated art i hated anything creative i hated music and english and all of that but i loved math i loved science and i really liked building stuff i liked doing kind of like mechanical engineering type work now what i was doing back then was working with lego robots i was uh making like model cars catapults anything that had like a little engineering kind of sense to it i really really enjoy and so this is how i got my first taste of programming because i was working with lego robotics and you can program those you can make them so they go forward or so if the sensor is activated it turns to the left or it picks something up and that's kind of how i got into programming back then was i had this block based editor and i would say okay turn the motor you know 360 degrees okay if the sensor is activated back up whatever you guys get what i'm saying but that was the first introduction of programming back in 2011. alright so fast forward to 2012 i am 12 years old and this is when i start actually looking at html and css now i don't know exactly how i ended up getting to this topic but i do remember that i was very obsessed with learning at that age i would come home from school immediately go on my laptop start watching all kinds of youtube videos and just like experimenting with stuff and looking at all kinds of different topics and areas so i probably was googling like what is coding or like how does a computer work or something like that and ended up coming across an html and css tutorial now i remember very clearly that this tutorial was from bucky in fact i watched like hundreds of bucky's videos when i was a kid some of you may know his channel i'll put it up on the screen anyways i end up learning the basics of html the basics of css and in my mind i am programming i am writing code and i am like you know mega genius at 12 years old at least that's what i thought so i start messing with that stuff i'm really really interested in it and i just love the fact that i can go on my computer type in a few lines of code and see something appear in my web browser i really don't have any good idea of what i'm doing i'm just watching a ton of video tutorials and that's pretty much all that's happening in 2012. so fast forward to 2013 i've now done a bunch of html and css i'm able to make some very very basic web pages and kind of style them to some level and i start looking at javascript and php now javascript clearly is kind of a natural follow-up from html i'm now handling events on the website so when you click the button maybe i'm showing you a pop-up where i'm generating a random number or i'm doing something relatively trivial with javascript and then after javascript i'm like okay well now i know how to kind of handle stuff on the website how can i make a functioning website that's going to maybe store data so i start looking at php now i don't look at php for very long this is really complicated to me i don't really understand databases and all that kind of stuff and what ends up happening now in 2013 is i start to realize that i don't really like working on websites i'm not a fan of html i'm not a fan of kind of designing stuff in aesthetics i really liked the javascript programming and the php that was way more fun to me working kind of the logic in the back end of the website again i know it's not really the back end but in my mind it was behind the scenes because i didn't actually see the code that i was writing and so what i did is start looking for stuff that was kind of similar to that that i could mess around with so eventually i found vbs which is a visual basic script and i started writing kind of like little viruses or prank scripts that i could run on my friend's computer so for example i would write a script that would like constantly open the disk drive so it would open the disk drive and then if you push it in it would open it again where it would like rapidly toggle the caps locks button so you couldn't type something obviously i didn't leave these running on the computers i would just put them on kind of like prank them and then turn them off but that's what i was doing at that age now i also ended up jailbreaking a bunch of people's ipods i started kind of looking at more of the hacking side of technology and trying to manipulate stuff that i would use every day as opposed to creating brand new things alright so that was 2013 i'm kind of this immature child that's decent at like technology has some technology literacy and is like messing with people and making pranks and kind of vbs scripts and stuff like that and now we fast forward to 2014 where i start eventually learning c sharp now again this is coming from the realization that i really don't like web development the only thing i did like if it was pretty much the javascript and so i've got through my vbs stage i'm not really that interested in kind of pranking people anymore and what i want to do is learn a legitimate programming language so i end up coming across c sharp don't really know how and start trying to learn that for probably six months to a year so anyways i'm learning c sharp i'm continuing to kind of get better at it i'm learning about a strongly typed language i'm getting into stuff like functions arguments parameters and a lot of words that i just don't even understand at the age of 14 and well it's taking me a really long time to learn this i'm finding this really challenging but that's why i keep learning it because it's kind of one of the first things that i've found that is difficult and that's really testing my mind and my ability so anyways i learned c sharp for pretty much the entire year by the end of learning this for about you know six eight months whatever i'm working on graphical user interfaces