The Self-Taught Programmer

Explore how Jack Dorsey became a self-taught programmer, blending city infrastructure interest with a prototype completed in roughly two weeks that birthed Twitter after dropping out of NYU.

Explore procedural programming as a style that writes a sequence of steps changing program state, highlighting global variables and side effects, and contrast with functional and object oriented paradigms.

Explore functional programming by contrasting it with procedural styles, eliminating global state, and writing functions that pass data and avoid changing external state to reduce errors.

Learn object oriented programming by modeling objects with classes, creating instances, and defining methods with self, including composition and practical examples like orange and rectangle to highlight advantages and drawbacks.

Discover the four pillars of object oriented programming: encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism, and inheritance, and learn how to model objects with a unified state, expose a common interface, and reuse code.

Explore class variables, instance variables, and magic methods in Python, and learn how the is keyword compares objects and how repr customizes prints.

Learn object oriented programming by building an e-commerce inventory system with classes for customer, product, and inventory, including adding products, processing purchases, and stock tracking.

Learn to build a Python implementation of the card game War by defining Card, Deck, Player, and Game classes, including suits, values, shuffling, and round-by-round card comparisons.

Learn how Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify, taught himself to code at 14 and built a legal music service that turned pirates into paying customers.

Learn bash, the command line interface, to navigate directories, run programs, and manage files with commands like cd, ls, pwd, mkdir, rm, echo, python, and sudo.

Open a file with vim from the command line, create data.txt, and edit text by switching between command mode, insert mode, and last line mode to write and save.

Master regular expressions to search data with grep and Python, control case with ignore-case flags, and build patterns using carrot symbol, dollar sign, brackets, and non-greedy matching.

Learn how package managers such as Pip install Python packages, manage dependencies, and work with virtual environments for Python web frameworks like Flask.

Master git and GitHub to manage code with version control, local and central repositories, and push, pull, and track history.

Explore PyCharm, a powerful interactive development environment for Python, with features like debugging, breakpoints, local history, tabs, and configurable interpreters for professional and community use.

Build a web scraper in Python to extract links from Google News using beautifulsoup, after learning HTML structure and how to parse HTML into structured data.

Discover how Steve Wozniak became a self-taught programmer, from early math and ham radio to building Apple One and Apple two, and later teaching kids about computer skills.

Explore core algorithms, including fizzbuzz, modulo checks, sequential search, palindrome, and anagram tests. See how to implement patterns to count characters and validate data.

Learn how to combine two lists in Python using zip to pair movie titles with ratings, handle unequal lengths, and print the resulting tuples.

The lecture contrasts recursion with iteration, defines base case and self-referential calls, and demonstrates the three laws of recursion with examples like 99 bottles and counting from N to zero.

Master binary search on sorted lists to locate elements in O(log n) time by halving the search range, contrasting with linear search.

Learn to find duplicates efficiently by using Python sets instead of nested loops, reducing time complexity from O(n^2) and collecting duplicates with a for loop and length checks.

Explore extracting digits from a string using Python list comprehensions to filter digits and select the rightmost digit with a negative index, demonstrated by practical examples.

Learn to find common elements between two lists in Python using a for loop or the set intersection, then convert the result back to a list.

Explore data structures like stacks and queues, learn push and pop operations, understand last-in, first-out versus first-in, first-out, and see Python examples that reverse strings and simulate ticket lines.

Explore how hash tables use hashing, modulo division, and primes to store data efficiently, address collisions, and enable constant-time lookups.

Explore how linked lists differ from Python arrays, using nodes and pointers to connect elements, enabling efficient insertions and various forms like singly, circular, and doubly linked lists.

Build a linked list by defining a node class with data and next, a list class with a head, and methods to append nodes and print the list.

Learn to search a linked list with a linear algorithm starting at the head, using a while loop to compare each node to the target and return true or false.

Margaret Hamilton, a self-taught programmer, learned in the 50s and 60s, built Apollo mission software at MIT and championed rigorous testing for ultra reliable emergency alert systems.

Apply best practices to write production-ready code, emphasizing dry, orthogonal, and single-responsibility design. Build with tests, code reviews, secure input handling, logging, and minimized attack surface.

start by climbing the freelance ladder on upwork, taking small projects to gain experience without traditional interviews. build five-star reviews and badges as you rise to larger, six-month contracts.

Learn to craft a standout freelance programming profile on Upwork by avoiding new labels, using testimonials, and highlighting automation, web scraping, and Python skills.

Learn how to apply for freelance programming jobs on Upwork, focusing on entry-level web scraping projects and budget filters. Craft tailored proposals to overcome objections and win approvals.

Land your first programming job by building projects on GitHub as your resume and pursuing freelance work. Prepare for interviews by mastering data structures and algorithms with LeetCode.

Prepare for your first full-time programming job as a junior software engineer. Practice using version control with others and pair programming to learn your team's tools and methodology.

Continue your self-taught programmer journey by diving deeper into programming, paradigms, tools, and computer science. Practice by building projects and reading others' code on GitHub to master your chosen domain.