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
#262 - 12 Months to Hired: A No-Fluff Roadmap to Becoming a Software Developer
If I lost everything today—no job, no network, no portfolio—and had to start over in 2025 as a software developer, I wouldn’t be looking for a 3-month miracle.
I’d be planning for 12 months.
That’s how long it really takes now.
We cover:
- what tech stack you should learn
- networking as a developer using BFS
- a capstone project that is actually impressive
- an interviewing strategy
- 3 books I'd read as a new developer
At Parsity, we cover all this and much more. Apply here.
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Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Googler, Brian-look-a-like)
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 I lost everything today no job, no network, no portfolio and I had to start from scratch as a software developer in 2025, I wanna lay out exactly what I'd do. This isn't gonna be some sort of clickbait thing like oh, here's how you get hired in three months. I honestly consider that a bit of a fantasy. I know that it is the reality for some people, but in general, that's just not the world we're living in anymore.
Speaker 1:I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've worked with hundreds of career changes over the years. I have 11 years as a software developer and I will tell you that it's closer to a 12-month game now, and that's the reason why you see a lot of coding bootcamps either completely going out of business or making it clear that they're going to be for a lot longer than they used to be, including Parsity. We're not immune to this at all. We now work with people for 12 months. We've been kind of doing that honestly for the last two years now, but we'd make it more explicit that, hey, this is gonna be a 12-month journey. It honestly gets rid of a lot of the people that are just get-rich-quick type, people that generally won't do well in this profession anyway.
Speaker 1:So in this episode I wanna go over my no-fluff 12-month blueprint to break into tech. I wanna go over the exact tech stack I'd learn and why. This is my opinionated opinion on what to learn and why. This is my opinionated opinion on what to learn and why. What I would completely ignore that's just going to waste your time as a beginner. The kind of project that I'd build I'm not going to tell you to build a hundred weird little projects. Here we're going to talk about the project I'd build that would help me get interviews and pass interviews. How I would network like a software engineer and not some desperate job hunter. The kinds of companies I'd go after, an interview prep strategy, as well as some books that I would read if I wanted to really think like a developer and gain some more foundational knowledge that self-taught people and bootcamp grads don't tend to have. This is the stuff that I wish somebody had told me when I got started and also the stuff that I feel is really missing from the discourse that's online.
Speaker 1:So I was just in LA with Zubin, my partner at Parsity, and we were talking about interviews. We love talking about interviews. He went to Google. I never have, but we're both, you know, obsessed with interviews. Just like most software engineers. Interviews are the highest leverage skill you can have as a software developer. And, by the way, if you are a software developer, I do have a program where I'm working with a few software developers at a time to increase their salary and really nail their interview.
Speaker 1:But, honestly, most people that want this service aren't even getting interviews in the first place. And the problem that most boot camp grads have is not necessarily that they don't know a lot, even though many don't know that much. The real problem that they have is they can't even get an interview, and so I really hope this episode will not only break down what you should be learning and kind of some of the pitfalls that you should avoid. This episode will not only break down what you should be learning and kind of some of the pitfalls that you should avoid, but hopefully help you to actually start getting towards interviews. So there are chapters to all these episodes. So if you need to skip around. If you're like I already know how to code and all this stuff, that's fine. You may want to skip around and get to the part about interview prep, the books I'd read and the kinds of companies I would go after and the networking strategy that I currently use as a software developer.
Speaker 1:I know I have a lot more experience than many of you listening here. I also know that I've had a lot more luck than a lot of people that are on the market despite three years of experience. So do with that information what you will. And now we're going to get right in. As far as tech stack, this is going to be super opinionated. I am on the West Coast. I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've also worked with a lot of career changers in the Midwest of the US and in the South. Most of our students do not live on the West Coast or even near large tech centers. That being said, here is the tech stack that I feel is the most useful and relevant going forward In 2025, here's what I would pick that has some job market weight to it Nextjs, react.
