Introduction

Good afternoon. Good evening, no matter where you're coming from. Hope you all are doing well welcome Look at y'all Look at y'all what's going on? Everybody? Welcome. Hope everyone's doing well. Glad you're all here. It's good to see you.

This is day one of a 30 week software engineering bootcamp and we got a lot on the plate. This evening, we're gonna take some time to get to know each other a little bit. We're gonna take some time to get to understand the opportunity that's in front of us. We're gonna talk a little bit about what it means to become a software engineer, how you can actually do that. We're gonna talk about how to actually learn. A lot of folks set on this path and they don't get to the end because they never actually learned how to learn. So that's what we're starting tonight. And then we're gonna get to some basics of HTML. So we got a lot to get through.

All right, so before we dive too deep into actually learning tonight, I wanna take some time to explain why we're here, what we're doing, and hopefully that's what you signed up for so tonight we start a journey to becoming a software engineer by the end of class tomorrow you will be a software engineer let me say that one more time you know what i'm gonna go big leon here let's go let's go let's get skittles by the end of class on thursday let's say thursday Thursday, sorry, class Thursday. By the end of class on Thursday, you will be a software engineer. You will all have written code. ** Now, there are some nerds in the bunch that are like, Leon, just writing code's not being a software engineer. Knock it off. You can write code, you understand the systems and tools behind the code that you're writing, and you conduct yourself as a professional, you're gonna call yourself a software engineer. We're gonna have some haters that are gonna disagree with us, but fuck them. What we're here to do today is to lay that foundation that by the end of 30 weeks, not only are you a software engineer, not only have you gotten paid clients, not only have you built tons of real projects, sunk a hundred hours into a fully custom project of your own. Not only have you contributed to open source, but you are fully prepared to enter the workforce as a software engineer. ** Right out the gate, I'm going to tell you one thing that I hope sinks in today. We don't get got, we go get. Exactly. One thing that I hope sinks in today, and that learning to code is a journey, but you can do it. I've seen folks from all walks of life, all shapes, sizes, shades, creeds, do it. So I honestly believe in my heart of hearts you can do it, but learning to code is not enough. We're gonna talk about that later today.** Learning to code is not the only thing. In fact, it's a small part of what it takes to get a job. And so, we're gonna talk about the whole journey. The way that you go from maybe just figuring out if this is the career for you, to actually landing that job. And, this isn't our first rodeo, folks. This is cohort two. Our last cohort saw 75 folks get jobs. Yes, I know, Leon, you said 72 in the tweet. Well, guess what? I got three more for y'all, I got three more for y'all. So we're at 75 now. Now, that journey is a long, difficult journey. But we're gonna get there together. ** If you just turn off the screen and you never listen to me again, here's what I want you to take away. You need a community. If you're gonna learn how to code, you need a community. When you get stuck and something doesn't make sense, you don't give up, you go to your community. What we built in the last cohort is hands down the best community to learn code live online. And we're gonna keep it that way. So if this isn't for you and you still wanna learn how to code, that's fine. Find your people, find your community. But what we have is an amazing one and you're seeing it in chat right now. We got a lot of new folks with us tonight. We got a lot of old folks too. We got a lot of alumni, folks that already put in those blood, sweat and tears to get their jobs, but they're coming back because they want you to be successful. Mentors that want you to be successful. Folks that have walked this walk, have talked that talk, and now want to help you do the same thing. There's a lot of you, I love seeing it.

About Leon's Background

Right now there's a window open, folks. There is a window open. And in this window, you can become a software engineer for free and without a degree. And I wanna help you on that journey. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about myself and how I got to that, where we are now, why I started this bootcamp. So I'm gonna give you a little bit about me just so you understand the person that's gonna be talking to you for the next 30 weeks. So my background is I was very blessed. I grew up in Philly and in sixth grade, I had a computer science class. It was in QBasic. If you got some old heads in here and maybe you know about QBasic, but it's a throwback, all right? Now in this sixth grade computer science class where I was writing QBasic, I got a sailboat to go from one side of the screen to the other and I I lost my shit I thought I had magical powers I was hooked I was doing anything I could do to learn how to code but I didn't have a computer I definitely didn't have a laptop like that's the thing I always wanted and my dream of dreams was a was a laptop so I would take my my butt all the way down to the library every day after school and kink around with stuff Then I was blessed in Philly, we have magnet schools. I went to ENS, which is engineering and science. And during high school, I had two years of C++ classes. Two years, that's wild. So I know that my background is one of amazing privilege because back in the day, we didn't have programming courses and I had three years of it before I even got to university. When I got to university at Yale, I didn't study any code. I went all in on biology. In my mind, doctor, lawyer, dentist was the only opportunity, the only way to change my future. And so that's what I went all in on. Around my junior year, I started to get this entrepreneurship bug. I wanted to build, I wanted to create, I wanted to build nonprofits and companies. And I started to pick up a little bit of code to like do those things to put up landing pages And then in my senior year, I dropped out of Yale. I Joined an incubator called tech stars. I raised a bunch of money for my first company, which was called social side We did scientific surveying for academics what we did was You would say you're a psychologist and you need to run a survey. Not only do we have the tools to create your survey, but we also had the participants that would take it. We were in 4,000 different universities. I had an associate position at Harvard and we had hundreds and hundreds of academic articles that used our software. And while I was doing that, I got jealous. I got really jealous. I got really jealous. My engineers that were on my team that were there at my company, they could think of something and bring it into existence. They had a supreme superpower, the idea, the technology, whatever they wanted. They could chug a Red Bull and get it done. And so I pushed myself to learn the code. I wanted that superpower, and I got pretty decent at it. Eventually, after interacting with General Assembly, which is another big boot camp company, they asked me to start teaching a class, and now I'm distinguished faculty with General Assembly. I've been teaching their part-time courses for almost 10 years now. And about halfway in my journey at GA, I saw the power of what you could do at GA in 12 weeks. We were giving people those superpowers and About five years ago.

Resilient CoderS

I wrapped up my company and I joined a nonprofit called resilient coders So at resilient coders we started in Austin Austin has the second largest tech economy outside of Silicon Valley Yet, when we looked in our communities of color, we saw double digit unemployment rates. How do you have the second largest tech economy, but communities that have double digit unemployment rates? It makes no sense, but there was a disconnect. The individuals that needed those jobs the most did not have the skills yet to obtain those jobs. And so that's what we do at RC. RC is a 20 week intensive boot camp for folks of color in the Boston, Philadelphia, and now Pittsburgh area. And in those 20 weeks, they get the skills they need to command amazing jobs. In the last year, 100% of our graduates have gone on to get amazing opportunities. We just sent eight people to Amazon in the last year. We're sending individuals to FAANGs to amazing top tier startups. But what we're doing is we're showing that there is a way to take these skills, teach it to those that need it the most and have their lives and their future change for the better.

Start of 100 Devs

So, when the pandemic hit, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nurse, I can't gear up and go do something effective, but I have a skill that I think I'm somewhat decent at and that's teaching people to code. So, I started 100 Devs. 100 devs was made so that folks that were hurting, that were in the feeling the pandemic, could get those skills that I've seen change other folks' lives and use it to change their own. Now a year later, 75 jobs doesn't sound too bad, but it's not 100. This program's called 100 devs, and I want 100. Not 75, I want 100. So we're doing it again, and that's why you're here. I didn't hit my goal yet. So we're doing it, we're doing another round.

What Tech Can Do for You

And there's one other thing I want to, while we're at this point of the story, there's one other thing I want to get to. Let's rewind a little bit back to when I was in university. When I was in university, I get a little choked up when I tell a story, so bear with me. When I was in university, I moved off campus and there came a time when I was hungry. I didn't have money for food, and I didn't have a way of getting it quickly and What I did it was realized you know what I Can make websites, so I got my ass on Craigslist. I made a post and That same day someone responded they paid me a Deposit like actual monies a deposit and I skipped the skipped all the way to that grocery store I skipped all the way there. I was happy as could be got myself enough pasta and pasta sauce to last me a small year and That that day changed my life It changed my life in that moment I knew No matter how hard it got No matter if I got fired. I lost my job. Nothing mattered Stay with me. I had a skill a Skill that no one could ever take away from me a skill that I'll put food on the table a Skill that kept me fed and I want that I want that for you. I I want that for you. At the end of the day, that's what I want for you. Now, there's a lot of you here, which means that we got a lot of applications that came through and I read them. I'm not through them all. There's a lot of y'all. A lot of people showed up today. There's a lot of y'all, but I read them. and the stories that you shared, the things that you're going through are real. I see you, I hear you, and I'm gonna work my ass off so that you feel the way that I feel about having that skill. That's why I'm here. I want you to go home today knowing that if you put in the work you give me those 30 weeks you won't just have a job you'll have a skill that is yours that you can tap whenever you need it to get the things that you need. That's why we're here. And it's not just me. There are literally hundreds of folks in this chat right now that have already done it, that wants you to be successful. There are thousands of us on discord that want to help you get there. Mentors that are giving up their nights and weekends alumni that are giving up Their mornings and Saturdays because they want you to have the same thing that they unlocked We don't get God we go get exactly pan. We don't get God we go get So I know it takes a little bit of trust I know it takes a little bit of belief But you don't have to believe me today You don't have to believe me on class on Thursday, but give me a couple of classes and I think you'll start to believe that what we're talking about is real. Heck, you can go on our discord and go into our celebrations channel and see all the folks, the jobs they got, the real salaries that they share, the clients that they were able to lock down. You don't have to take my word for it. But if you're not there yet, that's okay I'm gonna work hard to gain that trust and I realized that yes, the program is free You will never pay me a dime.