kind of messing around with net technology i'm making stuff like calculators i'm making stuff like uh you know graphing programs that can graph like a line and at this point i believe i'm probably in grade nine and i'm showing this to some of my friends showing it to my parents all that kind of stuff anyways that's pretty much all i can remember from 2014 now let's go to 2015. so in 2015 i'm now probably entering grade 10 in high school and i'm taking my first computer science course in high school so in this course we're learning action script now actionscript is something that allows you to program flash games i already have a programming fundamental base i kind of know functions i know like you know basic programming concepts so this course is very very easy for me and so i'm always kind of asking the teacher hey what can i do next is there anything more difficult can you challenge me and he says hey maybe you should join the computer science club so in grade 10 i joined the computer science club and in this club they're actually preparing you to write a competition called the ccc now the ccc is the canadian computing competition hosted by the university of waterloo it's pretty much like five data structures and algorithm questions you get like three hours to answer them and depending on how many test cases you pass on all of the questions you could get invited to round two where you actually go to the university of waterloo and compete against like the best high school programs anyways i realized very quickly that i can't actually write this competition in c sharp which is kind of my main programming language at this point and so i asked my teacher hey what language should i learn because they don't have that as an option for me to submit my code with and he says well you should probably learn python that's what we're going to be doing next year in computer science and the year after and python is just a pretty easy language to learn for beginners so this is where i start getting into python i absolutely love python as soon as i pick it up and i study it for a few months before eventually writing the ccc competition that i end up doing very very poorly on i hadn't really prepared for it very much it was pretty challenging a lot of these questions were kind of math heavy as well and they increase in difficulty from one to five so i probably successfully answered like the first two questions and then completely failed the rest of them but i remember being motivated to kind of come back the next year and try to do better so that's pretty much 2015 this is when i started taking programming a bit more serious it's kind of more of a serious hobby now i'm doing it almost every day and i'm really really enjoying it and starting to realize that this is probably a career path for me all right so now we go to 2016. now 2016 i'm 16 years old i am in grade 11 and i'm taking my computer science course in grade 11. now in this course we're learning basic python i already know all of this because i've been continually learning python since that competition last year and again i sign up for the computer science club where i'm going to compete in the ccc now this year in the ccc i do much better i'm a few points away from actually being being invited to kind of the next round at university of waterloo i'm starting to get way better at programming i'm learning stuff like pie game i'm learning python modules i'm learning object oriented programming and i'm really starting to kind of dive head first into this field and realize that i really enjoy this and i really want to be good at this now other than that i'm probably just working on some larger python projects and actually i believe at this point in time i start looking into xcode and developing ios applications so i remember i wanted to make an ios app that would allow me to like categorize photos of my textbooks so this is kind of a little tangent but i'll tell it because it's an interesting story so i always had to walk to school my walk was like 20 to 25 minutes so i hated having to carry my textbooks because they were super heavy and it was really annoying to walk home with the textbooks so what i did is i would always take photos of any of the homework pages from my textbook so i never had to carry them home i could just do them off my phone but then i would go to my camera roll and i would have like hundreds of photos and i wouldn't be able to find the page so i wanted to make an ios app for my phone where i could just like take a picture of the uh of the textbook page it would automatically like group it into sections or subjects and give me the page number and all of that so i ended up working on that for like six months actually ended up making the app and it worked successfully and i put it on my phone so that was kind of uh you know a cool tangent kind of a side project going on where i was learning swift and objective c and just messing around with xcode and eventually creating this you know very simple app but something i was pretty proud of anyways i think that's pretty much it for 2016. now let's go to 2017. all right so 2017 is probably one of the most important years in my life so far i'm only 21 so take that with a grain of salt but anyways this is grade 12 this is when i really start to get passionate about computer science i know i'm going to go to school for computer science next year i've already applied to a bunch of universities and i'm in my grade 12 computer science course i'm learning big-o notation data structures and algorithms i'm continuing to work with a ton of python modules and i'm just a much more confident and competent program at this point in time i also start working at a summer camp as a stem program coordinator now