Speaker 1:Why Nextjs and React? They've already kind of won the war. The framework war is no longer a war. React has emerged as the victorious winner of this war. It's not between Angular or Vue or Ember or any of these things. Yes, they are used even a fraction as much as React. Barely. React is basically synonymous with front end, and you can like that, you can not like it. It's basicallyjs is a bit of a gamble, but not much. It's a really really safe bet to learn. That's why I started using it in parsity and made a whole curriculum on that, because I saw that's where the market is going. People want nextjs. Developers react has said hey, we're using nextjs. That's the full stack framework that we officially recommend. So, yes, you probably want to be familiar with Nextjs.
Speaker 1:Next up is Node and Express. This is a pretty obvious choice for the back end if you're already learning JavaScript and yes, I still think you need to learn JavaScript. Why? It's everywhere. You cannot avoid it. It's the first or second most popular programming language on the planet, which means that at some point in your career you will absolutely be using javascript. And if you're already learning it, why not add a back-end skill set by adding node and express? On top of that, I would learn some sort of sequel, some flavor of sequel. I have a whole episode on that as well that I can link in the show notes. Sequel is the most popular choice for databases and if you know postgres or my sequel whatever, pick one understand how to do things like select statements, joins. Learn how to use an object relational mapper like Prisma or something like that. But learn some SQL. Learn how to do some basic SQL. It's going to take you pretty far.
Speaker 1:Next up, I might add, in some Python or maybe C Sharp. I think I would choose at least one of the language to be a little bit familiar with, and that would really depend on my market. In Parsity now we have students do market development research so they understand what kind of languages and technologies are hot within their local market. For some people this is C Sharp, for some people this is Java. For most people this is going to be what I'm just laying out here, which is going to be React JavaScript, python. So learn a bit about what's hot in your market market and just make it a point to know a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:You don't need to be proficient really proficient in that many languages to start with. Be proficient in one. Have a second one that's a little under your belt. Learning one language typically will lend itself to learning multiple languages. For example, I started off with JavaScript. My first job was using C Sharp. My next job was using Ruby. Now I'm using Python. I had to learn TypeScript, so don't worry about getting pigeonholed into a certain language or technology in the beginning. That being said, it's really important to choose something that has some sort of market value. If you are learning Angular and you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you're going to have a really difficult time finding jobs in the Bay Area. Now, if you're in Washington DC, learning Angular actually might not be a bad idea. I know at one point it was actually really popular in that area. Anyway, do some market development research.
Speaker 1:Next up, I would learn Git. Obviously, you need somewhere to store and deploy your code. Learn Vercel. Vercel and Nextjs are tied at the hip. This means that you can use Vercel to launch your React app out into the web, and Vercel makes it really really easy. Now, on top of this, I've learned the basics of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Provider, so you can deploy your backend services. You should over-engineer what you build, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Next up, I'd sprinkle in some system design for my interviews by reading a couple books that I'll also get into later in this episode. Now here's what I'd ignore Certifications Off the bat.
Speaker 1:So many new developers get caught up in certifications and I've seen people say, well, there's some certifications that are really good to get. As a software developer, I would go on the side of not over-indexing on getting a bunch of certifications. People look at it kind of like okay, that's cool, you have that. If you're going for a software developer job or a front-end developer, back-end developer unless really you're going for DevOps roles, I don't see a lot of value in getting certifications. But if you have a really, really good point, let me know in the comments or email me or whatever, because I'd love to know like is there a certification that you actually feel is important for a software developer, a full-stack developer, a backend or front-end developer that actually might help you get your foot in the door? I would argue probably not. If you're gonna get any certification, make it AWS or GCP. That might give you a tiny, tiny little bit of leverage. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Probably not. Tiny little bit of leverage. Is the juice worth the squeeze Probably not Next up LeetCode everybody's favorite site.
Speaker 1:Now listen, I'm not a LeetCode hater. I have a pro subscription to LeetCode. Don't waste your time doing 200 LeetCode problems. It'll just make you feel productive. It's also going to really frustrate you, likely if you're a self-taught developer and you're going to go in circles trying to figure out how to beat lead code problems by memorizing them. That's not a good plan. Honestly, just avoid lead code at this stage, probably even up and through into your first job. You can safely avoid lead code. That's my hot take on that.