How You Can Contribute

I don't want your money there's nothing you can do to give me money all these subs and donations they get donated to resilient coders and And specifically, that goes into a fund, our emergency fund for mental health support. When folks need an emergency doctor or medication or things they can't afford, that's what that money goes towards. Just because a program is free in money doesn't mean it's free in time. I know that a lot of you that are here right now are giving up time with your family. You're giving up time and the ones that you love. You're some of you right now are in the break room trying to hide as you watch on the, on your phone. I had a couple of people wrote, wrote out about me about that. It's not just money, it's time. And I won't take that time for granted. You give me that time, you're going to walk away with skills. So, yes, program's free, you'll never pay a dime, you'll never be given something that costs money, that you have to do, and I will respect that investment of time. That's my promise to you.

Getting Started

We're gonna ease into everything, okay? We're gonna ease into everything. I know it can get a little hectic, a little hectic. Especially with so many people. We're gonna ease into it. We're gonna explain things, but don't feel like you have to have everything locked down today. That's not today's goal. Today's goal is to present the opportunity for you to get a taste of what it's gonna be like the classroom but things will come with time and if things don't make sense that's all right you're going to come to discord and we're going to help you figure out all the things that you need to figure out so on discord we have lots of wonderful channels we have so many folks there that have been tirelessly over the past couple weeks responding to all your questions the ask Leon channel has exploded, , in all the best possible ways. , we're going to talk about all that, but no, there's a community to support you and right now you don't need to have an understanding of everything. You don't have to understand what all these little bits and bobs are doing. We'll get there with time. 30 weeks is a significant chunk of time. Give yourself a little bit of grace and we're going to get there together. All right, tonight we're covering the basics and we're going to start off by talking about software engineering as a career. Then we're going to move into the course, how it's structured, the things that will be due, what is expected, all the things that you're going to need. then we will move into learning how to learn. Learning how to learn. It's the most important thing you walk away from this course. People are like, Leon, I learned how to code. No, you learned how to learn. You are all gonna join jobs that use a different stack, different technology than that we're gonna learn. But the skill that you're gonna have is the ability to pick up anything quicker than your peers. And that starts tonight. That starts with you learning really how to learn. Then we're gonna move into something called the client server model. That's basically how the internet works. And then we're gonna see a little bit of code and get our toes dipped into the world of HTML just a little bit. You don't need anything tonight. I'm not gonna ask you to write code tonight. I'm not gonna ask you to use a text editor tonight. You can just be here participate in chat. You'll be good All right I was gonna start off with questions Before we always dive in each lecture. I always get that off of questions And so I know there's a ton of questions so I'm gonna take just one or two right now because we're gonna cover a lot of stuff tonight and I'm sure is gonna answer a lot of your questions

No tech skills, that's fine. The expectation is that you have never coded before. That's the goal here. And like I said, tonight we're reveling in the wildness here, but we'll turn on slow mode and make sure that it seems a little bit more easy to participate in as we kind of continue on. We need software. The only software you're really going to need is a text editor, which we'll cover later on and a browser. That's it. Those are the only two things you'll need for the entire 30 weeks. Cool. All right. There's gonna be lots of questions. I always like to start off with a few. But if you come on Sunday, right, on Sunday, you are able to ask any question you want. We spent three hours last Sunday just answering questions. And so we will, This Sunday again have office hours You can come ask a bunch of questions and it's just a question answer session for the entire day That's it. So we're gonna definitely come through on Sunday And if you have lots of questions, that's the time to come through and get those answered.

All right, so we're all here to be software engineers. And there's good reason for why you might want to be a software engineer these days. Right now, there is a gold rush of sorts that is happening. And everyone is flooding into this space of wanting to learn how to code. And that's okay. There's plenty of room for us, and we'll talk about that in a second. And the reason why it's becoming such a popular career choice is because it has a very high pay. Right now the average is 92K a year. It is what we would say is one of the happiest careers. The reason why a lot of folks are looking to move into software engineering, right, is the idea that it is a high paying job. 92K average right now for software engineers in the US. And the other beautiful thing is that it constantly shows up on the happiest careers list. So if you look at the past five years, right, If you look at the past five years, every single year, some sort of software engineer, some sort of software developer has shown up on that list. And then the other beautiful thing is that you don't need a degree to become a software engineer. So you're telling me that there is a high-paying, happy career that you can learn for free and you don't need a degree? Well, everyone should be running to it. And a lot of folks are saying, is the market oversaturated? Hell no. Now, it's oversaturated with folks that don't know what they're doing. We have 100% placement rate at my nonprofit during the day in terms of students that graduate our program getting a job, 100%. We have more people trying to hire our students than we have students. Double, triple.

Why Coding Isn't Enough

But here's what happened. When people found out that there was a high-paying, happy career that you could learn for free, didn't require a degree, that knew that right now they could get into it, we had a lot of these programs pop up. and a lot of these programs predicate it that the only thing you needed to get a job was to learn how to code. Well, I'm here to tell you that learning to code is not the thing that will get you a job. What? What did he just say? I was here to learn how to code. Learning to code, let me get big here. just so people don't get lost here. Learning to code will not get you the job. It's a small portion of it, it's a small portion of it, but it's not the only thing. What if I told you, because this is true, half the folks, half the folks that got a job from 100 devs, this last cohort, half of them did not have a technical interview. Let me say it again. Half of the folks that got jobs did not have a technical interview. So, a coding bootcamp that just teaches you how to code is leading you astray. People are like, what, how? You found the right place. So, when it comes to getting a job, Coding is definitely something that's gonna help you. It's definitely something that will come up in a significant number of your interviews. But the networking, the building a rapport with the individuals that have open jobs and applications, the way that you apply to jobs has more impact these days than just your raw coding ability. So we're gonna spend a lot of time on things that aren't just learning how to code. This bootcamp's gonna teach you more than that because that's not the only thing that contributes to you getting a job.

Why 100 Devs Beats Other Boot Camps

Now, the other wild thing that happened is when this industry popped up, when people realized that you could have a high-paying, happy career that you could learn for free with no degree. Well, a lot of bootcampers popped up that spit out generic, just generic coders. There are whole crops of bootcampers that have the exact, the exact, like line by line projects in their portfolios. Like you could see whole, like if you go and look at bootcamps, you could see whole groups of individuals that graduated that did not have a singular line of code that was different. So no wonder people are saying, oh, it must be saturated or there's too many. No, there's a bunch of people that have no idea what they're doing that have all the same projects that have all the exact same experience That haven't tell their resume that haven't put any work into networking that haven't made connections in the industry and they smell They smell They walk in the room They can't even get in the room. How are you going to hate from outside the club? You can't even get in. They can't get in because they smell. There's a stench. A recruiter spends six seconds looking at your resume, and they know it's all cap. They know you can't code. There's nothing. There's nothing. on your resume, in your experience, on your LinkedIn that would lead to you actually being successful on the job. And so right now, there's a window that's open. There is a window that is open where you can learn to code, learn how to network, learn the things that you need to differentiate yourself in the market, where you can get a high-paying, happy career that you can learn for free with no degree, but I have no idea how long that window will be open. Right now, the window is open for a couple of reasons.

100 Devs Versus CS Degree

A lot of folks say, Leon, why aren't CS grads taking all these jobs? Well, when you go to a four-year university, you are very lucky if you have two classes that teach web development. That's the best program I've ever heard of. You're going to spend more time on compilers and CS theory and all this stuff that nobody wants to pay you for. They want you to build web applications and you at best probably got one class of that in university. So at 100Devs, we teach the practical skills, the things you actually need to get a job and then I task you once you're getting paid to learn the theory, to go get the dusty ass books and learn the theory. But here we learn the practical stuff, the stuff that people actually wanna pay you to do, and then once you get the job, you fill in the gaps. Don't do it the other way. That's one of the reasons why this window is open. The other reason why this window is open is because right now, you can learn one language that does it all. You can learn JavaScript, use that on the front end. You can use that on the back end. You can use it to do everything you need for your job and you only have to learn one thing. If you go to a four year CS program, you probably never learn that language. Like what? But how is there one language that you can use across the whole stack and this language it makes me mad I get angry I'm sorry I'm getting mad I'm getting angry this language is literally the most in demand language let's get big. It is the most in-demand language and you're not teaching it. That's why the windows open. That's why the windows open. There are a lot of folks in the market that don't have practical skills, that don't have anything that shows to an employer that they know actually how to code, and they haven't put in the work to build their network so they can actually get into the interview for the job. That's the biggest, that's the hardest thing. The hardest thing is actually getting the interview. You go on Reddit. You go on Reddit and you'll read post, I applied to 500 jobs and I haven't heard anything. 500 jobs and I haven't heard anything. And I just sit there and I'm like, if you applied the 500 jobs and nobody got back to you, it's because you fucked up. You didn't do it right. You smell. You smell. Your portfolio is busted. Your resume is busted. You don't have anything that shows to an employer that you actually know how to code. You got got. And you just click apply. Never, ever, ever just click apply. If you ever just click apply, it's the same thing. It's the same thing as you printing out your resume and lighting it on fire. Actually, no, you just clicking apply is worse than you burning your resume. Let me tell you why. Because if you printed out your resume and lit it on fire, there's a small chance that that piece of paper lit your curtains on fire, your house caught on fire. Thankfully, the sprinklers put out the fire. House didn't burn down, thankfully, but the fire department still had to come. When the fire department came, there was somebody on that, like the fireman was like in your room and they saw that you had VS Code, like your text editor open, and they go, oh wow, you know how to code. My brother's cousin's uncle works at this company downtown and they've been looking for an engineer for the past two months and they haven't gotten, Like, how about, I'm sorry that your, your curtain's caught on fire. Why don't I connect you? So maybe you can get a job that is more likely to happen and get you a job than you getting a job just by clicking apply. So. There's a window that's open. there's a window that's open right now where you can get a high paying job that is the happiest job like five years running that will provide for yourself and your family that right now there is a practical way for you to compete against individuals coming out of four year CS programs where there's a practical way for you to learn the things that are actually in demand that companies actually want. And if you do it right, you can get a job.

Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?

