Develop Yourself

#282 - From Overwhelmed To Hired: A Realistic Plan For Learning To Code on an Adult Schedule

• Brian Jenney

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👉 Your adult time audit worksheet 👈

I get it.

There is no time. 

You have kids, maybe adult dependents or a really good show you're binging in between our slow descent into a dystopian reality.

I don't believe in fluff.

Let's cover a practical guide on learning to code as a busy adult and some of the easy (and not so easy) steps you're going to need to take.

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SPEAKER_00:

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. I made this worksheet for really good looking developers that need a way to audit their time and actually make a coding schedule they can kind of stick to. This is a simple Google Doc that I think will really help you out. This is essentially what I use. I actually just use a notebook, but hopefully this helps you out. You can grab it in the show notes. See around. You ever ask somebody how they're doing and they just say busy? It feels like that's the default response for most adults, especially in the US, because we kind of measure our worth by how busy we are in a capitalist society where basically your output is your worth. But before I get off into a tangent on that, what you probably clicked on this video or want to know about is how do you, as an adult with a career with kids that has no time on your hands, how do you find time to do something like learn to code? And I'm gonna share with you some very practical ways to do it in a lot of pitfalls that I've seen people get trapped in over the years of teaching hundreds of people how to code. Learning to code myself at the age of 30 years old with two kids, just getting sober, long commute, and really no time on my hands at all. And so I just want to share with you how this truly is possible and how you don't have to have a ton of time to do this kind of. So at Parsity, we actually help busy career changers learn how to code and transition into a career in software. And really, the model that we've been using is specifically for people like me and maybe like you that are career changers. These aren't 18 or 22-year-olds or people that have a ton of time on their hands or can usually go to a class at a certain time of day, every night for like months on end. It's just not gonna work. That's what we use a personalized model to teach people. But anyway, 11 years ago, I had just gotten sober from all sorts of things. And then I kind of fell down the coding rabbit hole. Part of the job that I had at the time was updating a very simple website for the school where I worked, and I had to do something that required some HTML and CSS knowledge. And then I asked the webmaster for a little bit of help. So this woman came in and showed me HTML and CSS. And believe it or not, me, 30 years old at the time, had never seen HTML or CSS. And I asked her, is this the code behind like all websites out there? And she's like, Yes. I was blown away and I fell down a rabbit hole that basically replaced my addictions that I previously had. And my new addiction was coding. And within about nine months, I went from not knowing what HTML and CSS was to landing my first role as a full stack software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area, making peanuts. But I was super happy. And here's how I found the time to do it with a one-hour-long commute, two kids, and I was even driving Uber and Lyft on the side at the time. Now, let me be very brutally honest with you. What I'm gonna outline is not something that I necessarily recommend that you do, and it's not gonna be easy or something you're gonna like to hear. It's just what worked for me, and what I often see will work for people that joined Parsity or have been successful on their own, going a self-taught route. Whatever you choose to do, you're likely gonna have to make some very difficult choices. And here's the first thing you're going to have to come to terms with. This sounds a little bit cliche and maybe I'm being over the top, but your new life is going to cost your old one. So for me, I gave up alcohol and drugs and had a lot more time on my hands. I also had to think, what else could I give up? I had picked up a habit of watching Sunday football because I had all this time on my hands because I wasn't getting obliterated during the weekends. And I thought, what do people do? I'm like, maybe I'll watch football. I don't know. Three hours, six hours. And I'm thinking, I should be doing something else during this time. If I really want to actually make this into a career, and I was doing Code Academy at the time and trying to figure out how to make janky little apps myself. And I thought I should be using this time to do this instead. And I didn't really like football or care. So I'm like, well, that's easy to throw away. The harder thing, obviously, was being sober. That was really the catalyst that started all this off. And when I look at the people that are the most successful when it comes to switching careers, they've made a very conscious decision to cut something out of their lives. Maybe it's doom scrolling, maybe it's like TikTok. I've seen people erase the apps from their phone. You have to really audit your time. Do a quick back of the envelope calculation about where your time is going during the day and on the weekends when you tend to have the most time and see where is your energy flowing? Where is your attention going to? TV, movies, sports, drinking, doing illicit drugs. I don't know. You're gonna have to figure out which one of those things you're going to let go to make space to do some coding stuff. The next thing I did was set myself up for success. I've always been an early morning person. And when I got up, a lot of times I would go straight to my computer to try to finish up some work on Code Academy or work on some very ugly site that I was trying to make. I was making a site for the city of Oakland at one point that I had on CodePin. If you go to CodePin.io, maybe you can find it. Anyways, what would happen is I'd go to my computer and I'd sit there and be like, wait, what am I gonna do today? And I'd think through all the things that I could do, things that I wanted to learn and think, should I do Code Academy right now? Should I build part of the website? Should I like try to find a meetup to go to or something like that? And then next thing you know, I'm like, well, I gotta get to work now. I gotta get my kids up and get my son ready for school and stuff like that and cook them a pancake and bounce out the door. And I realized I hadn't done anything besides just sit there and kind of spin my wheels. So then, very simply, I bought a 99 cent notebook because I met somebody that said this phrase that stuck with me and still has it. Like the smartest people always have a notebook. I don't know why that phrase stuck with me. I have zero clue if it's true, but