this means i'm actually running a coding specialty and i'm teaching kids between the age of 11 and 15 how to code at a summer camp and i'm actually teaching them python code so a real programming language and this is when i realized that i really enjoy teaching i'm super happy doing that and so i start the youtube channel where i start teaching python too well all of you now at some point in time during this year i start posting more and more videos on youtube this would be when i created something like the golf game that some of you may have seen on this channel it's a python kind of like mini golf game anyways i'm working on a lot of larger projects i'm getting way better at coding and again starting to really realize okay this is a career path this is what i want to do and then i eventually get into the university of ottawa for computer science as well as a few other universities i do choose uottawa and now we'll go to 2018 where i start my first year of university alright so 2018 first year of university also mentioned the summer before going to university i did my second year of the stem program coordinator at the summer camp which was great again continuing to post some youtube videos for the kids at the camp then i get to university i'm taking my first year computer science courses so introduction to computing i'm taking linear algebra calculus all of that type of stuff i'm living in residence in a big huge building with like hundreds of people in kind of like apartment style i have a roommate and this is when i really start getting serious about my youtube channel so i realized quite quickly into university that studying for courses is not going to take up nearly enough of my time i just really had a lot of extra time in university i was playing video games i was wasting it doing a bunch of stuff that i wasn't proud of doing and so what i did instead was say okay what can i do that's going to be productive that i'm going to enjoy and that's going to help me in the future and my answer to that was my youtube channel so at this point in time i had like two or three thousand subscribers but i really enjoyed posting on there and coming up with the educational content so i said to myself i'm gonna post a youtube video every single day for as long as i can so the unfortunate thing though was i had a roommate i we're in this like you know big apartment-style building and so it's really loud throughout the day and i just wasn't really able to record when my roommate's in the room and it just didn't work out very well for me to be recording at normal times so what i had to do is wake up at 5 30 a.m every single morning for as long as i could and film youtube videos between the hours of like 5 30 and 8 or 9 a.m and then start the rest of my day now this completely changed my life i got to a point where i was being so extremely productive i could probably do what i would normally do in a week in like six seven hours a day i was grinding really really hard but it completely paid off and over that first year of university or at least that first semester i grew my youtube channel for like two or three thousand subscribers it's like 15 20 25 30k and i think by the time i ended first year of university which is gonna be 2019 i probably had like 30 or 40 000 subscribers on youtube anyways at this point since i'm doing so many youtube videos i'm learning flask i'm learning django i'm learning python web development i'm getting into a ton of other python modules and i'm really expanding my programming knowledge i'm learning math i'm learning get and i'm just learning a ton of stuff because of the amount of time that i'm spending work anyways now we move to 2019 now 2019 is going to be like end of first year beginning of second year university now in between that i'm working at the summer camp for the third time as a stem program coordinator and this is when i'm continuing to grow the youtube channel and now i'm sitting with a youtube channel that has like you know multiple 10 000 subscribers so i'm feeling good about that i'm posting a ton more content i'm starting to learn stuff like machine learning artificial intelligence i'm learning like tensorflow scikit-learn pi torch all of that type of stuff i'm now partnering with companies like free code camp i'm sure many of you know them and really just starting to kind of get involved in the programming community and start to learn most of my stuff on my own rather than from school so of course as i'm in university i'm learning you know computing too which means i'm learning stuff like java i'm learning data structures and algorithms in a formal course so i'm using java for that as well i'm learning programming paradigms so i'm learning languages like go like haskell like oh camel i'm kind of diving into all of these university courses but at the same time i'm doing a ton of work on my own and kind of just getting better at programming on the side with side projects and all the youtube videos that i'm posting so now near the end of 2019 this is when i actually start looking for internships for 2020 i really want to work as a software engineer ideally at a large tech company you know i'm targeting like a google microsoft amazon whatever but i'm also totally fine to go to a local company so i interviewed at shopify at ibm at bell actually which was uh close to where i was living at the time in ottawa anyways i was doing a ton of interviews and i started practicing my data structures and algorithms and doing like the coding interview type questions where i actually used algo expert now this is when i started a relationship with clement this is when i did a video on his channel with like a mock google coding interview and i started getting way better at these