Develop Yourself
To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself.
Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.
Develop Yourself
#227 - How Busy Professionals Can Learn to Code (Without Losing Their Minds): A 3 Step Process
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Ever feel like learning to code is impossible with your packed schedule?
You're not alone.
Ten years ago, I was juggling parenting two kids, working full-time with a brutal Bay Area commute, and driving Lyft on the side just to make ends meet. Finding time seemed impossible—until I discovered three game-changing strategies that transformed my journey.
No fluff - just practical stuff you can start doing now.
PS.
Here's a really solid web dev roadmap I found on Reddit that you might find useful. Link
Shameless Plugs
🧠 (NEW) Parsity's The Inner Circle Program - a highly customized roadmap to take you from 0 to hired. For career changers who want to pivot into software.
💼 Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Google, Brian-look-a-like)
👂🏻Easier Said Than Done Podcast
Already a developer? Check out 👉 Not Another Course
Serious about joining Parsity? Schedule a call with me ☎️
Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. If you're working full-time, maybe you're raising kids, maybe you're commuting, maybe you're doing some combination of all those things and you're wondering how am I supposed to find the time to learn to code? I can barely find the time to learn to code. I can barely find the time to go to the gym or cook dinner or even bathe myself. First of all, get yourself together. Just pull it together. What I'm going to do is give you three practical tips, things that I did in order to find time where I had none, in order to learn to code and change careers, and then do all sorts of things that changed my life for the better. So let's get right into it. I'm just going to give you three practical things you can do as a person that's changing careers wants to learn to code. You're a busy adult. Maybe you got kids, maybe you got all sorts of things going on and you need to find time. How do you do it?
Speaker 1:First off, let me tell you that 10 years ago, I was in your situation. I'm not just talking about this stuff. I have three kids now. I had two kids at the time. One was a toddler, like one years old, and one was like seven or something. At the time, I had a job in the San Francisco Bay Area where I had to commute, and if you're in the Bay Area, you know how bad the commutes can be. It was like an hour drive to get to work, and then I also drove Lyft and Uber on the side to get more money, because, you know, we were kind of broke. So I didn't have much time at all, like no time. I felt like I had negative time. So how did I learn to code with all this stuff going on? Well, I kind of stumbled into this and one thing I found out and this is step one for you you're gonna have to find something that you're gonna need to sacrifice, and if I was you, the easiest thing you can do is go through your phone right now and look at your screen time and you can find where you're spending all your time. And this should tell you what you value, because if you weren't valuing it, if you didn't value this stuff, you probably wouldn't be doing it. So, as much as you might say, oh no, I really want to code, I really want to do this thing, your actions are going to tell us where your value truly lies, what you really want to do. Right, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:So for me, this was playing Angry Birds, which I'm a little bit ashamed to admit. I like Angry Birds, I still do. This was also 10 plus years ago, when Angry Birds was more of a thing that people would play Maybe not grown men, but hey, whatever. Anyway, no judgment, I hope. Anyway, I was doing that. I was watching way too much TV. My TV was on constantly. I was just watching TV, just mindlessly, and this is really before Netflix was a huge thing. So I was just watching tons of just daytime TV, or nighttime TV, apparently, and also watching football on the weekends. I don't even really like football I didn't back then either but I was watching it because I was just bored, had something to do.
Speaker 1:So I decided these were the things I was going to give up. I'm like, okay, in order for me to do this thing, which is learn to code, I'll have to give these things up. So you're going to need to do the same thing Make a list of the things that you can give up, and no, not the gym. No, not your kids or your wife or husband, or neglecting relationships. No, those are lame things to give up. Give up things that aren't lame, right. Give up things like eating out too much, or give up things like drinking or whatever, things that take up a lot of time, that don't add a lot of benefit to your life, and even some things that you might like doing that you just know you have to put away for a season Maybe you're really big into football that takes up three to six hours of your week, maybe more, maybe 10 between everything else you do to prepare for watching the game or whatever. I don't really watch sports, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:Pick that thing, find time that you're going to have to reclaim for yourself. Which leads us to step number two. You're going to use these micro moments to learn on the go, right? So for me, this was 30 minutes in the morning, one hour at lunch or maybe 30 minutes at lunch. You know like, okay, I need to eat a little bit of lunch, maybe do a little socializing, maybe not, you know, depending on how much you like your coworkers, whatever. Then at night I'm not going to do anything. I'm tired, I'm getting home and burned out. Then on the weekends, I'm going to spend about three or four hours on the weekends working, catching up each day. So that leads me about 10 hours or more a week. That's quite a lot. That's quite a lot, but it still can feel like it's not enough, because the problem with me reclaiming these micro moments and you may have this issue too is that I didn't really know what to do in these moments. So what I do is bumble around thinking about what I should be doing. I do is bumble around thinking about what I should be doing.