Now, you're saying, Leon, it sounds great. Sounds great, but why doesn't everyone do it? Why doesn't everyone do it? Well, here's the reason why not everyone does it. Learning to code and putting in all the other work that it takes to get the job takes a really long time. We call this the trough of sorrow. Many of folks have endeavored to become software engineers and many of them have failed trying to cross the trough of sorrow. Here's where a lot of you are right now. You want to see where you're at right now? A lot of you are like right here. You're on Udemy hill. You keep buying those Udemy courses. You're, you swipe that credit card, like, ah, boom. You throw in the credit card at the, at the, at the screen. You're like, oh, look at me now. Just bought a Java course. Ah, just bought a javascript course. Ah, like python course. Ah, right You never finished one You bought a bunch of them But you definitely didn't finish one If you got If you got more than three Udemy courses that you've never actually even started in your account right now Just just give me a thumbs up in chat. You can just you can just put up you can put up or thumb if you got at least three that you've never even started, put up. I gotta put up two. We did this during office hours, I'm guilty. I got a two. Boom, there you go, I put my own up. So we gotta stop and we gotta ask ourselves why do we keep buying all these courses that we're never going to do and haven't gotten us closer to our goal. And there's two big reasons. The first reason is it's very easy to spend money and feel like you've done something. It's a very low cognitive effort thing that makes you feel like you're taking a good step towards your goals. So a lot of people will over and over again spend money getting got because it feels good. They feel like you're working towards progress. The other reason why people do this is because some YouTuber told them to. Some YouTuber told you that you needed to buy the course to get the job. Some YouTuber told you that if you didn't spend that money, you weren't going to get the Fang job. Somebody told you that you could get a Fang job from their course. And unfortunately you got, got that's okay around here. We don't get got, we go get, so you found the right place. People are saying what's Fang Fang is like the big top tier companies Talking about Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. If you come to me, you say, Leon, I wanna go work at a Fang. I don't know how to code. I've never coded in my life, but I wanna work at Fang. Don't let me be the person that gets in the way of your dreams. But let me tell you a little bit what that sounds like. That sounds like to me, you know Uncle Ray Ray that comes around every once in a while And they tell you that story about how they almost played for the Yankees. That's what it kind of sounds like It never played baseball a day in their life But they come and they tell you that they're gonna play for the Yankees. It's the same thing as you coming to me and saying Leon. I Mean my dad tossed the football around I'm gonna go try out for the Eagles Okay, there there is a small chance that you will transition from never having thrown a football to going and playing for the Eagles. Don't let me get in the way of that dream.

What You Can Expect

But I'm here to be a little bit more realistic. I'm here to help you get a job. And I want you to keep your sights lasered focused on the plethora, the thousands of jobs that are so much more easy to get into than shooting for the Eagles or the Yankees. We can all go play in our rec league, and that's what I'm talking about. I want you to all join a rec league company. I want you to get paid good money, be happy, have time for the ones that you love and for your hobbies, And I want you to be able to do that within 30 weeks So I'm not gonna sell you on a dream. I'll leave that to the youtuber you love to watch I'm gonna sell you on something that's realistic that you can accomplish that you can get done and then once you are getting paid Once you are getting paid you got that that cheddar coming in then study your ass off and go get that fang job and I'll be there to support you. I sent 10 people to fang very recently. But let's get paid first. All right, so let's get back to this trough of sorrow. All of you are kind of like right here right now and to make it through the trough of sorrow, you gotta do a lot of stuff. You got to go through the muck very quickly. Probably today, if not tomorrow or Thursday, you're going to find yourself kind of plummeting down Udemy Hill, and then you're going to have 20 weeks of being in the muck. And after those 20 weeks of in the muck, you're going to start to have some wiggles of false hope. These wiggles of false hope is when people like start responding to your emails for jobs, or when you get that first really big interview, this is going to happen to most of you. You're going to get a really great interview at a company that you'd be really excited to join. And you're going to go into the interview and it's not going to work out. That's just the truth. That's the wiggles of Fossil. We tell individuals that they have to apply to 60 companies, 60. and we know already that we don't just click apply. These are 60 companies that we have networked our way into, where we're talking to a living, breathing, human being at those companies. That's what I mean by 60 companies that we applied to. About 10 of those interviews are gonna go horrendously wrong. Like slap their mama, throw up all over them bad. About 40 of them are going to go so-so, and about 10 of them are going to go amazing. Like could not have gone better. You did everything, it just went well. Your best friend, you're going to their summer house the next weekend, like just amazingly well. And out of that, you'll get two offers. Let's step back here for a second. You're gonna go through the muck of learning how to code and then you're setting up for 60 real applications, not just clicking apply. All right, so that's why people don't go through it. It's daunting. It can be anxiety inducing, but remember what I said earlier, today's not the day. You don't have to have all this figured out. We're going to give you the tools, the techniques, the tricks, the things that you need to make it through this trough of sorrow. And on the days that it feels the worst, you have a community to fall back on. Community is the only way I've ever seen folks truly make it through the trough of sorrow. And after today, you might say, Leon, sounds great. This isn't the community for me. and that's okay, that's okay, but you need to find one. You need to find one that's gonna help you get unstuck. When late at night things aren't going well and you've been racking your brain, you should stop and go to sleep by the way, but you're going to need someone, some group of people that can help you get unstuck. What we've been able to do in the last cohort is build an amazing community. Folks that are gonna help you get through the muck, through that trough of sorrow and come out the other end. And there's a lot of folks here right now that are new, but they wanna help too. When you learn something, you're gonna teach it to those around you. And in a week from now, when there's something that you don't know, guess what? there's gonna be someone else to help you. Everyone needs to know right now that there is a cost to this program. Leon, you're like, there's no cost. It's free, it's no money. Yes, you'll never pay me money, but here's the real cost of this program. When you graduate, when you get that job, the expectation is that you turn around and you bring three more with you. That's it. That's the real cost. You're gonna get there, you're gonna turn around, you're gonna bring three more with you. And I don't mean a lazy half-ass bring three with you. I mean, you're busting your ass to answer people's questions, you're giving them time. I put a thousand hours into this cohort last cohort a Thousand think about that 300 plus them were just live Another 300 preparing and get anything going and then at least over a hundred maybe four hundred five hundred of 101 time There are so many people in this chat right now that I've spent hours on the phone with where I've picked up the phone to talk to an employer to hype them up, to say they're the best person I've ever interacted with. So the real cost here is that when you get the job, you make it to the other side, we go back to the Trophosaurus, when you make it to the promised land, you turn around and bring three more. That means you're gonna hold that window open a little bit longer. You're gonna make sure your people make it through. You're gonna make sure that they know what they're walking into when they go into that interview. You're gonna make sure that they're prepared. You're gonna make sure that the people that helped you along the way, you're there to help when it's time. So if you're not ready for that type of cost, just close your eyes. Just take out the headphones, it's okay, you can leave, it's fine. This community is a community. I don't know how else to say that any better. You're signing up for a community. A community that wants to help each other, support each other, and when they make it to the promised land, turn around and bring more with them. You can't say I didn't warn you, you can't say I didn't tell you. I'm making it very clear that that's the cost of this program. And if that's not something you're willing to sign up for, that's okay. Close your eyes. Click exit, you're good.

3 Core Things to Help You Succeed

Now, there are three other things that are the real core things that help people be successful in this journey. Like without these three things, you're not making it to the promised land, you're not getting through the trough of sorrow. I've been teaching people to code for 10 years. I've taught thousands upon thousands of people to code, I've helped hundreds get jobs, and I've picked up three key things that help folks make it through the trough of sorrow, and I'm gonna tell you about them when we come back from our break.

Because around here, we like to be healthy. We like to make sure we take breaks at the top of the hour. Becoming a software engineer is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to be doing stuff that enables us to remain healthy and be able to get through these 30 weeks. So if you are able, I'm gonna bring up a timer. If you're able, I want you to get up and leave the screen. I want you for five minutes to take an actual break, to let your fingers relax, to hydrate, to go and look out the window, let your eyes focus on something that's not the screen, and then we'll be back in five. Okay. So you're gonna take those five minutes.

alright folks let's get into this again alrighty so talked about community being the goal but I promised you that there were three things three things that my students that I've noticed over the years are very good at that helps them. That helps them get through the trough of sorrow to learning how to code, all right? And those three things are...

• Managing frustration
• Being consistent
• Taking care of yourself

Now, when I used to teach classes in meet space. Where like students actually had to come into the classroom. Remember those days that's wild Students actually had to come into the classroom Students would come in they would sit down and within like the first few minutes. I knew whether or not they were going to be successful Shrimp said repeat that I got you shrimp. I got you. I Said back when we used to meet in person. People would come they would sit down and literally within 10 minutes I knew if they're going to be successful or not. And I can tell you how I knew they were going to be successful. It was how they dealt with frustration.

Managing Frustration

There are two types of individuals. They're going to be on this journey. There are gonna be some types of individuals that sit down to learn how to code and think that learning how to code or their lack of coding ability is a reflection of their intelligence, their IQ, all these things, which are absolutely not true. Your ability to code is a reflection of your ability to put in hard work, to sit reading dusty documentation for hours on end, to struggle and fail over and over and over again, and then ultimately come out the other side of the trough of sorrow. It has nothing to do with where you started. I have seen folks from all walks of life. I have had individuals that have been returning citizens and hadn't touched a keyboard in five years, the folks that were caregivers, it just does not matter. Learning to code is not about raw intelligence or IQ, definitely those things can help, but it's more about how you deal with frustration. There was a very famous study that came out not too long ago that looked at when did individuals lose their ability to be fluent in a language and for a while folks thought that they lost their ability to become fluent in a language like in the teens like early teenage years and what they found out was people don't really lose the ability to become fluent in a language. They just get older. And when you get older, you lose the ability to manage your frustration because when you're a kid and someone says, go do this thing, go study, you do it. You do it. Right. Noroplasticity is the thing. It is. It is. But what this study showed is that it's more this idea. that you could eventually become fluent in the language, but you are now in charge of your own life. You decide when you go to bed, you decide when you wake up, you decide what to eat. And when we start doing that, our ability to get more frustrated is present. And that frustration is what stops you from learning. And so there is a mindset that my most successful students have. You're asking me like, who's the most successful? The most successful students I've had are the individuals that say, you know what? Whatever Leon said today, I did not get. And you know what? The stuff that Leon said yesterday, I didn't get that either. And the stuff a week ago is still not clicking, but I know tomorrow's my day. Tomorrow, this stuff will make sense tomorrow. I will have figured it out and I will keep working until it does. Two different kinds of people. And it comes down to you managing your frustration.

