Ep.3 - The Coding Video

Working title:

How I Learned to Code in 4 Months & Got a Software Developer Job (No CS Degree, Pay Revealed)

This is the 4th version of this damn video...

What started out as what we thought would be an easy video took:

5 Brainstorming Sessions
8 Music Changes
6 Scripts
4 Shot Lists
6 Versions

And around six months to finish...

It may not look like much but retroactively telling this story was A LOT harder than we thought.

I originally wrote this blog post in 2021 -->

I wrote it to share in excruciating detail how I became a software developer. After my tenth time explaining to someone how I did it, I figured that it would be easier to send someone an article that I wrote rather than continually hopping on forty-minute calls to help guide others who wanted to do the same thing.

Since this is a story I've told and since I've pretty much written the script it shouldn't be too hard to turn this into a YouTube video.

Or so I thought...

I was wrong... VERY wrong.

Honestly, our biggest mistake with this video was trying to convert that original blog post into a video rather than just starting with a brand new script by picking the necessary details that we wanted to include.

The first version of this video wasn't only long (20 mins) it was packed with way too much irrelevant information and tangents that I don't think most YouTube video watchers would care for.

This video took 6 months not because of the lack of information but because of the 5 iterations it took for us to realize that many elements that I thought were important (like how I deconstructed a bootcamp) are actually not important details for those who just want to know how to learn how to code and where to get started.

Version 1 was so boring and so bad that we over-corrected and ended up making a 5 min comedy sketch on the learning how to code journey for version 2.

In the end, it was still worthwhile because we used a lot of the broll that we shot for the final video but after we finished version 2 (which was 5 days of filming) it took us another week to edit it just for us to scrap it because it didn't actually fulfill the purpose of teaching someone how to start coding if they wanted to learn.

For me, this was the first real learning challenge I put myself through so I wanted to be able to capture what that journey was like and what I had to do to overcome the obstacles I went through learning such a tough skill.

This video is near and dear to my heart because it's the video I wish I had when I was first searching for learning how to code online by myself.

Learning this skill changed my life and granted me a lot of opportunities even to this day. More so than coding, learning how to learn and the confidence I gained by learning how to code ended up becoming a major phycological win for me.

I think colleges are prehistoric institutions and learning how to learn is a superpower.

Even if you're not interested in learning how to code I hope you can apply these principles to learning any tough skill that you believe is possibly out of reach for you to learn on your own.

Internal goal: Can we make a "talking head" video talking about something that's already happened entertaining to watch while informative?

Parameters: Must be entertaining but the information is extremely important!

Purpose: We want someone to have the road map to learn how to code and get a job in the tech industry if they so choose after watching this video.

I hope you enjoy the video!

I made a playlist with all of the videos I used to learn in the Resources tab.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Much love,

Tim Kim