Telling people you're a self taught developer in YouTube is a big business now

The only lesson that can be taken from here is marketing.

The business model is easy: "Yes, you can, no need to go to University!" followed by insane promise "40 days of anything" and in the end people blame themselves for not being able to cope with it. At this point they sell you another insane yes, you can do it program.

Learning is sometimes hard. I know quite a couple of Computer Science graduates who do not know html/css and have a not to fun time learning it.

I'm self taught and have teached many others. I highly recommend exercism.org over books, videos, or classes.

I'm self taught, spent 4 months entirely on my own going through freeCodeCamp and The Odin Project. My tip - only do it if you enjoy it, there's plenty other professions out there with a better ROI on time invested.

Yeah I did it took me 7 months more or less to get an offer and the rest is history. I trying to post videos more regularly here’s a recent summary I made of the minimum to get a job: What you ACTUALLY need to learn to get a job as a programmer https://youtu.be/iqUm_3rOp7M

I mean I've been writing stuff in Python since I was 8 or 9 years old, I'm now writing a bunch of C code for an open source project. I wouldn't say I'm too good at the coding challenges though. I don't know know how those compare to real work.

Pick a project you’re passionate about and find a technology you’re curious to learn. Then figure out how to make it happen. You can chart your own course (and from what I’ve seen from most bootcamp project results during interviews, you probably should).

I’m a self-taught dropout - I learned how to do this to the detriment of other endeavors including my assigned coursework (which happened to be for another degree).

It sounds like you’re not doing this because you’re driven to. That’s fine, but you’ll probably struggle doing it on your own. I’m guessing those self-taught folks were just more inclined to the field.

I have started poking at ZX-BASIC when I was 8 years old, then started poking at QBasic, then read a (bad) book about C and some MSDN articles about Direct3D (using a paper dictionary, as I didn't know any English). I've got first programming job when I was 19 years old.

Absolutely possible, but the ones I know didn't rush it in a few months but had it as a childhood hobby for many years before changing trade.

> Do you think it's practically possible to learn everything without any structure, discipline?

Yes and no.

For the YES part: I am a self-taught developer, and I got promoted to Principal this year. I taught myself Ruby on Rails first, then after a year pivoted to front-end.

For the NO part: This part is twofold. First, you can't learn everything. The job of an engineer is to learn how to do things, and most of the time there aren't convenient tutorials you can just follow. In the front-end world, lots of us started as hobbyists first. Second, you absolutely cannot learn development without structure and discipline, but you can have those things without a formal class. I learned front-end using FreeCodeCamp, and the course there absolutely has structure. The discipline has to come from you. Learning discipline was part of it for me.

You have to be patient. You spent a month trying to learn front-end? I spent 3 years doing development as a self-taught hobby before applying for a job. It doesn't have to take that long, but that first month is the start of your learning journey, not the end. Would you be frustrated that you couldn't "learn" guitar in a month of watching youtube videos? The basics of music are quite simple, it's the 10,000 hours of practice that differentiates the adept from the novice. Front end web development is simpler in some ways.

> Can anyone remain patient for 40 days to learn html, css

The basics of HTML and CSS only take a few hours to learn. I couldn't imagine spending 40 hours on the "learning" part, but building definitely takes a long time, especially when you are just starting out. This is where the patience and discipline part comes into play. That feeling of frustration is a part of the job, especially for junior/mid-level devs.

I will tell you this: being self-taught has not hurt my career at all, but has helped. I'm pretty good at what I do, which includes teaching others as well, and people are more impressed when you get to this level without formal training. I used to feel inferior to people with CS degrees, but now I really play up the "self-taught" thing.

No bootcamp, No degree or indeed any college courses on software engineering, and I made it. Yes we exist and yes it's possible to succeed as self-taught. It is however way more difficult to get into industry than this way.

I am a self taught developer (never visited a course nor going to university in my life), though that is over 25 years ago. But I basically went through the full career ladder: from junior dev to CTO.

So it is definitely possible, I know others like me. But it is for sure not for everyone. It needs a ton of self discipline.

Unfortunately as it is so long ago (I had no internet at the time I was learning privately) I don't have tips for specific courses, just wanted to drop: Yes you can do it, but it's a shit ton of work. And if you get a job in the country you live in is another question. For me being a european it was fairly easy.

Based on talking to my co-workers I would say somewhere around 80% of them are self-taught (i.e. no CS degree). Most have some kind of technical degree (Physics, Maths, Engineering etc). A few have non-technical degrees and some have no degree at all.

Being self-taught is completely unremarkable.

I think you're going about learning programming the wrong way. Don't try and learn everything up front and then only apply it at the end. You need a project you're trying to make and then you just start doing it. When you get stuck go and learn more to get past that obstacle.

I'm not sure what the issue is or what kind of "tips" you're looking for. There have always been many, many self-taught developers working in industry. Bootcamps are a fairly recent phenomenon.

> I didn't even know the basic of the things like, how much hrs of content should I watch daily to not get overwhelmed?

The answer is zero.

> Please tell me your tips for being a self taught developer.