Speaker 1:And don't learn a bunch of frameworks. Pick one or two. We're going to go deep, a little wide. Obviously. We have to go a little wide for breadth of knowledge, because we need to know enough to become a full-stack developer. Why do we want to become full-stack developers? Because that is the expectation in today's job market. Front-end developer roles have dramatically decreased. We see that at Parsity, we see that in the general market. We see that front-end developers are generally just kind of shrinking their market share right, especially as AI begins eating up more and more UI-related tasks. So knowing full stack to me is safe for your career. It's better for your trajectory and opens up a lot more avenues for you to pursue as a software developer. So learning full stack is great. Learning five frameworks like Angular and React and Vue and Ember it's a waste of your time, right? So those are the main things I would avoid that I see a lot of people get caught up in, as well as avoiding tutorial hell.
Speaker 1:This is something people never talk about when they go the self-taught route. It's like you don't need a bootcamp, you don't need a CS degree, you don't need anybody to teach you anything because you can find it all online. And if this was the case, we'd have a lot more self-taught developers. But we don't. We see that most developers have actually gone to four-year institutions or coding boot camps or had some sort of formal mentorship, but there's this pervasive myth of like the self-taught developer but we never talk about. What about tutorial hell and this just going between one tutorial to the next tutorial? It's like frogs or something that spawn in the wild. One tutorial makes you go to two tutorials and you go to four, then six, then eight. You're feeling productive. You have a library full of Udemy courses that don't really make sense or have any obvious pattern to them or ladder up to an actual skill. It's just like learning a bunch of random skills and then thinking that somebody might actually hire you for it. It's a seductive trap that I see a lot of people falling for. So here's how you can kind of avoid that. Honestly, going to a place like Parsity or getting a CS degree or even getting some sort of mentorship, whether you go to Parsity or not, might be your best option, but here's a way you can kind of avoid that.
Speaker 1:Now, in the beginning, I think going to places like Codecademy, using Scrimba even, can lay out a pretty nice path. But what you're really going to need to keep focused in building something is a project. So, picking the right kind of project. I don't believe you need to make 100 small applications, although that could help you out. You absolutely need to have one really good app, and I would say you even need to get real users for it. So I wouldn't do like a movie finder app is like the project I want to show off. We do that in Parsity, or we have done that in Parsity. We may continue to do it in the future, because building small apps helps you learn stuff.
Speaker 1:But the thing you want to talk about to an employer or the thing that you want to go out and show the world or on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, can't be a clone of some other app. That's not interesting. Everybody's built one of those things. Everybody's built a movie finder. Everybody's built a weather tracker. Everybody's built like some sort of calculator type tool or some code generator or quote generator thing like that a habit tracker, whatever. So you need to build something that people actually want to use.
Speaker 1:This is the really, really difficult part. Maybe it'll be like a customer relation management tool. Maybe it'll be like something that scrapes Reddit or other website sources and tells you upcoming product ideas that people might want to use. Maybe it's something that helps you compose poetry. Maybe it's something that fixes something in your life. Whatever it is, it needs to be full stack, it needs to be deployed on the web at a publicly available URL. It needs to have real users. It needs to be secure. It needs to be full stack, it needs to be deployed on the web at a publicly available URL, it needs to have real users, it needs to be secure and it needs to have some authentication. I'm going to leave that really open-ended, because if you meet all those little buckets of criteria that I just outlined there, you're going to have something really, really cool, and the act of going out to get users is going to teach you a ton, because anybody can build an app. Most people will never get users to their app. This is true of even startups. So if you can get a couple users even your parents, your friends, your community, your church, whoever that's gonna teach you a lot, because now you're gonna be able to talk about.