types of questions and then eventually ended up getting an interview at microsoft and some of you know how that goes but now we're gonna go to 2020 where i'll talk about that all right so 2020 i am continuing to grind for my technical interviews i'm doing all kinds of data structures and algorithms type problems doing almost all of the ones on algo expert anyways then i end up getting flown to microsoft for my in-person technical interviews this is in january before the pandemic is really known in the world so i do them end up passing those technical interviews i get a job offer from microsoft three days later i do my technical interviews at shopify end up getting one from them as well i end up deciding to choose microsoft because i was excited to actually go in person to microsoft to work there of course we know that didn't end up happening regardless though then the pandemic happens kind of puts everything on pause for i guess like a month or so that's probably an accurate timeline i end up moving back home away from school so out of ottawa doing school remotely and continuing to learn computer science stuff from school right so i'm learning languages like golang now i'm learning about programming language concepts computer architecture digital systems all that kind of fun stuff and continuing to work on the youtube channel which at this point in time probably has about 150 000 subscribers okay continuing i go to microsoft i'm working on the python extension for visual studio code an absolutely great fit for me at microsoft we're using typescript and javascript for the entire extension so i end up learning typescript and working in that for about three or four months okay so after leaving microsoft because that was just a summer internship i now start school again i am now doing my first semester of third year so i'm learning some other programming stuff there although nothing super notable and i end up actually getting a job at algo expert as an algorithms instructor which i am doing while i am running my youtube channel and while i am going to school so i am extremely busy i'm working like 12 hours days every single day just really grinding because i have a job school as well as the youtube channel which is pretty much a full-time job as well and i end up doing that until i finish my first semester of third year and then i drop out of school alright so 2021 this year i am now dropped out of school i am so happy i finally have some time back in my life i'm not as stressed as i was before long story short on that decision i was generating a significant amount of revenue and it just really didn't make sense to be in school anymore this was not a you know on the whim decision this was something that had been thought about for a long time anyways i continue working at algo expert as an algorithms instructor so continuing to develop my uh you know algorithms data structure knowledge i then really start getting into front-end frameworks learning stuff like react learning a bit more about styling and css and really working on kind of full stack web applications that you guys would have seen me release at kind of end of 2020 beginning of 2021 on the youtube channel of course i'm continuing to work on the youtube channel and then i start working on programming expert now programming expert i talked about at the beginning of this video essentially it's an entire platform to learn how to code and i started planning that as early as february of last year so we kind of had the idea signed all the logistical contracts and all of that then started coming up with the curriculum and building that out pretty much for the entire year until we released it just i guess about a week ago from when i'm filming this video anyways you can check it out from programmingexpert.io but that's what i've been working on for a very long time which means really in this year i haven't been learning a lot related to programming i've been focusing on building this product working on the youtube channel expanding the business and yeah that's what i've been doing now as a side note i actually ended up moving out of my parents house to my own place that was kind of a huge thing that i did at the beginning of the year and now i am pretty well done with this video and everything that i went through now this video did not turn out exactly how i planned for it to be it was kind of more of a life story than it was and necessarily you know what i've learned programming although it did start in that way regardless i hope that gave some value to you guys and i just want to quickly tell you what i'm planning for 2022 in case you've stuck around till the end of this video so for 2022 my main goals here are to improve my front-end development skills i really want to learn more about front-end frameworks i want to learn more about javascript and css and be more comfortable working on the front end of websites because i think i have the back-end skills down pretty well i want to continue to improve programming expert dot io again find it from the link in the description i want to be practicing golang go is kind of the next language i really want to transition into and then i want to do some more work on blockchain and cryptocurrency cryptocurrency which is actually what i've been working on a little bit right now and i have a series plan for you guys where i'm going to be teaching you solidity and how to actually host your own smart contracts and work with cryptocurrency regardless with that said that is going to end this video this video has taken a long time to make if you guys enjoyed please leave a like subscribe to the channel leave a comment with your journey learning how to code down below and i will see you in another youtube video\n"