Try to make stuff. Get stuck. Figure path forward through sheer tyranny of will. Do not google answers.

You need to like it.

Yes, it's how people used to do it. I spent my first decade without mentorship. A month isn't enough time; I consider what I do a craft that I'm honing over the course of a life time.

I am self-taught and am co-founder/CTO of my second company. We have 35 or so employees, so we’re small, but it’s something I’m super proud to have created from nothing.

I started many years ago with little projects. Building a simple website with Rails tutorials. Trying a basic Node app. Eventually I got my first internship making $15/hr, and they forced me to learn tmux and Vim (for which I am super grateful) and work on a variety of codebases and tech alongside more senior engineers. From there I had the skills to start my first company (still learning a lot along the way!)

I have never been motivated by courses. I need to have a goal to be successful, so if you’re at all like me in that it’s difficult to stick to a course, I’d recommend you start a small project and learn to do specific things that help you achieve a little task.

The advice here is good…make stuff you care about and figure out how to make it great.

Very practically, it’s useful to pick a community which tends to run along similar tracks. I am part of the Laravel community, but there are vibrant communities in React, Rails, and others.

That said, self taught has a lot to do with personality and some people just don’t thrive under those circumstances. There is nothing wrong with paying a teacher to help guide in a more formal way, if that’s your particular bent.

It's absolutely possible but you need to be extremely motivated and willing to grind. It's all about the grind, it's not just "learning to program" it's the tooling, the shell, the messy configs, etc.. basically everything around programming.

Do you have it in you to just power through and keep plowing in the face of adversity? Do you have the personality to sit in front of a computer for hours and hours while being mostly frustrated with the occasional high from getting it to work?

And by the way, no one will "teach to program" you have to learn it yourself.

Like others said, pick an area and a goal. I would just recommend that you use chrome devtools + kaboom.js and hammer some basic basic games to start with.

My 'self-taught developer experience' as a teenager is too far back to be any useful today I guess, but when I learn a new technology (like a new programming language) I usually don't use any '3rd-party-material', but instead just lock myself into a room with my computer and just use whatever there is on 'original' documentation.

The next important thing for me is to set myself a practical goal that seems achievable in a relatively short amount of time (preferably something I had already done before in a different context). For instance for a new programming language that could be "I'm going to write a Tetris or Pacman clone", so that you are forced to tackle actual real-world problems instead of just following the documentation examples.

Just passively reading a book or watching a video tutorial never works for me. I need to tinker and experiment with my own hands and refer to the documentation for guidance only when I'm stuck.

Self-taught starting over 40 years ago for fun, then transitioned to FT around 28 years ago. Books, time and mainly a driving passion to write code, get it working and often even make it useful is how I got started. No college but several corporate paid courses in the interim and learned a lot from experienced co-workers over the years, some were degreed, some were self-taught and some of the degreed actually were very good.

I did it in 1.5 years. Went to college for business, now been a Rails dev for 9 months.

The only question is if you really want it. It's a lot to learn, but anyone can do it. I did it with 0 knowledge of anything CS/programming related, you so definitely can.

After that,

1) Focus on *one main technology* (ex: only focus on React if you want to do Frontend or Node.js for Backend). Ultra focus will shortcut your learning like crazy. If I hadn't gotten distracted by different technologies, I probably could have gotten a job in half the time. Even if you pick React, then realize you want to do backend later, you'll still progress faster than constantly flipping between tech.

2) For each technology you're learning, *pick a tiny project to build while you're learning the technology*. I can't stress this one enough. You learn 10x faster when you have a real application in mind to tie your learning to. For example, when learning HTML&CSS, I made a prototype of an app idea. The app didn't actually work, but it cemented my learning. And when I learned different concepts, I'd think "Ah, so that's how I'd make the button round".

And don't be religious about finishing courses — the real learning happens when you start making things.

I’m self taught. The things I found most helpful:

CS50x Exercism.org MIT algorithms lectures on YouTube Introduction to logic and sets for computer programmers book

I also got lucky enough to be involved in an OSS project early that really made me learn by doing.

I found books and online tutorials to be a double-edged sword. They’re great for showing the basics, but always have a plan to deviate and force yourself to encounter and fix errors you cause. Not doing so (“you” hereafter is past me) causes you to be reliant on the next chapter or comparing to the finished code online, which doesn’t exist when doing something yourself.

Lastly, be hungry, humble, and have thick skin. Ask a lot of questions. Read a lot. Program a lot. Program some more. Stack overflow is great, but try to make it your last stop.

i am a 100% self taught software engineer with a degree in philosophy and no formal training. it’s called getting a computer as a kid and being a fucking nerd. i did luck out in that my dad brought home a copy of visual basic from work for me to pirate. he was not a programmer but he knew i wanted to learn more and snuck it home (all 15 floppies or however many! i still remember the sound of installing it) so i could play with it. soon after that we got better internet and i learned about linux, and the rest was history. i only went to college because i was working in software right out of school and felt surrounded by old dudes and like i’d never meet a girlfriend this way.