Tips For Building Confidence As A Beginner Programmer

all right so the long form videos that I usually publish on Mondays are for beginner programmers and usually I'm walking through some really early programming Concepts I've explored things like inheritance composition basics of C sharp and these are really Geared for people that are new to programming so that they can learn and try to get a better understanding so in this video I'm actually not going to be walking through any code but I wanted to talk about a topic that's been coming up a lot more recently I get this question really often on LinkedIn and then more recently I've had more Instagram followers reaching out and asking about this I just figured I'd make a video to address it and essentially I have a lot of people reaching out and say hey which programming topic should I start reading about and researching so that I can be a better programmer and have more confidence so first of all thank you so much for your questions and reaching out to ask about this I think you know it's great that you're taking that first step to be able to ask but I do have a common answer that I give to people and it might not be the most popular thing that other people are saying or the thing that you expect to hear so I've been programming for about half my life now I've gone to University for it I've been programming professionally for like over a decade and I still stand by the advice that I want to give here and my opinion on this is that it's not about just reading material and trying to memorize Concepts and it's not even about trying to practice things like lead code problems and I don't want you to get me wrong here I think there is some value to being able to practice like algorithm style questions giving yourself a little bit of a challenge trying to think in different ways be creative so I'm not saying that there's no place for that kind of stuff but if I had to have an option between memorizing some content you know watching video tutorials practicing lead code problems and this other thing I would take this other thing every day all day every time so what's this other thing actually programming I know it sounds kind of ridiculous right but I think if you want to get better at programming and have more confidence as a programmer you need to be programming in my opinion this should be taking it more time than all of those other things put together now I haven't surveyed enough people that have asked me to figure out why they're not gravitating towards this but I'm thinking that it probably has something to do with well I don't know what to program I've been pretty fortunate in my programming Journey that I've always had little things to program and I've had long ongoing projects that I'll probably never finish but they've served as like a playground for me to try programming Concepts out in so I have a little bit of a bias here because it's always felt pretty easy for me to go jump into something and work on it but I do want to recognize that that might not be the same for everyone still I believe that you do want to be spending more time actually programming so that you can practice learn and feel comfortable so if your first roadblock is well I don't know what to go program then here's a couple ideas the first thing that I want to say and I think a lot of people do do this is that they're going well I'm going to be a programmer so if I'm trying to think of something to go make like what's the next big startup idea like what's going to make me millions of dollars and I just want to say stop right there it's not going to happen right away if you haven't programmed um and maybe I shouldn't say that there's always exceptions to to everything right you should never say never but I want to suggest that you don't try to focus on it that way if you've never programmed anything before then trying to jump into building a complex system or programming something to go solve a bunch of needs might just not be a good Avenue to practice so with that said let's actually try scaling that idea back and instead of jumping to like what complex problem or what thing am I going to solve for other people why don't you just think about trying to build something super simple it doesn't have to be anything awesome it doesn't have to be like a super sexy application or something like that it can be something as simple as like a console calculator that adds numbers together you could try to make your own Notepad application where you can type the things and do it save and load them you could try doing something like making your own calendar right all of these things are really simple little tools or things that you could go make they allow you to practice some fundamental programming Basics and even though they might not be things you can go turn around and sell and whatever else that's not the goal right now the goal right now is for you to get more comfortable programming so program another really cool part about this and I've told people that have messaged me this like if you want to go build something like a calculator you know as an example go start making a console based calculator that can add numbers together then you could add you know subtraction multiplication division you have the kind of Basics going on there and you're like okay I have a console calculator whoop-dee-doo I get it it's not that exciting but if you want to go learn web Technologies maybe you can go take your console code and you could actually go take the calculator pieces of that and go make an asp.net Blazer web app I don't know there's an idea or if you want to go learn mobile programming you want to learn.net Maui maybe you can go take your calculator back-end code and actually go move that into a Maui application so you can actually try programming in these different environments different Tech Stacks learning different things and actually focusing on not what problem am I going to solve like what magical thing am I going to invent what crazy system am I going to build you can just look at how do I code things and spend the time actually coding and then learning the material as you're coding it and I just want to say that I fully recognize that everyone learns in different ways but from my experience it has been way more common that people seem to get ideas and Concepts and programming by actually doing them versus just reading about them or watching them you may very well be an exception to this maybe that's actually why you're watching this video right now right you're looking for programming Concepts to go learn about and maybe you're like hey like well this guy sucks I don't like his advice and you go to the next YouTube video that's cool just make sure it's one of mine but um I do think that you'll have a lot better experience from the majority of people will have a lot better learning experience by actually programming things and again if it comes back to confidence and your ability to feel confident in your programming then I do think that you want to be practicing it before I wrap this up I just want to kind of give you like a metaphor that you can maybe think about this might not apply to everyone it kind of hits home for me but if I think about people like I like to go to the gym a lot so if I think about people that are new to the gym and they want to learn to bench pressure they want to learn to squat or something like that they might be intimidated by that right they might see other people in the gym that can squat you know 400 pounds people that can bench press 300 pounds and and they're like I don't even know if I could hold the bar like I don't know if I can even bend down into a squad or lower a bar at a bench it and like you have no confidence and that's that's okay everyone starts somewhere including those really strong people you see so what I would suggest for people to get better at those things and to feel more confident with them is not to go reading and watching you know you know every research paper on swatting and and bench pressing and stuff sure you might go watch some YouTube videos like this one right you might go read a couple of things but ultimately those people got to where they are not just by reading about stuff and watching stuff and learning about research papers on it and all the theory behind it they got there because they practice it they can get under the bar to squat hundreds of pounds because they practiced it they've squatted hundreds thousands of times to be able to do what they're able to do and I think the same thing applies to programming maybe with a little bit less weight on your shoulders hopefully but if you want to get better at doing it you need to be able to practice it and that's going to be the number one way that you can personally build confidence and once you start to have some of that momentum then I think you might want to start going and exploring like cool like I know how to work with databases like maybe um I've worked with SQL but like I haven't used a no SQL database before ever so maybe I want to explore that maybe you want to try Performance Tuning some things and that's where you're actually reading about some more Theory to see oh like if I use this algorithm versus this one or this Tech stack versus this one they have different performance characteristics so you're starting to blend some of that theory with like your actual practice but especially in the beginning I think you just really have to start coding things another final thing I'll leave you with is that all the stuff you're coding right now and making progress on it's going to feel cool as you're doing it because you're going to start to build that momentum and then I want you to in one year from now go look back at the code you wrote and another year from that look back at your previous year's code you're going to be blown away by how much you're improving but it means that you have to be coding things so hopefully that helps I know what might not be the answer that you're expecting but that's usually the advice that I give to people and I would say too if you have other questions if you're following me on Instagram please you can DM me ask me anything you want you can leave comments below about stuff that you want to learn about I'm happy to try making content about it I've already got a couple of ideas queued up because people have reached out and they are like you know beginner programming Concepts so I'm happy to go make content on it but it helps me to know what you want to see and then you can help me help you so thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this you might want to watch these other beginner programming videos right after