Being Consistent

ADHD gang in the house. So for those that don't know, I have bipolar disorder and I also have very severe attention issues. That leads to the next topic here, consistency. When I first started to learn how to code, I had a very severe problem with consistency. Consistency is hands down the biggest factor in your ability to learn how to code and retain it going into the future. And let me tell you why. A lot of folks come to me and they say, hey Leon, I wanna learn how to code. I'm gonna study 10 hours a day. They come to me, they say, Leon, I'm going to study ten hours a day. No you're not. You've never done that before. You've never studied that much before and even if you did it wouldn't be good studying. So that's a lie. And what I'm here to tell you is that you don't need to do ten hours a day. You just need to be consistent every day. So class is about six hours a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then outside of class, you should expect to spend about 10, 10 to 14 hours, depending on how well the week goes and the folks that mess up or the folks that say, I'm going to spend 10 hours on Saturday studying. Why do you think studying for 10 hours on Saturday is a bad idea? What do y'all think? They burn out exactly. It's the weekend. I got shit to do now. We outside, you know, like can't be spending our weekends doing that. Y'all goofy, y'all silly. It's because you can't, it's too hard, but here's the real thing. Maybe some people can study those 10 hours, but next Saturday is actually the baby shower. and then two Saturdays from that, it's the parents are coming to town. And so you skip that one Saturday. And then after you skip that one Saturday, you're behind. And then once you're behind, you just stop. So instead of chunking huge hours on time spans that you're probably not going to hit, we want to spread out our learning through a period every day and be consistent in that learning every day. One to two hours a day is plenty to get a job within the 30 week time span, all right? And that consistency every day actually has a scientific mechanism that we're going to explore in a few minutes. So if you want to learn how to code, you got to learn to manage your frustration, which is something you can do. It's something you can practice, something you can exercise. You have to be consistent. You're committing to studying every day, not just one day a week, one to two hours. And I know that's a big ask for a lot of folks. For some folks, that's a huge ask. You got life, you got responsibilities, you got things you gotta do. And so I respect the hell out of folks that can figure out those one to two hours a day.

Taking Care of Yourself

The last thing that I've seen on this list of three things that have helped my students be successful is the ability to take care of yourself. Most folks burn out, that's it. Most folks lose that endurance to keep going. They start off trying to do 10 hours a day, and then within two weeks they're too tired. They start off trying to do 10 hours a day and within a week, their fingers hurt, their arms like literally hurt. You are way better off getting that one to two hours in, all right, getting that one to two hours in and then sleeping, eating right, exercising a little bit. I'm a big boy, but getting that exercise in just a little bit, I'm not talking about like going to the gym, I'm talking about walking. You gotta make sure your brain is healthy if you wanna learn this skill. Do you all know, like if you, like chess grandmasters, when they're in tournaments, how many calories do you think a professional chess player burns just by playing chess in a tournament? How many calories do you think? Oh, people already know, people read the article or they've been around here for a little while. Professional chess players burn 6,000 calories in a tournament, 6,000 calories in the tournament. And they're sitting there moving pieces around. It's because that cognitive effort. I had to look this. I looked this up right before class because I didn't believe it either, because I've been I threw it out. Like, I got to be correct. It's 6,000 calories. That cognitive effort has a real toll on your body. So if you've managed your frustration, you've set up your life in a way that you can be consistent and to set up your life in a way to be consistent, you might have to talk to your partner. You might have to talk to your family. As Dr. Eric Thomas said, you called me, but you called me at the wrong time. You might have to put things into different places so that you can be consistent. And then if you manage to have that privilege of the time to actually study, don't waste it by burning out and not taking care of yourself. Learning to code is a marathon, not a sprint. Princess Sparklebox said, I believe that, haven't done school in a decade and this class is wearing me out. it will. And so we got to be healthy. We have to know that we're going to take our time and we're going to ease into things. But most important is I'm going to lay out what I think is the best path for you to learn how to code. The path that has helped hundreds of my students get jobs. the path that I've seen work for folks time and time again, that's helped them to not burn out, to actually finally learn this and to get the soft skills they need to get a job. And I'm gonna ask for a little bit of trust and a little bit of patience. There's a lot of you here, way more than we would have expected. We're gonna figure it out. But if for some reason the path I'm laying out is not the path for you, If it's not the path that makes sense for you, that's okay Don't let your dreams be dreams Don't let some random dude on the internet stop you from doing what you want to do and accomplishing what you want to accomplish Just do it Just do it.

About the Class

All right. So let's talk about the course. We're doing this motion for the course. All right, we're doing this motion for the course. Everything with time, all right? You don't have to come in knowing how every little thing works. You don't have to come in with any coding experience. We're gonna get there together and we're gonna take our time. We're gonna ease in over these first three weeks. None of this stuff is a hard requirement until we are three weeks in. So I'm about to say some stuff that I'm gonna ask you to do, but none of that's a hard requirement until we make it, right, until we make it three, three, three weeks in. Okay. Until we make it three weeks in, we're going to, we're going to go slow. We're going to take our time. Okay. Now, the materials that you need for class. Materials that you need for your class are always going to be on Discord. If you're not in our Discord, you can do exclamation point Discord and every day we have a channel called the follow along materials channel. In that follow along materials channel you will find everything that you need for the day. There will be the slides that I'm using right now, there will be the link to check in, there will be motivational poems, things that are gonna help you get through the class. So, if you're not on Discord, right, you want to make sure that you are, and that's just leonnewell.com slash Discord, or you can just switch between Discord and it'll take you there. Cool. Now, every class I am going to share a tweet. If you want to be in Turing and Hopper, which we'll talk more about, if you want to be in either of those houses, liking and retweeting that tweet is mandatory. For everyone else, I would love if you did it, but not mandatory. I asked you to do this for a few reasons. One, I want more people to find out about our community, to find out that they don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to code. and that tweet helps more people find us and see what we're doing and want to join. Okay. Now, the other reason why I want you to get used to checking in and using Twitter is because it's going to be one of the biggest tools in our arsenal to get a job. Okay. I told you that learning to code isn't enough. It's the networking that's going to be one of the biggest impactors on you getting a job. Twitter is by and far the best tool to network with other engineers. Okay, so yes, I'm asking you to do it as a requirement of the program, but I'm also just trying to get you to find other people on Twitter to work with, to interact with, to network with, so that you can get the job that you want. Another requirement of the course is that you network each and every week. You are going to network with three individuals that are already in tech, Meaning that you're going to reach out to them. You're going to connect with them at least three each week. Now, a lot of you might be freaking out. Being like, Leon, I have no idea how to network. Right? I have no idea how to network. I have no idea how to interact with people. You might be saying, I am the most introvert of introvert. Right? That's okay. We're going to have full classes on how to do this appropriately. And we're going to find ways that work for everyone. Whether you're the most extroverted or the most introvert, we're going to find a way for you to network and build up those connections of individuals that are going to help you get a job. because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, it is not Raleigh, your coding ability, but the individuals that you've connected with, they're gonna help you lock down these jobs. Remember, if you just click apply, you might as well light your resume on fire. I'm gonna also ask you. I'm also going to ask you to have two coffee chats each week, which is where you sit down with someone and have a longer form conversation about their experience in tech. How did they get to where they are? What are the things that they're learning right now? What are the things they're doing. And like I said, right now we're easing in everything. None of these are requirements until week three, and we're gonna have full classes on how to do this. All right? But if you want to know how people consistently get bigger and better jobs, it's because they put time in doing this. That's it. They know how to code, but the real differentiator is their network. There will be homework. After each class, you'll have some homework. That homework will always be due a week later. So tonight, you have some reading and some watching to do. And that reading and watching will be due next Tuesday. So the stuff I assigned tonight, the stuff that's already on Discord will be due, right, will be due a week later on Tuesday. At first, you'll be submitting stuff through Google Forms. And then, once we get further into the course and we feel more comfortable with things like the terminal, we'll be using GitHub to submit all of our projects and all of our homework. All right, cool. You can't find the Discord channel, it's the follow along materials channel. Cool. There's no like specialized channel for it. It's just the follow along materials channel is where it'll be listed. Cool. We do not start with GitHub. GitHub is confusing as fuck. So is the terminal. So is Git. All those things are just not stuff you need to start off with like to ease into things. We're gonna start actually from zero. If you are starting from zero, you've probably never used the terminal. No, we're not gonna start there. Just doesn't make sense. We're gonna ease into it. Eventually, once we have a command of JavaScript, I'm gonna ask you to do a coding challenge every single day. Every single day, that's right. No weekends, every single day. Not yet though, not yet. Not until we get to JavaScript, but you're starting to see how folks have been successful in this program. Hopefully, it's becoming a little bit more clear why folks were able to get jobs.