Speaker 1:What did you build? What was the practice of getting customers? How do you make sure that you secure their data and you don't end up with something like that crazy T app, that dating app that just exposed all these women's driver's licenses online, or something like that. Go check out that story if you haven't checked it out. The T app, where apparently the developers there, or the developer there, who knows basically didn't secure anything and now a bunch of people have their driver's licenses out on the freaking internet. They doxed all their users. What an awful, awful developer at that company. What a terrible thing. Anyway, don't be that person, right? So take these things seriously.
Speaker 1:When you have customers, it makes you think a lot differently. How do you make money off of this app. Maybe this app turns into something that you can actually make money from. That would be a really, really cool project. And then maybe you don't even consider being a software developer at all. Maybe you just say, hey, you know what, I already got something making me money. Maybe I'll just do this. I have seen a few people go that route. That is not as uncommon as you think. I would say it's not the most secure, but I'd say it's also like totally within your realm of doing. Anyway, to reiterate, that app should be full stack, have a backend and a frontend. Those things should be separately deployed. It should have authentication, it should be secure, it should be at a publicly available URL and it should have users. You meet all those criteria. You're going to guarantee to have something very interesting to talk about.
Speaker 1:Next up networking. Like a developer, I like to use this strategy and this is what we also teach at Parsity. This is really uncomfortable, by the way. This is not fun to do and this is the reason why most people do not do this. This is also the reason why most people don't have the kind of luck that Parsity students tend to have when it comes to networking online. In fact, we have a lot of students that come from boot camps, that come into our program, who we train up how to network and do market development, because we realize that, honestly, this is much more difficult than learning to code. We can give you material that is going to teach you how to code and build really great projects and teach you all the syntax and logic and all these things, and we can help you with that. It's very, very direct and objective, like does this code work or does it not? We can tell you that immediately.
Speaker 1:What's really hard is this part. Networking is this black box, and people just generally get it wrong. What they do is they write posts into the void. They do this a couple of times, they don't give any traction and then they just give up, right. Or they like talk to their friends or just ask random strangers on the internet for, like, a coffee chat, and it doesn't go anywhere. That's not gonna help you out in 2025. I don't think that really helped you out even five years ago, right? So here's what you should do. You should BFS your network, breath first, search, go broad and shallow at first. Go for old co-workers, classmates, friends, church, family and then send them some version that sounds like this. We go much deeper into parts of this. We have whole sections and modules on this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But you could just say, hey, I am reaching out to you because I'm learning software development and I'm gonna be a software developer and I'm looking for my first role. I know that you're not in tech, because most of these people probably aren't in tech. They don't even know anybody. The point of reaching out to these people is not because they can give you a job, but they may know somebody that can get you closer to a job. Closer to a job. This is why it's called breadth first search, you go wide and then you're going to deep right.
Speaker 1:So you're going to say, hey, you know reaching out. We kind of know each other already, if it's like friends or family. Your mom, even your aunt, say hey, I'm becoming a software developer and learning this skill, I'm looking for my first role. Do you happen to know anybody who might be in the tech industry and if so, would you mind making a warm introduction for me by chance? I would just love to pick their brain about what it is they do for the job and if they have any advice they might give somebody who's learning.
Speaker 1:People are generally going to say, oh wow, that's really cool, you're making a career change. And let me think, maybe I do know somebody. Oh, there's somebody at church I know who's a software developer. Maybe they'd be open to speak to you. Then you want to get this list of people and this warm list and this cold list. The cold list might be people that you don't really know, that your mom or your aunt said hey, reach out to this person. You might not wanna reach out to them just yet. You might wanna wait till you're a little bit further down the line, until you at least have some basic front-end skills down and you can build something like a small React app and deploy it on Vercel. That's a pretty good litmus test to say, okay, now I'm ready to reach out to this person. So the timing of this is fairly important, right, you don't want to do this really too early on in your journey and you also will give you a little bit of pressure to make sure that you have the skills that you'll need to to reach out and say, hey, you know, I'm building this react app. Um, I heard you're a software developer or you work in a tech company. I, they want to be in your position. Hey, are there any positions that are currently open at your job? If so, do you think I might be a good fit, and is it too forward if I ask for a recommendation?