Speaker 1:Now, this was 10 years ago, before you had so much information on the internet that it's easy to get inundated and overwhelmed and just drowning in a sea of information. Information is free, it's abundant and it's worthless for the most part. You can find out how to do anything online fix a car, do open heart surgery, learn to code, whatever but if you don't know what you should be doing, then you can just end up going down these rabbit holes or reading articles or doing things that aren't really leading you to your goal. So now that you have this time reclaimed. You have to know what to do with these little moments, because they're micro moments. They have to be really impactful. They can't be spent bumbling around or else you're going to lose momentum, you're going to lose steam and you're not going to want to continue doing it. Which leads us to the most important step, and this is where we're going to spend the most time Now Zubin, my partner.
Speaker 1:He's a guy that has color-coded calendars and has his days planned out to a T. The guy is like something else really smart. That's why I partnered with him, because he's super, duper smart. He's also a career changer and he and I are very different in many ways, which is funny because we look very much alike but we're so different in many ways. I respect the hell out of people like that. That's not me, right. So what I learned how to do on my own this is not what we teach people at Parsley, by the way. We actually are much more methodical and strategic with how we have to manage their time.
Speaker 1:But I'm going to tell you what was the biggest difference for me when I was doing this, when I was on this learning to code journey, so I had reclaimed the time, I was getting these micro moments, and I had them set. I'm like okay, 30 minutes in the morning hour at lunch, and then the weekends. The problem was, though, my mornings were completely worthless at first. The first two months of learning to code, I was doing HTML and CSS, and I was waking up in the morning and being like, okay, what now? I'd sit at my computer and feel like I was doing something because I was sitting there wasting time. I was reading a book about HTML. Can you imagine how worthless that would be to do Reading a book on HTML? Just think about that for a second. So you don't just need speed, you don't just need time. What you need is clarity.
Speaker 1:So step three is getting a direction, having a plan on what to do Super duper important. So at this stage, I was like what is my ultimate goal? So my ultimate goal is to become a web developer, somebody that could build a website. That was my ultimate goal. Super simple goal at the time, right, much simpler in 2013 than it is in 2025, right Nowadays, it includes HTML, css, javascript, nextjs, reactjs, server-side components, sql, mongo, aws, and the list just goes on and on, and on and on and on. Back then, I'm like HTML, css, jquery, angularjs. Anyways, I knew what I should be able to build. Now that was a really powerful thing to know. Now, if you don't know that, you'll have to get some sort of clarity on what you should be able to build. I have an article where I can list out those things for you that I'll include in the show notes because I like you, and it can lay out kind of the basics of what you should know as a web developer.
Speaker 1:If you're a machine learning engineer or a mobile app developer or a blockchain engineer, your path may look different and it's not a one size fits all thing, which is exactly why at Parsity, we make people custom curriculums, because we know that everybody needs a bit of a different map to get to the place where they want to go. Think about this. Zubin told me this, and this is my last little tangent before I get into the practical part of this Imagine you're in California and you want to go to New York. You could go two directions. You can go east, which would be smart You'd get there in, you know, whatever 12 hours of driving. Or you could go west. Now would you hit New York eventually, going west? Absolutely? How long would it take you to do that? Months, weeks, you know, a year, potentially right. So speed is not always the most important factor, it's clarity. This is what we really need. We need direction.
Speaker 1:So me as a web developer, I'm like, okay, I need to be able to build this thing. And so I had a project in mind. I'm going to build a website for the city of Oakland. Now your project should be whatever your project is Now what I encourage you to do is break this down into tasks. Decompose this into small pieces that you're going to do on a daily basis. Sometimes it might be research, sometimes it might be coding up some part of some application. Sometimes it might be completing a part of a tutorial. That's fine. Just know what you're supposed to do before you wake up.
Speaker 1:And here's the hack in quotes that I can tell you that worked for me. I have really cheap notebooks that I just stack by the dozens. Now I write notebooks constantly. I wasn't always like this and I'm still not some sort of like journaling type of dude or affirmation type of guy, and if you're into that, that's your thing right Now. What I did was to make sure that I wasn't losing track of all these great ideas I was having at night was to buy a really cheap notebook and I'd have it right by my bed, and I still do this nowadays. When I wanted to read the Bible more, I kept a Bible by my bed. When I just wanted to read more, I kept a book by my bed. When I want to write, I will keep a notebook and a pen by the bed. This is a reminder. This is a cue for the habit that I wanna begin building.
Speaker 1:So learning how to do this, building this new habit, is something you're going to need. You're not going to have motivation, you're not going to have ambition at the end of the day, you're just going to want to go to sleep. So if you have your notebook sitting in some fancy office somewhere or in your backpack, whatever, you're not going to do it. So what you need to do is have it really close to you so you can immediately write into it and also get that cue to do it before you go to sleep. Then, when you wake up, you're going to know exactly what to do.
Speaker 1:I like using notebooks. I know there's tools like Notion and Trello and all these cool tools out there. Just use a notebook. It's super simple. It's really effective. But also just use whatever the hell you want. Just have some way to know what you're supposed to do. Now here's the reality. Most people won't follow this at all and most people will get the results that most people get, which is not what they ultimately want, results that most people get, which is not what they ultimately want. So learning how to manage your time, like it or not, is your superpower as a career changer who wants to learn to code. People that don't get this fundamental aspect of learning to code and changing careers won't make it.