The Trough of Sorrow

You said, Leon, I came here to learn how to code, but I didn't know it was gonna look like this. I didn't know that you're gonna be asking me to spend six hours in class. Be consistent studying at least one to two hours a day. Networking with three individuals each week, having two coffee chats each week, doing a coding challenge every single day. Homework on top of all of that. Right now, we go back to the Trough of Sorrow. You are officially at the peak. The peak is for those that have gone up the hill, they've mustered up the courage. To come and say, I wanna learn how to code. They've mustered up the courage, they've gotten to the top of the hill, and they looked over. And when they looked over, they saw a lot of material that they had to work through. They saw that they had to be checking in. They saw that they had to be doing networking each week. Three individuals, two coffee chats. They saw they'd be submitting homework. They saw they'd be doing a coding challenge every single day in preparation for getting that job. And when they looked over that hill, they had a choice. Here are your two choices. All right, the first choice is you can go down that hill Screaming, screaming, crying for your mama, or you can be Beyonce. That's my options for you right now. If you are here, you can go down this hill screaming and crying for your mama, or you can be Beyonce. Beyonce's having fun. they realize it's going to be a journey they're going to be ups and downs and they're all equally exhilarating you are going to feel lows that you may not have felt in a long time where things feel really dark nothing makes sense things aren't clicking it sounds like gibberish is coming out of my mouth, but I promise you that right after that dip is an exhilarating ride up. And so you're going to give me 30 weeks and some of you are going to go through these 30 weeks screaming and crying for your mom. That's okay. I ain't here to judge. And some of you are going to go through this, like Beyonce, you're going to have fun. You're going to enjoy the process. You're going to make lots of friends and you're going to give your all each and every day knowing because you've managed your frustration that I may not know it today. I might not have known it yesterday, but I'm going to get it tomorrow. Oh no, be Beyonce. Oh no. I gotta fix, I always hit the end and then that happens. All right. We've chosen to be Beyonce, hopefully. A big question that I keep seeing come up in chat and people ask me a lot is, Leon, is there a syllabus? No, there's no syllabus. We are learning full stack JavaScript. You will learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node, React, and MongoDB. Now, like Leon, why no syllabus? Why are you not giving me the full outline of the course? I'm gonna tell you why. Because if I give you the full outline of the course, a couple of things happen. One, there's some research that came out of Harvard that shows that people drop at the chapter end. So basically once the chapter is over, that gives you permission to stop. I don't want that to happen to you. The other reason why is because a lot of you don't know it yet, but you're code weenies. I'm a code weenie too. It's okay. What that means is if I gave you the full syllabus, you're going to charge ahead. You're gonna do every single thing that's on that list. You're gonna be putting in 10 hour days and a month from now, you're burnt out and we never hear from you again. So to save you from yourself, to save you from yourself, there's no syllabus. If you're like, Leon, I hate that. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Fine, all my stuff is on YouTube, bye. Trust the process. I've been doing this for 10 years of hundreds of folks get jobs taught thousands people to code It'd be really silly Really silly for me to put a thousand hours into a course and not do something that takes me 10 minutes There's a reason behind it

Rules

Cool All right If you are Joining you are agreeing to our rules. We've built a phenomenal community. We've helped dozens of folks get jobs. And I'm proudest that folks can get help when they need it and the folks that give their all to this community. And so I am protective of this community. Folks that are wallowing in chat, I see you. I'm coming for you. I'm coming for you. You're gonna be banned. I'm gonna go through this chat with a fine tooth comb and I'm banning all y'all. And I'm gonna love every second of it. So if you wanna join this community, you're agreeing to our rules. When you join our Discord, you agree to some rules. I'm gonna read them again because I want you to be very clear what these rules are. All right. So the quick rundown. And this is specifically here and on Discord.

• No non-safe-for-work stuff, especially on the Discord. We're here to learn how to code. No one's here to find the love of their life. We're here to learn how to code and get phenomenal jobs.
• No illegal discussion, this includes hacking, piracy, stuff like that. You want to sail the seven seas on your own, that's okay. Don't do it here on Discord. No ban evading. If you switch your IP, stuff like that, we're going to find it anyway. You're just making more work for us, but we're going to ban you anyway.
• No discrimination. Be very clear on this. This includes using racist terms, slang, sexist or ableist terms, making others feel bad for their race, gender, sexuality, or disability. If you can't be a good human being. Get the fuck out. This isn't for you. If you can't be a decent, kind, caring person, leave, please. Just do us all a favor because eventually you're going to get banned anyway. Just leave right now. Please, you're doing myself and our moderators a huge service by just leaving now.
• No advertising, don't spam stuff here in chat, don't spam stuff on Discord. So on our Discord, don't post your YouTube, your Twitch, your other Discords, your social media. We have a self-promo channel that that stuff can go in But specifically this includes private study groups and other things that split the community All right I'm not putting a thousand hours into this cohort right For folks to run amok and ruin it for others We keep our spaces moderated for a reason If you try to lead people to another space that is not moderated by our amazing team of volunteer moderators That's a problem because we've had that problem where folks break off a little bit They still try to be involved but shit goes sideways and we can't be there to moderate So if you're sharing other communities on our discord, you're sharing other private study groups. It's just a ban We want to make sure that the community stays together, that we're able to protect everyone, that we're able to create a safe learning environment, and we can't do that.
• Don't ignore your warnings or mutes. We're nice people, we're gonna warn you. We're probably gonna kick you if you do something weird, but we're gonna tell you why.
• no abuse.
• No toxic behavior
• No spam.
but there's one thing I want you to really live by. If you're going to be a part of this community, please, before you type anything or say anything in our discord voice channels, ask yourself one very important thing is that the nicest kindest thing right that you could type in that moment that you can say in that moment?

Let me say it again let me get big here real quick before you type anything on discord before you type anything in this chat is that the nicest kindest thing that you could say in that moment. If it is not, don't say it or get the fuck out. I don't understand why this is such a hard problem for a lot of people, but it is, this is that some of you are in this, in this, in this right here with us right now, and this will be the hardest thing you've ever done in your life. But if you want to be a part of this community, that's the cost before you type anything, before you say anything in our voice channels, is that the kindest, most helpful thing that you could do in that moment? If it is not, don't do it. And if you do do it, bye bye. We didn't bust our asses over the past year to build a wonderful community for that not to continue.

Be a decent person. Myself and our moderators are gonna hold you to it. Now, tech for a lot of folks is not a welcoming space. There are gonna be a lot of gatekeepers, gonna be a lot of people that tell you no, we don't need that in our own community. We don't need that coming from our own people. you are going to be ahead of someone at some point in this cohort. And you're gonna be behind someone at some point in this cohort. We all have bad days. We all have responsibilities outside of learning. That's okay. When somebody asks a question, don't be a jerk, answer their question, and do it with kindness. When someone misses something in class, when someone misses something in class, don't make fun of them for missing something in class. If they don't understand something, make sure they understand it. If you can't agree to be the type of person that puts helping others and being kind above everything else, this is not the community for you. Go to Stack Overflow. Find some other Discord group. And you're like, Leon, you spend a lot of time on this. Yes, damn right, I'm spending a lot of time on this very specific point. We have a wonderful community in our Discord that grew by 10,000 people in a week. I refuse to have that community change into something that it is not I will go through and delete all y'all I'll just I'll just go back I'll go back 10 days cut it all and bye-bye like it just gone I'll delete every single one of y'all I don't care because what we built is special it does not exist anywhere else online. It just doesn't. I've been around the block. I've tried to learn a lot of languages and I have been met with hate. I've been met with disrespect. I've been met with people that don't give a fuck. That's not us. That's not 100 devs. That's not learn with Leon. And if you can't get that through your brain and commit to it, get the fuck out. I'm gonna give you a second. I'm gonna stop talking. I'm gonna put the music on Go ahead No, please Put the music on I'm giving them a second. Hold on. Sometimes it's hard. Some people just close their eyes They forget they got to click the button. It's it's the it's the little X you click that and you're gone Cool You're all here So we're agreeing We're agreeing to these rules. We're agreeing to be kind and positive first. We're agreeing to See the best in each other My executive director at Resilient Coders has a brilliant line, like a few lines. I'm just going to read them because they're, they're brilliant. And it's the thing I want you to keep in your brain and the thing that they always tell our students, and I'm going to tell you right now...




Be kind to one another, be the type of person who stays positive and gives people the benefit of the doubt, see the best in people, embrace diversity of backgrounds, of perspective, of things we can choose and those that we can't. Accept your own failures and those of your peers as an important part of the process.





All right. Now I've said it I'm gonna keep saying this if you don't like what I'm saying right now like go Like it's gonna keep coming up because I refuse to build acommunity. That's just like everything else in tech That's not us




Learning How to Learn




All right We've laid the groundwork here we've laid the groundwork here let's get into learning how to learn. Now, a lot of folks don't make it through that trough of sorrow, not through any fault of their own. They don't make it through the trough of sorrow because they might not have ever really learned how to learn. They might not have actually ever really learned how to learn. The things we're about to talk about are just absolutely criminal to me that they are not taught in Every school every university these things are the things they're gonna help you get through these next 30 weeks And so just real quick to lay it lay some groundwork here.

Have you ever re-read a chapter multiple times while you're trying to learn something?
Have you ever taken copious notes? Like you wrote a lot of notes as you were trying to learn something?
Have you been taking notes tonight?
Have you ever highlighted? Like you wrote all those notes and you spent a lot of time highlighting and going through them, highlighting them.

Let me blow your mind here for a second. All of those things, re-reading, taking notes and highlighting, they do nothing to help you learn.
You're probably like Leon, that's what I've always done. I've always taken lots of notes and highlighted my ass off and re-read a billion times.
It doesn't work. It wasn't you. Seventh grade English class, it wasn't you. You just didn't know how to study.




How to Study




But I'll show you what does work. What if there were two strategies that enabled you to learn stuff faster, more efficiently, and forever? The rereading, the highlighting, and taking notes, that ain't it. But there are two things you can do that we're gonna learn right now that are gonna help you to learn stuff faster, more efficiently, and forever. And those two things are...

• Active recall
• Spaced repetition

Now, you're gonna have two videos to listen to for homework that go way deeper into these two topics because they are so important. Literally, when I teach, this is the first thing, I don't care what topic I am teaching, I don't care where I'm teaching at. These are the first two things I'm telling you. I teach at the Harvard Business School, maybe like once every year, twice a year. And at Harvard Business School, I open with these two things because it is criminal that we are never taught these things. It is absolutely wild that I made it through my entire educational journey without knowing these two things.