Speaker 1:You have to be a little aggressive. You have to say things that you might not feel comfortable with to get a result that most people won't get. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, I think. Is that how you say that phrase? I think that's what I'm trying to say right there. But you have to ask. Ask and you shall receive A closed mouth doesn't get fed and certain more cliches there. But this kind of stuff works. I mean, it honestly just does.
Speaker 1:A lot of the jobs that are online get a hundred applicants at a time, or a thousand applicants, and they're all junk. I've been on the hiring side before and let me tell you your competition is not as fierce as you think. You are not competing with people that are getting laid off from Microsoft and Google. You're competing with people from mostly other boot camps and college grads, right and all through the noise. There's so much noise out there that to cut through the noise you might need to go to a backdoor. How do you find those backdoors? By making a network of warm and cold leads. Look at old places where you used to work, look at communities you're a part of. Look at friends, family, all this kind of thing. Reach out to them asking this question and then, from the people that they recommend to you, ask those people for recommendations as well, and you'll see that you'll naturally develop a pretty large network.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, you need to be on LinkedIn and you need to get to this magical 500 number on LinkedIn. And when I tell people this, like how the hell am I supposed to do that? Here is a strategy for getting up to 500 connections on LinkedIn. This magical number is not because, oh, you need to have like just so many random connections, but you are basically undiscoverable if you have less than 500 connections on LinkedIn. Just being honest with you. So if a recruiter is going out and looking for people for a role, they're looking in their second and third party connections, right, they're looking for people that they may not know but are connected to somebody that they know, or they're connected to somebody who knows somebody they know. Now, if you have two connections, what are the chances that that recruiter can ever find you. If you have 500, it's basically like you're connected to the entire LinkedIn ecosystem at that point. So how do you get to this magical 500 connection? They do this on sales teams, by the way, too. They often won't let salespeople even begin getting on calls until they have 500 connections.
Speaker 1:So what do you do? You follow some people like me or Zubin or whoever that's in tech. Make sure that they are in the tech space, look through their comments, look at people that seem somewhat sane, somewhat nice, somewhat normal, and connect with them. Maybe send them a note, maybe don't. Maybe get LinkedIn Premium, which has a free trial, or something like that, and just try to rack up. A lot of people Make comments under those posts as well. People will connect with you. A high-ranking comment can actually have a lot of visibility.
Speaker 1:So if you write something like hey, you know, I agree, rocket ship, it's not going to get a lot of really good engagement, right. If you write something like hey, that's really interesting. You said that I've been actually struggling with Redux or TypeScript or Java myself, and this really helped me understand this thing. Have you considered X, y and Z? These can lead to natural conversations. And now you're networking by being visible and also like genuinely adding to conversations about things that you hopefully actually find interesting. I'm on LinkedIn not only for business, but because I like to learn. I was on X for the same reason. I watch YouTube for the same reason and I genuinely like learning stuff from people. So if I see something that's valuable and I'm like, oh, that reminds me of this thing, that happened to me, or wow, that really helped me solve a bug, why not add to the conversation there? So many people just say I agree, or you know some AI generated slop and it's so obvious that it is that just being genuine nowadays can really make you stand out.
Speaker 1:So don't post a bunch of fluff. Be confident or at least fake it. Just do what feels uncomfortable. You have to understand that you're going to feel uncomfortable in this phase as you're reaching out to people. You're asking people for favors. Get used to asking for favors. This is a big career change you're trying to make.
Speaker 1:It can't be just business as usual. You can't work in silence. You are not going to get there alone. Very few people are ever successful on their own. There's tons of phrases and cliches about this kind of stuff. But it's true. Every time you hear about somebody's success story and how they did it all on their own, what you don't see is the mentorship behind it, the friends, the family, the wife, the husband who is supporting them, the kids. People have support. Please do this and realize you're not being a bother. And even if you are, have support. Please do this and realize you're not being a bother. And even if you are, so what you are trying to get to where you want to be. You can't be too concerned with what other people think of you, because in two years you won't care. In six months you probably won't care. So if you're not going to care about it in six months, just go ahead and, freaking, do it.