Speaker 1:I used to teach at a coding boot camp about seven years ago and I knew this guy there and he was pretty diligent, like he would always show up and he would be there for like eight hours on the weekend, but he didn't ever seem to get the material and I just straight up asked him. I said you know, why are you still struggling with for loops? I see you here like all the time and you're always doing all this work and you're like learning all this stuff. And he's like, well, you know, during the week, um, I'm just so busy and I got this job and I'm having to travel around and my kids and I have this like open court case. He had a lot of stuff going on in his life, right, he had a lot of drama going on. I'm like okay, okay, cool, like okay, sure, yeah, we all got stuff in our lives. Yeah, whatever I said. So when are you doing your work? He's like, oh, I do it all on the weekends and I'm like, after years of doing this, like literally working with hundreds of people, I've never seen it work, and at Parsity we don't allow this.
Speaker 1:If we saw somebody doing this, we'd say that's not going to work and we would make sure that you're doing it the right way, because we have access to everybody's schedules. Maybe it's weird if you think that we're not a cult, I promise, but we need to know what you're doing when you're doing it, so we can help you manage your own time. We tell people 15 to 20 hours per week is what it's going to take. Now, me personally, I spent around 10 to 20 hours per week on my own before I went to a coding boot camp to learn all this stuff, and that's just what I knew I had to do. Now will you do that for more than a year? No, now can you do way less than that for a lot longer?
Speaker 1:Sure, if you've ever wondered why you meet people who are studying for years on end and not getting to the quote-unquote promised land or getting to that hireable state I've met quite a few of these people it's because they lack direction, they lack clarity, so what they do is they learn a lot of stuff that can't quite fit together. It's like if you wanted to become a mechanic and you bought some tools and you bought an old car and you opened the hood and just started doing stuff. Eventually you'd probably figure things out. It might take you a really long time. Imagine if you had a mechanic standing next to you that had worked on that exact same car. How fast do you think your learning would be then? Same analogy can apply to software. Anyways, I hope that is helpful.
Speaker 1:And just to reiterate one find something you're gonna sacrifice, or find hours that you're going to sacrifice. Easiest step look in your phone. Find things that you're doing that you think you probably shouldn't be doing, like looking at Netflix a ton or being on Instagram doom scrolling for hours about AI and whatever's going on in politics and taxes and tariffs and all this kind of stuff. Don't do that. Step two reclaim those micro moments. Make those dedicated times where you're going to do the thing that you're supposed to do, which, in this case, would be learning to code. Step three make a plan of action. Have clarity in what you're supposed to do on a daily basis and, if you can, on an hourly basis. That way, you know exactly what you're supposed to do at which step. That part is obviously the most difficult. Without a clear plan, you will be basically going nowhere fast. And, by the way, if you have questions, I'd love to answer them, because I know that if you have a question, other people have that exact same question.
Speaker 1:I've been doing this for a very long time, and the dirty secret is that most of the influencers that you see online or that you read about or on social media, the problem with getting your answers from many of these people, and why I caution you from doing this is because most of them have worked either at really large tech companies, where only 1% of software engineers will ever work, or the really dirty secret that I kind of feel awkward even saying is that most of them haven't really worked in software at all. It's really weird, actually. I've met a few and I'm like kind of shocked to learn that they worked maybe one or two years, then went on to become influencers. I don't have a problem with this at all, to be honest with you. I think they have a lot of really good advice, but I also know that that advice is based on a very limited experience during a time that might not be reflective or representative of where we are right now in the industry. I'm still working in software. I'm still teaching people how to code and get into the software industry, so I'm actively in it, going through the same things that we all are.
Speaker 1:I've been laid off last year, went through like 10 interviews, but yeah, I mean I've done all the stuff that you're reading about and I think I can speak fairly intelligently about it and give you some practical advice based on what I know works for me and other people that I've seen in Parsity and other programs where I've worked. And I'm not meaning to say that I'm the source of truth or anything either. What I really want to make sure you do is find somebody that's been where you want to go and ask them is what I'm doing making sense? Is what I'm learning making sense. Would you do this? What did you do? Find somebody that's been there, done that and then try to reverse engineer their path, and then you can use these steps to actually have a really clear plan. Now, if you want, you could just go to Parsity, where we do all that for you.
Speaker 1:But whether you do or whether you don't, if you do what I just laid out for you, you're gonna have a hell of a lot better chance than just kind of vibing your way through coding career and coding tutorials as usual. I hope that's helpful and if you have questions, please leave them in the comments, hit me up at brian at parsityio or however you wanna get in touch with me on LinkedIn, wherever, because I really want to answer more questions from people that are out there living it and give them practical advice that other people can benefit from too. Anyways, have a great weekend and I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio, and if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by.
