Today’s post will be listed under “experiments”. I always thought that anyone could learn programing and become a digital nomad, travel the world and live life on their own terms without a boss.
I personally have done that but I did it by building niche websites and not knowing how to code anything at all.
Today’s I want to put into practice my own advices. I will go from zero to hero as a developer. I have no previous experience in programation. I not only want to learn it but I want to build something successful with my new knowledge within 3 months that people around the world will be using.
Why I want to do that.
Each time someone would tell me they were tired of their job, I’d tell them to build their own site like I did or learn how to code and get a coding job. I’d tell them that coding could be learn in a few short months and landing a decent remote job that pays around $50K/year was easy once you had an online portfolio.
So, in 3 months, I will go from not knowing anything to having my own successful application that I will have build myself and it will have returning users. From what I understand, it is a few short steps away from landing a job since the online portfolio is the most important, i.e. what can you build with your knowledge.
Needless to say that I don’t expect the app to be much more than a prototype by the end of the 3 months, but it will have returning users and will be a moderate success by that time. I will be measuring success on the amount of people who are using it and you’ll be able to judge by yourself also.
I choose 3 months because its like an extended summer vacation. More than 3 month is not really impressive in my opinion. Less than that, I’m afraid would not give me enough time to learn how to code and then build my application. 3 month is still a large chunk of time, but it’s also short enough to make it realistic that someone would put his life on hold for that period in order to radically change is life.
I also really want to encourage you to start this project along with me. It does not matter how much time you can put everyday on this. As long as you put a little time it will go forward. When you find a new thread, you never know where it will lead you. So here I offer you a thread to follow, start your own blog and learn how to code along with me.
Where I Will learn
One big criteria is that I want to spend as little money as possible on my learning. I already bought 2 books on Amazon about Python that I downloaded on my kindle and the remaining will be from YouTube video, MIT opencoursweare and other free resources.
I really want to make sure it is possible for anyone to learn this in order to make it a true universal guide so I don’t want to spend any money on this. The only thing I can spend is time.
Because I only have 3 months, I have to use my time wisely. I already know which language I want to study. It is Python.
Python is one of the most used language in machine learning and A.I. I think this field will be essential in the future(think Facebook algorithm and self-driving cars) so it’s important for me to be able to use those skills there in the future. Also because it is a widely use language, Python as a lot of courses available for it online like on the MIT open courseware YouTube, books, etc…
If you read my previous post on how to learn anything, I will be using a lot of those techniques. The first important technique is to teach what I learn to cement my learning. I plan on creating a new website,
I already bought the domain programAndCoffee.com where I will only share info about my new coding skills there.
It will be a simple blog and I will talk about my journey as an program developer and what I learn there. If you are taking this challenge with me, I encourage you to build your own blog also. Go on Namecheap.com and buy a domain for as low as 10$/year you can have your own website like I did. I suggest you to use your own name like I did for this website (alexfortin.com) Post yours in the comment below so I can have a look!
I plan on posting around twice a week there, snippets of code and programming techniques I will have learn. It could also grow into something much bigger later if I wanted, like add a podcast and interview other programmer, etc… But I will keep it simple and only post blog there. But that is something you should do if you want to make programming a career. Having a well round-up website about programming will impress most hiring manager.
Here on alexfortin.com I will share the actual journey, so you can just follow me here and you’ll get all the updates on my journey. The other website is only about programming.
If you are willing to take this challenge with me, go ahead and start coding and let me know how it goes. My app will be live and successful before the 7th march 2020 (3 months from today) or else I will have failed… But failure is not an option!
Leave a Reply