Speaker 1:Next up, here are the type of companies that I would target, and here's honestly what we tell people at Parsity go for high risk companies. You're honestly a high risk hire. Just being straight up with you. You're a little bit high risk, right. You're a career changer. Maybe you're self-taught. Maybe you went to Parsity. Maybe you're a French fry cook. Maybe you're a security guard. Maybe you're just something that's not a software developer. Maybe you were like Zubin, who's a freaking lawyer. He showed me a picture when we were at dinner of him in a fancy little lawyer outfit at 27. At 27, I think I was getting arrested or running from cops right. Totally different lifestyles. And yet we're both like the same risk profile. For most software companies when we're trying to change careers Nowadays, we're very safe bets. I have around 11 years of experience. I think Zubin has like almost a decade of experience now or something like that. Whatever, we've been vetted and we have things on our resumes that can say hey, I'm a software developer. We're no longer risky hires. But when we changed careers me from like nothing and him from lawyer we were risky.
Speaker 1:So where do you go as a risky hire? You go to a risky company. What is a risky company? Startups, startups, agencies, small teams, freelance contracts, anything that doesn't involve like a permanent role. These are risky. People like me and Zubin, who are a little more discerning, especially in the US, are going to be like you know what? I don't want to go to a five-person startup. I don't want to do that. Oh, that's the salary? No, I can't work for that little right. Oh, a freelance agency? Oh, that sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to do that kind of work. We're a little bit more picky because we can afford to be. If you're starting off, your salary may not be that high to begin with. I know the salaries are the big thing Everybody's like. I want to make more money and I can almost guarantee you will.
Speaker 1:When we check out Parsity students and their first job now, this is mostly people that are not on the West Coast or the East Coast. Most of the students in the past have come from non-traditional and non-tech centers, so I'm talking about North Carolina, texas, ohio, tennessee. Even so, their salaries were well under 100K for most of them. They still had a pretty big bump in the beginning, maybe like 8 to 10K more than what they were getting. So, honestly, that basically covered the price of the program off the bat. Their first job, it already covered the price of the program. When we followed these people, we saw that the next jump was the massive salary gain that also tracked from my own personal experience. My first job, I basically got paid peanuts. The next job, I literally doubled my salary. It freaked me out how much I made.
Speaker 1:If I'm being honest with you, I'm not saying that to be a weird brag, or maybe I am? I don't know. But all I'm saying is that next job is where we see people tend to make the most money and they get to that magical 100k mark. Now, if you're in Tennessee or Ohio or some other places, that non tech center, to me, to be completely honest, 100k doesn't sound like a ton. And if you're in the Bay Area and you're a junior developer making less than 100k, I'd say maybe, maybe, go to Parsley. We can try to help you out with that, or maybe apply for the interview program that I'm also doing, because I think we can definitely get you much higher than that.
Speaker 1:But if you're in these non-tech centers, that's a huge bump, right. You're talking $30,000 to $40,000 from what some of these people are making. You're talking $50,000 to $60,000 from what some people are making. On the low end they were making like $40,000, $50 really massive jump, right. So that first company you go to, that's okay. If it's a little risky, it's okay. If your salary is not huge. You just can't stay there. That's just my honest take on that kind of thing. You probably will need to job hop at least once, maybe even twice, and this is the most difficult part of most people's careers, because this is the make or break point. People think the game is over when they get the first job. The game's not over at all.
Speaker 1:We had a mentee come back after going through the program. He is now interviewing at Amazon or something like that. You know we're talking about really massive salary jumps. This guy's a pretty young dude too. I'm thinking, man, if only I had done that much younger. But hey, hindsight is 20-20.