Active Recall




All right, active recall. Here's a chart. This comes from Ali Abdaal. They have an amazing video that's actually your homework that walks through a process called active recall. You can click here to watch the video. All active recall is, is when you are done reading something, you recall the things that you just read. Now, I have attention issues. Here is a very common thing that happens because I have attention issues, I will read through a chapter and it's as though I like teleported. It's like I'm at the end of the chapter and I'm like, what just happened? Because for the past five minutes, I've been flipping pages, I've definitely, my eyes have been moving, but I have no idea what I just read. It took me until like 10 years ago, like adulthood, to know that like other people did that. And it's because we never were taught actually how to read appropriately when it comes to studying. So if your mind's blown, let me tell you what helps. Actively recalling. when you get to the end of a paragraph, stop and recall to yourself what you just learned. If you have attention issues, you're gonna be stopping more frequently in the beginning. If you don't, some folks can get to the end of like a page, or some folks can even get to the end of the chapter. But the idea is when you're done learning something new, you talk to yourself, say it out loud, the things you just learned. You all saw Bob during the break. Me and Bob have whole ass conversations. Where I am telling them all about the stuff I'm learning, all about the weird things that are going on in my code. And if Bob has his headphones on as he does right now, I talk to my duck. It's chroma keyed out so you can't really see it, but I have a duck that I talk to. Bob was the mannequin that was sitting on my chair when I left. I talked to my duck. Some days me and Bob were on the outs and I talked to my duck. When I am learning something new, I stop every like chunk of text, like every paragraph of text, I stop and I say to my duck what I just learned. And at the end, I recall everything I learned in that chapter. And here's why. Here's why. There was a study that was done where they gave a group of students, four different groups of students, one chapter of, I think it was like a biology textbook. I forget. I'll bring it up in the video. One chapter, let's say of a biology textbook to read. One group read it once. So here is the group that read the chapter once. Here's the group that read the chapter four times, four times. Here is the group that read it and then did like a spider map, like they did some other things that like got them like actively into learning. And then here is the group that read it once and recalled the things that they just learned. now let's say this one more time let me let me let me let me let me let me let me just let me let me just bring this down a little bit here this group read it four times they read the chapter four times this group read it once and did fucking better. If you're not mad right now, you should be. This group read it four fricking times. This group read it once and then just talked out loud to themselves about what they just learned and they did better. I don't know which one of my teachers wanna step up, but somebody's catching hands. How, how can there be a way? How can there be a way where you do a fourth of the work but do better. That's active recall. Right, that's what active recall can do. A fourth of the work, but still do better. So you bet, after you learn something at 100 devs, the thing you should be doing is recalling. When you are done class tonight, when the stream ends,you need to stop and recall the things that you just learned. Now, something that people do is they like to take notes. Here's how I twist notes.




Don't Take Notes




Don't take notes, take questions. Don't take notes, take questions. As you're learning something, write down a question. What is a study practice that can enable me to do a quarter of the work but get better results? Because at the end of class. At the end of class, you go back through your questions and your questions are your active recall. So don't take notes. Who has that emote? The Great British Bake Off, it was hilarious. Take questions, and then at the end of your lecture, quiz yourself by going through your questions. Cool, that's active recall.




The Forgetting Curve




Now, the sad thing is, even if you put in the work to actively recall, we have something called the forgetting curve. Now, this was a study of one, so it's like not the best research, but it is something that has been repeated and you can actually see it within yourself as well. What this person did is every day, they would memorize a three digit, like a three letter combo, like three, just three letters. And then they would quiz themselves. They would quiz themselves 20 minutes after, an hour after, all the way down to 31 days after. and what they found is that that three letter combination within 20 minutes, there was like a 40% chance that they forgot it.
Let's say that again. With just in 20 minutes, there was a 40% chance that the three numbers went in one ear and right out the other.
Okay, so if you are trying to learn how to code, guess what? Software engineering is a cumulative career, meaning that you have to remember the stuff that you've done in the past so you can build upon it and build up your knowledge over time. Even if you put in all the work, you do all your active recall, by the end of 31 days, there's like an 80% chance, it's just, poof, gone.
You learned it, you forgot it, and it's gone. A lot of people put a lot of time into these tutorials. They put a lot of time into learning how to code only for two months later struggle to remember a damn thing. I can't tell you how many tutorials I've done that just a few weeks later, I would have to restart the whole tutorial. And that contributes to being in the Trough of Sorrow because people just don't realize that...


1. They were taking notes the whole time. They were highlighting their asses off. I can't tell you how many notebooks I have full of stuff that I took notes on and highlighted that I will never, ever remember.
2. They didn't practice active recall

So, active recall helps you learn the material, but we know as humans, we have this forgetting curve.
And when we come back from break, I'm going to teach you or show you how you can never forget anything that we learn together or anything that you learn in the future forever. There's a very simple tool that you can put into place that will enable you to reap the benefits of your hard work and not forget the code that you learn.


Off-Topic Content

So we're at the top of the hour. And as you know, we like to be healthy around here. We take a break at the top of every hour. It's a marathon, not a sprint. We're going to take care of ourselves and so let me pull up the timer here Please if you are able Get up get away from your chair walk around if you're able Grab some water hydrate do some light stretching Let your eyes focus on something. All right, let your eyes focus on something. That's not your screen because we're in this for the long haul. All right, let me start the timer here, and put on the tunes, and I will see you all in five minutes, because I'm gonna take a break, too. I'll give you Bob so you're not lonely. See you in 5 folks. I'm gonna chill until the timer's over. What are mini Leons for? You can use your channel points to unlock a bunch of stuff from like silly stuff that happens during stream or eventually like getting resume reviews and stuff like that. Was that a man use scarf? Yup. Robo, thank you for the hydration. Cheers to you. What's my favorite Pokemon typing? grass, cause I like Bulbasaur. I don't know. It's not the competitive answer, but it's still my favorite. Leech seed, all the fun stuff that comes along with it. I don't know what the starters are going to be in the legends. Charmander. Psyduck is the best. Abra was the best in Pokemon blue just because you could if you got Alakazam or whatever the way to get out exam was like It was over. It was a wrap Leaf blade exactly Favorite anime tack on Titan I'm not like deep in the anime though. Actually, I'm gonna say cowboy beatbox. I'm an old head What's the blue circle for I just didn't take it off You play overwatch with your students quite a few yeah, we have a game together channel Definitely down to play some overwatch or some fun stuff Favorite superhero batman Did I get the pearl diamond remake of course So I play apex I played it once or twice but never really got into it Favorite video game? Definitely Pokemon. I like Pokemon X and Y. I think I'm a little weird in that regards, but that was the only gen where you really felt like you were like a real trainer because you could go from like meeting someone in game to them being on your like friends list with video, like with video with voice chat. So like really felt like you were actually a Pokemon trainer that could play with folks from anywhere around the world. And then they got scared of voice chat and Pokemon games probably for good reason and got rid of it All right, folks come on back come on back hope you had a good break hope you're able to stretch Relax a little bit grab some water Let's get this.




Flattening the Forgetting Curve




Alright, so we, before we took our break, we talked about this idea of active recall being the thing that actually helps you learn. Like the idea of actively recalling the things that you just learned is the tool to use as you are learning material. And we talked about probably not taking notes, but taking questions so that at the end of the night or the end of your studying session, you can go back and recall the things that you just learned. Now, the forgetting curve is the devil at play here, because even if you do your active recall, let me show the music here, even if you do your active recall, there's a good chance that you forget the material. You forget the material. And so I promised you when we came back to tell you how to flatten or get rid of this forgetting curve. And the way that we get rid of the forgetting curve or we flatten it is with repetition, okay? Now, what happens the very first time that we learn something. The very first time we learn something, by the end of three days, there's a non-zero chance that we've forgotten it. Like we've gotten to like a 40% chance that we've just like forgotten it. But if we were to review that material. Just once we push our 60% memory retention from three days to seven. Let's think about this if You just reviewed your material. If you just reviewed your material once You've flattened your forgetting curve by a whole week If you were to review it three times Right? That flattens out the forgetting curve even further. And with enough, with enough repetition, pick one, hey, what's going on? Thank you. With enough, with enough repetition, with enough repetition, that forgetting curve becomes flat and we just don't forget stuff. We just don't forget stuff. And so if you're gonna come here and you're gonna put in all the work, you're gonna put in all the hours. Feel the rock song coming on. If you're gonna put in the work, you're gonna put in the hours, you're gonna put in all this time to learn stuff, you owe it to yourself to do the strategy that's gonna make sure you don't forget it. Briefcase said, well, what constitutes reviewing? we're going to use a tool called spaced repetition. I got you. What spaced repetition means is that we are going to space out our repetition. What that means is we're going to see the same material over and over again. The same things that we learned, we're going to make sure we see them in some formulaic algorithmic way. We're going to see them over and over again. And just by that idea of repetition, we make sure we don't forget stuff. So here is on a scale of like, if you're gonna remember it or not. On a scale if you're gonna remember it or not, if you just learn something once. There's a good chance that you just forget it. If you recall that information once, look at this. Just literally recalling once, look at what your percentage jumps to. you jump over 20% just by recalling once. That means if you took questions during our lecture and after lecture. After lecture, you just review the things that we learned, your retention jumps 20%. One recall, 20%. So that's why active recall works. You just do it once, you got like 20% more chance of remembering something. And then if you repeat it multiple times, your ability to remember things goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up.




Spaced Repetition




Now, here's the really interesting thing. Here is spaced repetition. and here is repetition in mass. This repetition in mass is when you take Saturday to study over and over and over again. So that's the people that wanna put 10 hours in on a Saturday where you just sit there all Saturday repeating stuff. It literally, look, this is lower. Here is you repeating a bunch of times in one session versus recalling once. This makes sense.
Here's the idea behind why this happens.
Let's say I learned something and in that same session I repeat it to myself a hundred times. I'm not gonna say a hundred,but let's say I repeat it to myself a bunch of times. So there's no recalling. It's just that one session, I just do it a bunch of times.
That is worse than learning something and then recalling it once at a later time.
And then here is if you space out your repetition. So you can see how significantly important it is to space out your repetition and not just have a day where you study. You have to do this every single day.
Here's the science. Y'all don't take my word for it. Ali Abdaal is the master of this and they are gonna guide you through it it through these two videos that I've shared.
You can click here to watch the video titled "How to Study for Exams" and you can click here to watch the video titled "Study Tips: How to Learn New Content."