I'm like, I'm gonna do that. I wanna be a smart guy. So I bought this freaking notebook. And guess what? I started writing in it every night what I was going to do the next day. I'd wake up and I'd be immediately ready to do that thing. This cut out all that additional thinking. And within like 15 minutes, I could actually get something done. And then the night before, I'd have myself set up. So in the morning on the kitchen table, I'd have the laptop open, I'd have the thing I was going to do or the thing I was going to read, or I knew what I was going to do. And then I would just get right to doing that thing. So that 30 minutes in the morning was really impactful because now I wasn't wasting time thinking of what I was going to do. Now, this next one for some reason is where I see a lot of people fail. I used to actually work at a boot camp while I was working as a full-time software developer. And I even see this, unfortunately, in Parsity. And I always tell people, this will never, ever work. So if you're doing this thing, I want to tell you straight up, this is not going to work. I met a student actually, really bright guy, was coming in every weekend when I was working and teaching at this boot camp, right? And he seemed to be really stuck on learning for loops in JavaScript. And I was like, what's the deal here? This guy's like here every weekend, sitting here for like six hours and just seems to be repeating the same thing over and over and over and over, like a coding groundhog day or something like that. Groundhog, by the way, is an old movie. I'm a little old. So if you don't get that reference, go check out the movie. So then I straight up asked him, I said, Hey, dude, why are you so stuck on like for loops and stuff? Feels like we're like going over this every single week. I said, How are you studying? Like, how are you doing stuff? He's like, Well, you know, during the week I'm really busy, have a job and you know, stuff. I'm like, Yeah, me too. And he's like, So I do all my studying on the weekend. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I spent eight hours here every Sunday doing all my studying. I'm like, I'm like, wait, what? So you don't do anything during the week at all? He's like, No, I don't have any time. Now, in all fairness, this guy had a super commute. He was fighting some sort of like court case for his citizenship. He had a lot of stuff going on. Like, he really had some serious stuff going on. But I've met people that have said the same version of this story, like, I have kids. I'm like, well, yeah, me too. I got three kids now. Or oh, I have a long commute. I'm like, well, yeah, me too. I had a long commute when I had to learn how to code, or oh, I have this thing going on in my life. I'm like, yeah, you know, life sucks. Like, it's gonna happen. Things are gonna happen in your life. If you cannot make the time to be consistent, you're gonna set yourself up for not only failure, but for a ton of frustration because it is the most frustrating thing ever when you feel like you're doing all this work and you're spending hours and hours on one or two days of the week and you feel like you're just starting at zero every single week. Consistency is where it's at. If there's one thing that separates those who get hired from those who don't, it is bar none consistency. I think about this all the time after 11 years of teaching people and working with people and being in the industry as a software developer. And the biggest thing I can think of, and it's not CS degrees, it's not how much data structures and algorithms a person knows, although those things are factors for sure. The one differentiating factor, the one I can think of is consistency. That's it. And very lastly, this is one thing that I always recommend people to do: have a side project. Forget the portfolio for a second. No one really wants to see your portfolio full of a few janky apps that look like every other person's janky app out there. Learn enough, get yourself through React, maybe learn a little bit of backend like Node Express, TypeScript, Python, whatever. Learn enough to be dangerous so you can build your own thing. This is incredibly important because this gives you the emotional attachment that you're really going to need to keep going forward. If you don't have an emotional attachment to the things that you're learning, you're going to want to quit. This is why tutorial hell is such a common thing that people talk about online when it comes to learning how to code. It's not just that tutorial hell is easy to fall into and you feel like you're on this hamster wheel. It's just that you don't really care anymore. It's like if you're building the thing that a thousand people have built and you're sitting there and watching some dude type and you're typing what this dude has typed, you're not only not learning, it's just kind of boring, right? But if you're building something that maybe you intend to sell or you want to show off to your family or friends or that you can use in your daily life or your work life or for your church, community, school, whatever, that's gonna keep you emotionally invested. And that's gonna help you maintain that consistency, which is so important. So if you do all those things, if you audit your time, you cut out what's not important, you make a plan so that way when you wake up, you execute that thing first thing in the morning and you're consistent. I'm not talking about hours a day. I'm talking about an hour a day, maybe two hours a day. You can totally make this work, even with a very, very busy schedule. Everybody that we've taught at Parsity has been mothers, new parents, people with high demanding jobs. We've taught doctors how to code. So we know this is possible. And I know that for every hundred people that we can help, there's always one person that has some crazy circumstance that just won't work out. And if that's the case, then unfortunately that may be your reality. But for 99% of people, it's not. And they just need to find the time, be consistent, cut things out, be a little uncomfortable, make a new schedule, stick to it, plan out what they're going to do, and then finally make a project that they're actually proud of and want to go back to each day. And this is how you make consistent and incremental progress towards your goal. Now, if you do want help, obviously go to parsity.io. We can only take a few people per quarter. We're not some big old boot camp or anything like that. But either way it goes, whether you join Parsity or not, I truly hope you found this helpful. And if you have any secrets or tips or tricks that you found as a busy adult trying to code and change careers, let us know in the comments because I'm sure other people would really like to know how you're doing it in real time. Anyways, hope that's helpful 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 parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

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