Speaker 1:Anyway, go for these companies, because you'd rather be a risk than a perfect hire somewhere else. You're probably not going to crack a big company on your first round. In fact, we don't even recommend that to any students. When people say they want to go to Fang, like, oh, I really want to get into Meta or whatever, and they see that Zubin has done that and they're thinking he's going to know the secret to get in there. The secret is he didn't go there first. Right, he went to a smaller company first. He had a startup, then he went into Google with months of rigorous study, and of course we prepare people for that as well, if that's something they really wanna do. But for the first company, no, let's just be real here. We just wanna get your foot in the door and from there it opens up a ton of opportunity.
Speaker 1:Where do you find these companies, by the way? Yes, they are on LinkedIn. They're on AngelList, which I think is called Wellfound. Now you can find them on another site that I like called jobrightai. That's R-I-G-H-T. That's a pretty good site that I just found recently, but well found is by far the main source for these kinds of things. There's another site called underdogio. Now, they're kind of hit or miss, but I think it's at least worth checking out. So check these ones out. And LinkedIn, but companies that typically have really small footprints. These are the places where you're most likely to get at least a response back or maybe they'll take a chance on you.
Speaker 1:Now for interview prep. This is where developers spend the most time, which is kind of weird, because most of your time should actually be spent on market development and targeting these companies. That's what we always tell students in Inner Circle and Parsity. We say, hey, make sure that if you're studying for interviews, you got an interview coming up, because if not, it's just like you're just filling in the time. You're feeling like you're doing something. You're not really doing anything besides just kind of wasting your time, right? So, when it comes to interview prep. I think that you can kind of batch this up. I don't think this is something you want to do throughout your coding journey.
Speaker 1:I would honestly say this for kind of last like after you've deployed your full stack project, after you've mastered some of the basic fundamentals and you're using Git and feeling pretty comfortable with basic command line stuff and putting out your project and putting it onto the web and securing your back end and getting that deployed out to the web I'd say at that point, okay, we can spend some time learning a bit about interview prep. Now here's just my opinionated list of resources that I would use neat code if you really want to go down the data structures and algorithms path, because neat code organizes these concepts into like buckets of concepts and learning paths, so they don't just be like, hey, let's learn 500 lead code problems, because that's a silly way to try to attack the interview. They say, hey, there are, like you know, 10 to 20 types of interview questions and they tend to center around these 10 to 20 types of data structures and algorithms. So now it's about pattern matching. Now it's about when they ask you a question, what data structure or algorithm is best suited for that particular kinds of question. It's not about memorizing, it's about pattern matching. That sounds a little bit cloudy or not quite clear. That's expected. But just think of it like this If an interviewer had a problem like how do you find the shortest distance between two points, you should know that that sounds like something like a graph problem that probably requires traversal, maybe recursion, maybe some sort of breadth. First search analysis, right, and so you're pattern matching. You're saying that sounds like this kind of question, and so you're pattern matching. You're saying that sounds like this kind of question, and then you're having a conversation and then the code is honestly an implementation detail.
Speaker 1:Learning how to gain this intuition is really really important, and a service like NeatCode can help you gain that intuition. Same thing with AlgoExpert. I really like AlgoExpert. You should also do a lot of research on the types of interviews you're doing. Most of your interviews are not going to require data structures and algorithms and what I would do to practice these beyond AlgoExpert, beyond LeadCode Premium those are great, but what's really going to help you out is doing this live with a human being.
Speaker 1:We have people at Parsity and me personally I've used for mock interviews, I've shouted them out so many times. I really love that service because there's nothing like sitting there with a complete stranger on the computer explaining some concept that you barely know, sweating, freaking out, having a panic attack and then realizing you know what. It's not that bad. You do this 10 times. I guarantee you, 100% guarantee you. If I'm wrong on this, if you do this 10 times, if you do 10 mock interviews and you don't feel a lot more confident by the end of it, or at least a lot less stressed out by the idea of interviewing, hit me up and I will send you a box of donuts, maybe. And if you're too scared to do PRAMP, first start with just putting yourself on camera recording yourself talking through problems and then go on PRAMP so you can practice with another human being. This is a free service. They also have a paid tier for PRAMP as well. They have interviewingio as well as another paid service, but make sure you're practicing with a human being.