Anki




Now, you're saying, Leon, space repetition sounds amazing. I can flatten my forgetting curve, never forget something. How the heck do I do that? Well, we do it with Anki. Anki is a free tool. Anki is flashcards with an algorithm behind them. That's all it is. If you've ever used flashcards, great, you were getting some recall in, but it wasn't good enough because there's no algorithm behind it. What Anki does is it does the spaced repetition for you. You review a card, and then if you get the answer right, it's gonna show you that card in two days. If you get it right again, it's gonna show it to you in a week. You get it right again, it's gonna show you in a month. I have some cards that I won't see until I'm like 70 years old. Because once you review the material enough, you're forgetting curve is flat. You just won't forget that stuff anymore. So we're gonna use Anki. Anki is completely free. Do not pay money for Anki. Remember, I'm never gonna give you anything that you have to pay for. It is completely free on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, GNU Linux. It is completely free on Android and on the web. If you have iOS, the app is $25. Do not pay for the iOS app. Just use your web browser. You can use the Anki web, which I have conveniently linked for you right here . You can do all the stuff in the browser. I create all my cards on macOS and I review them on an Android phone. I highly recommend that you only create your cards in one location and then you review them wherever you want. But if you're like Leon, that sounds amazing, wonderful. We're gonna have a whole kind of like class on how to use Anki better. But as the co-work goes on and we're starting to actually learn more and more material, Anki is gonna become your best friend. Anki is something that you're going to use every single day. All right, so I got two questions for you. I just gave you the cheat codes to learning. Active recall, spaced repetition. I don't know why it's not on the front page of every textbook, but this is how you actually learn things. So now I'm gonna ask you a very important question. Why should you create your own Anki cards and not use someone else's? Throw it in chat, give me some ideas here. Why should you create your own cards and not use someone else's? Exactly, the simple act of creating your own cards is an active recall session. So by creating your own cards, you get a full repetition of active recall in. And it's gonna be the things that you actually learn that you're recalling. That cognitive effort that you put in to learn pays off when you do use your own cards. This is also why you should never use somebody else's notes or somebody else's questions. For using somebody else's notes or questions, you didn't get your own active recall in. And it's something you have to get better at. Remember, software engineering is a cumulative career. It's something you're going to be doing for the rest of your working days. And so you have to get good at using these tools and strategies. You are all going to leave this program and join a company. And on day one, they are going to use a tool and a technology that we have not learned together. And you're going to have to learn it on your own. So you better be good at creating your own Anki cards, taking your own questions, getting your active recall in, feeling comfortable with spaced repetition, because you're going to have to do this every single day for the rest of your life.




Tutorial Traps




Someone in the chat said, I can see why tutorials can be a trap. Exactly. Tutorials are a trap because a lot of times it's low cognitive effort. Reading, highlighting, note-taking, all low cognitive effort. When we do low cognitive effort tasks, the connections in our brain don't form the same way when we do high effort tasks. Active recall, spaced repetition are these high effort tasks that actually force the connections in your brain to solidify.




An Anki a day...




Cool. Next question for you. Why should you use Anki every day? High effort. It's spaced repetition every day. It's spaced repetition and consistency. We said the three things that I noticed in my students that were successful or they managed their frustration, they were consistent. They were consistent and they took care of themselves. Well using Anki every day builds that consistency. It makes sure your forgetting curve is flattened and make sure you don't forget the things that you did. It's high cognitive effort. You're forming those connections in your brain and it works. It just works. So if you're here and you're saying to yourself, Leon, I was never successful at learning how to code before, but you didn't use active recall and you didn't use spaced repetition, that's why. The folks that do active recall and spaced repetition and take care of themselves, they learn how to code. A lot of people say, Leon, I was never successful in school because you didn't know how to learn. They don't teach this shit I wasn't good at math because you didn't know how to learn Now you do You're gonna put it into practice and I guarantee you if you've ever said those things to yourself before Things change once you start putting these two things into practice Melissa how long's class three hours. We always go three hours Get your refunds folks If you want the universe and you didn't teach this All right now the fun stuff is that There are some other tools and techniques that are gonna be really helpful as well These are the big ones like if you just do these two, you're good life changed You'll learn and not forget stuff. Heck, you could be like, Leon, I hate you. Your voice sounds annoying. I'm going to leave. That's okay. Make sure you do these two things with your next tutorial because you're going to actually learn more. Just do that, please. That's all I ask of you. If this is where you stop with us, cool. Make sure you use these two things going forward. Now, the beautiful thing is that there are other tools and tips and tricks that are going to help you be successful as well.




Homework for Class 1




And so your first big set of homework is to go through Dr. Barbara Oakley's course called Learning How to Learn. They have broken down all the science behind how adults, and specifically adults, learn. And they're gonna give you all the tips and strategies you need to continue. We've covered the two big ones, but that course is gonna give you the rest. You can find the course by visiting this link

Now, like I said, a lot of folks come to learning how to code with all these preconceptions about how they learn. There are no visual learners. There are no kinesthetic, I gotta touch things learners. It's all made up. It's not real. It really, it's just, it's not a real thing. It's the things we tell ourselves to get over the fact that we don't have good study habits. And it's not our fault, we never learn this stuff. It's not true, you can look it up, don't don't take my word for it, look it up. You're like, Leon, I've been a visual learner my whole life, nope, you got got. That's something somebody told you 10 years ago when you were struggling in school to make you feel better, but it's not true. You need real study habits, active recall, spaced repetition, are real study tips that are gonna help you learn the things that you learn.




Taking a Step Back




Cool, deep breath everybody. I know it's a lot, especially if you haven't been in a learning environment for a while, three hours can be a bit, but I appreciate you and I thank you for putting in the cognitive effort, for putting in the active recall, for putting in the spaced repetition, and for being here right now. I can't tell you, and you can see them, how many folks out there want to learn how to code in the new year. How many folks want to learn how to code in the new year, but how many of them are not going to put in the high cognitive effort tasks? They're going to keep buying courses, they're going to keep taking, they're going to do all these things that are not going to actually help them to learn. So now you know what you got to do. It's hard, it's not easy, But if you decide to give up your nights or your weekends or a time away from the ones that you love I Respect the holiday view and let's get it.




The Point of This Course ?




Now, I kinda mentioned this at the beginning, but I just wanna be really clear before we get into the big topic we're gonna learn tonight. This is a jobs program. I know it says like free coding bootcamp, free software engineering program, but this is a jobs program. The idea is for you to get a job. Okay, that's the goal. We're covering way more than just coding to help you get the job. And what I really want to click is that for a lot of folks, learning to code can be a lot of things. I grew up loving puzzles. You give me a hard challenge, I'm about it. I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna have fun with it, I'm gonna love it. So for some folks, coding can be a way of getting daily challenges that they work through. For some folks, they love to code because it can be creative. You can bring things to life. It's like playing Minecraft on super energy pills. You can think something and build it and people around the world can play with it and enjoy it. And then for some folks, it's about making money. I started off my story telling you the reason I did this and the reason I got into it is to get the money. There's no shame in that. Make your money. That's why I'm here, and that's why I think a lot of you are here, too. I hope that in the process of making that money, you start to enjoy the things that you're doing as well. Right? You start to see the beauty in how the internet works. You start to see the beauty in HTML. You start to see the creative side where you can build things. But let's not front and pretend that that's why most of us are here. Cool. I'm a bag chaser, me too. All right,




What is the Internet?




so you all here to be software engineers, but the focus of this bootcamp is web development. Remember, we said a software engineer could write code that works in a lot of different places. The code that we're gonna write works in the browser, like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, the things that you would normally use to like access websites and web applications. That's what we're here to learn how to build. We will be software engineers. We're gonna have software engineering fundamentals. We're gonna know our data structures, our algorithms. We're gonna know our tooling and support. We're gonna know a little bit of math behind all that stuff. And our focus, our specialty, will be full stack web development. So a lot of you signed up for becoming full stack web developers without maybe knowing what a full stack web developer really does. We're gonna solve that today. That's what we're gonna get into.

Now, before we jump into it, what the heck is the web or the internet? Let's separate the web from the internet. There's actually two different things. What's the internet? You're all here to become web developers, to build things that exist on top of the internet. What the heck's the internet?



Off-Topic Content

And participation in this class, you can say whatever the heck you want. You could say Beyonce's network. Yes, you could say Beyonce's network and that counts you could say cats that counts cat videos that counts I want every single person that's still awake. That's still here to throw into chat. What the heck they think the internet is I want to see a bunch of like first-time Papers, this is your chance wires. I love wires Networking computers, I love it an addiction. Yes Community. Yes memes. Yes, the matrix. Yes. Come on. Give it to me Information, yes. Man, I can tell a lot of people watched like, like early 2000s NBC, the Information Superhighway. All right, I see a lot of people saying a wire. It means that you probably snuck ahead and watched my video.






The Wire




We're gonna start off with the idea of a wire. So let me go to a whiteboard here. Let's start off with an idea of a wire. Now on this wire We're gonna have two different kinds of computers We're gonna have client-side devices And we're gonna have servers Cool so we're gonna have a wire and And we're gonna have two different kinds of computers on this wire.



• Now, client-side devices are the computers that we use to consume things that go across the internet. So, client-side devices might be like your phone, your laptop, a tablet, a desktop. Whatever you're using to consume that content is your client-side device.
  whatever you're using to watch me right now, that's a client-side device.
• And then other types of computers out there on this wire called a server. Now take a wild guess as to why we call this computer a server. Why do we call it a server? What do you think that computer does on the internet? It serves, exactly. It's called a server because it serves. And what it does is it it serves up different kinds of content. A server will serve up a bunch of different things. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. These are all languages that we're gonna learn together.