Speaker 1:Lastly, here are just three books I'm gonna recommend you read. So here are books that I would be reading throughout my journey as a software developer, from zero through my first year. You Don't Know JS by Kyle Simpson, because most devs don't know JavaScript. They know how to write it, they know how to make some things work on a screen, but if you ask them anything about prototypal inheritance or object referential equality, or even promises, and explain them, they tend to fall apart. I know this because I once was you and I didn't know these things either, and, honestly, I didn't know this stuff till much later than I should have. Reading the you Don't Know JavaScript book series was really really good. It really helped me internalize and understand some of these concepts and I can't recommend it enough, and I think most of the books are free nowadays, which is really really cool. Shout out to Kyle Simpson, who was a guest on the show in the past, mind-blowing that I got him to come here and speak to me on this show.
Speaker 1:Next book is System Design 1 and 2. This is by an author named Alex Zhu A-L-E-X-X-U System Design and this will help you understand guess what? System design how to design and scale large software systems to ingest, interpret, display lots of data. These typically come up in interviews, but also just helps you gain more intuition for like well, how do things work beyond this little code that I'm writing on my machine? How does something like Facebook do the newsfeed? How does a service like Netflix serve, you know, billions of users around the world. How do things like my banking transactions work? And this gives you a little bit of an intuition, a little peek behind the curtain for how these really large scale systems work, and then you can speak about it somewhat intelligently and understand the relationship between the code you write, its performance, its scalability and how it also factors into the large things we interact with on a daily basis, because this is really cool. It'll help you also start to understand the different services that you might interact with daily but you don't even think about like oh well, how does that work at Starbucks? When I order something and then you know I immediately see my account balance reflect the new total. How does that work? I mean, what is going on there? How can I reverse, engineer that kind of thing? Reading those books should help you out a ton with that.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of system design books. I found that one particularly useful because it's full of stories and also it's short, really short books. You can read these like in a weekend and kind of get a pretty decent idea of how to tackle the most common system design questions you will get in an interview. Lastly, my favorite book, the Phoenix Project, or one of my favorite books, I should say. The Phoenix Project is a novel and it's about a guy that goes to save his company which is using these really archaic software practices, and it will teach you, through a story, a bit about DevOps and the software development lifecycle in a practical way and how software fits into a business context, which a lot of software developers don't seem to get. They're like this code is really performing good, but yeah, but how does it help the business? This book really ties those things together and shows that good software practices are good business practices and that software developers who understand this relationship are going to go far in their careers. This is one of those books that I feel like I find more value in the older I get and the higher up the career ladder I go. I've read the book twice and there's even a follow-up to it. I forget the name of that book, but the Phoenix Project and some other book by the same author Really good books and they're like nighttime books.
Speaker 1:You can read this in bed at night and I know people don't like to read anymore, which really saddens me, because reading will make you stand out as a developer, to help you articulate and organize your thoughts. And also this helps you get to sleep. When you're out there ruminating in your bed and you're thinking about all the mistakes you made in life and how you shouldn't have learned to be a software developer and how you shouldn't have gone to Parsity instead of whatever bootcamp you went to, and then you're sitting there just freaking out looking at the ceiling or scrolling through TikTok. Don't do that. Read a book. Anyway. Hope you found that really helpful and hop some resources in the show notes, as usual.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, if you want to work directly with me and Zubin for this year, our prices are likely going to go up very, very soon.
Speaker 1:We just got accredited and I'll have more information on that later later, but very exciting stuff, but I do believe our prices are going to go up, so you really should work with us very soon because we're one of the few programs out there that is still semi affordable. Honestly, we plan to keep it that way for as long as possible. We want to work with the best people possible and give them the best outcomes possible, and we can only do that with a select few. So this year I think we'll take on another 20 people before the year's over and then we'll close the doors, so hopefully you'll be in that next cohort of people we see. Hope you found that useful 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 just clicking the link in the show notes.