But when we are on our client side device, we can make requests. those requests leave our client-side devices and find themselves all the way at a server. That server can hear that request and respond with something. That is the backbone of the internet. This idea that we have some devices that can make requests and some that can respond with stuff.


Off-Topic Content

Bolt said, what's with all the nuns? All right, I'll explain what the nuns are. The nuns are an emote that you get on this channel. You can get emotes from subbing or from just using your channel points because you never need anything. You never need to sub for anything. Like it just doesn't do anything. But the nuns are an emote that we have Because, well, my mom was the best. , my mom always found free stuff for me to do all the time. And, , it didn't matter what it was. If there was a raffle, if there was something, we got it. Right. And so I remember I got to go to six flags. I got to ride. I think it was called the Medusa like eight times in a row, two hours before the, the six flags opened up because my mom filled out a form at Wendy's and we Well, my mom found out that there was a free art class every Saturday morning run by nuns. And so every Saturday, guess where I got dropped off to hang out with the nuns and learn how to draw. So my drawing, as you can see, is not that great. So you can't blame me. You got to blame the nuns. Go to Philly, find you some nuns and say, why can't Leon draw better? It's not me, it's them. So that's where the nuns come from. All right. We got two different kinds of devices. Jason Derulo. I love that name. Jason Derulo, thank you for the five gifted subs. We have two different kinds of devices on this wire. That is the internet. Client side devices that we use to consume.


Now, let's step back a second. If I asked you to open a Word document, what program would you use. What program would you use to open a Word document? Not trying to trick you here. Yeah, you probably use like Microsoft Word. You might have another program that opens it, but like Microsoft Word. What if I asked you, what if I had a PDF? What program could you use to open a PDF? Adobe, maybe Preview if you're on a Mac. But Adobe.
So we have this idea that like, we have these programs that can run on our client side devices. And these programs are really good at opening certain types of files. Word can open Word documents, Adobe can open up PDFs. While running on our client-side devices, we often have a program called a browser. And that browser is really good. And when I say browser, I mean like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer. these browsers are really good at opening certain types of files, specifically HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. They can open those files and display what you are seeing on your screen. So often what we will do is we will be on our client side devices we will be using a program called a browser and from this browser we are able to make requests to a server. That server is just another computer out there on the internet that can hear that request and has some code that tells it what to do right.
I like to think of this is like a restaurant. The client side is like you sitting at your table and the backend or the server is like the kitchen. From your table, you can make requests to the kitchen and the kitchen will send you back food. You don't really care too much about what's happening in the kitchen. You really kind of just care that they give you the food. Well, this is the exact same thing that's happening on the internet. You are sitting in the booth making requests on your client-side device. Those requests go to some server or kitchen and you get stuff back. Now, the beautiful thing is that our client-side devices, our desktops, our phones, our tablets, all have that program called a browser and the browser can run the files that are being sent back from the server. So when we get food back from the kitchen, we are able to eat it, but maybe there are some things that we couldn't eat. Well, a server could work the same way. A server could send you a file that the browser has no idea what to do with, and it just wouldn't know what to do, and it wouldn't run it. But when we send to the browser, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, it knows what to do with that stuff.

Cool. Now, let's do an example. Let's pretend that we are going to order from Domino's. I love using this example because I am actually no longer allowed to order food from Domino's, so we are going to pretend. My wife is just across the hall from me, like there on the other side of this wall. I ain't trying to get got. So we're gonna pretend. Okay, we're gonna pretend that we're gonna order food from Domino's Everyone's saying why I'll tell you why all right. Here's why I a grown man. I'm no longer allowed to order Domino's When you are walking down the street and the Domino's delivery person Pulls dirt like they're driving past you they pull over they get out their car, they walk up to you, they say, hey Leon, how's it going? They grip you up and they're not delivering you pizza and you're with your wife. That is the exact moment you are no longer allowed to order food from Domino's. So we're gonna pretend. I'm gonna pretend, I'm not even gonna type it in my phone, I'm afraid, it's all right, I'm okay to be scared. I'm gonna pretend that from my client side device, I am going to go to dominoes.com. So I type dominoes.com into my client-side device That request leaves my phone That request leaves my phone makes it all the way to Domino's server and Domino's server Domino's is like wait a minute. Wait a minute. Was that Leon? We're going to, we're going to, we're going to pretend we're going to pretend. So I've typed in dominoes.com pretending into my phone that pretend request is made to Domino's server, they go wild, and then they go, hmm, what should we respond with? Well, they're going to respond with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They're actual individual files. They're actual individual files, but each of those files handles something different. So, once the response comes back to my phone, I see Domino's website in its full glory. If you've never been to Domino's, and I haven't been there in a while, I haven't been there in a while. But back in the day, when you went to Domino's website, there was a beautiful picture of a pizza at the top. And going down the middle, going down the middle was a list of ingredients. All of that content that you saw, like the picture, the text, that was all powered by HTML. That was all HTML. So if you've ever been to a website and you saw content, your client-side device just consumed HTML freely. So if you've ever been to a website and you saw like text or images, that was HTML.



Difference between HTML, CSS, and Javascript




Now, Domino's website was beautiful back in the day. The ham was pink. The pineapple was yellow. The peppers were green. The ingredients were like centered. So like that color, that positioning, that style, that was all powered by CSS. So if you've ever gone to a website and you saw content, that was HTML. You ever been to a website and it didn't look like a hot dumpster fire, that was CSS. And then the coup de grace, the end of all websites was that on Domino's website, you could drag the ingredients on to the pizza. pizza. You could drag the ingredients onto the pizza and that was all powered by JavaScript.


• So if you ever went to a website and you saw content, that was HTML.
If it ever looked good and not like a hot dumpster fire, that was CSS.
• If you could ever do things like drag and drop, interact, that was all JavaScript.





Server's Role




Now, now, that's all stuff that's happening on our client side. But that's all happening on the client side. Like we're seeing all that stuff on our device But there's a lot of stuff that has to happen on that server on that server There's a lot of things that have to happen Right. They got to be able to process our credit card They got to be able to look up my 2,000 orders. They got to be able to store the new orders into a database Right keeping track of all the orders that somebody's ever made. So there's a lot of stuff that has to happen on the server That's set up So that we can handle the requests that are coming in Right when they when I make that request to Domino's the server needs to process my credit card It needs to send my order to the local Domino's It needs to store my order in a database all this stuff that we never see is happening server side.





Full-Stack




So you are all here to become full stack web developers. What that really means is that you will be able to write code that runs on the client side, like the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, and you will be able to write code that runs on the server. Things that enable you to process credit cards, store stuff to a database. Here are those requests for pizzas coming in. And we actually have words for that. Folks that just focus on what the user sees. Our client side developers or front end developers. Folks that focus on just the server side are called back-end developers. And individuals that do both the front-end and the back-end, we call them full-stack developers. Now, a lot of people come to me saying, Leon, I just wanna be a front-end developer, or Leon, I just wanna be a back-end developer. If you've never built a full-stack web application, you honestly don't know what you prefer yet. Some people think that like the front end might be more creative or that they, that the back end might be more mathy. No, it's not. They're very different things, but give yourself a chance. Don't close yourself off because you might like one more than the other. But here's the thing, you gotta know both, at least the basics. You can't be a front end developer that doesn't know how the code you're writing interacts with the back end. and that's how you lose your job. People feel like they're gonna go into just one specialty. No, you gotta know the full stack. You gotta know the full stack and you're gonna know the basics. And then once you know the basics, you've built a full project from scratch, then you make those decisions. Because you all, every single one of you here will have built a hundred hours project. A project that you put a hundred hours into where you've built the front end and the back end. And then you can stop and say, all right, well, maybe I like this or that, or maybe both. So come in with an open mind.

All right. Now, I said that this whole thing is about sending requests and getting responses. From our client-side device, we made a request for dominoes.com. That request found its way to the server, and then a response found its way back. And the way that this all works is that those requests are actually going across real wires. Let me show you those real wires. Here we go. You got to look behind my drawings. Here are the wires. Here are the transatlantic internet cables. There are these big ass wires that go across the ocean that enable our requests to move around the world. Inside each of these big wires, I've been told is that there are eight fiber wires in between each one and Each one of those fiber wires can transmit up to 53 terabytes per second now I've never downloaded an illegal blu-ray rip like who does that right? But if you had you would know that like a good quality blu-ray around 3 gigabytes So we're talking about the entire blu-ray collection going across just one of those wires per second there's eight of them in this tube. And then look at all of these cables everywhere in the world. They're just everywhere. So that's how our requests are actually moving around the world. And the funny thing is these requests only have three seconds to go from the client to the server and back. If it takes more than three seconds, people bounce. That's that's that's the professional term for this. It's called bounce rate. Like how many people just leave right now It seems simple at first but there are a lot of things in between Our requests from our phone or our computer all the way to domino's server and back Typically if you're like on your laptop or your desktop You are maybe connected on wi-fi and the Wi-Fi is you're gonna make a request from your device. It's gonna go from your Wi-Fi to your router, through your modem. And one of the first places, and give me some leeway with all this, like you could spend your whole career on just like one portion of this. And this is kind of an overview. So give me a little bit of leeway here. But one of the first places your request is going to go is an ISP.




ISP




What's an ISP? Throw it in chat. What's an ISP? Anybody know? Somebody said, is that where network engineering comes in? It can be. This is the start of it. Yeah, it's an internet service provider. These are the individuals that we pay money to that connect us to those big old wires. Now, I'm not a fan of the ISPs. I'm really not. They charge a lot of money. but I kind of get why. Those big cables that I showed you, they're not really ran by like the big folks that we're thinking of like Verizon, Comcast. Those are more like government, other really big service providers, maybe some of them. What Comcast and Verizon and all these other ISPs are really good at are what we call last mile. They're really good at connecting your house to those big pipes. And there was an article not too long ago about when Verizon came into Boston, they laid fiber. Everyone take a guess what the article said it cost them per block to lay fiber. What'd you think it cost them per block? Take a guess. Five million a block, five million a block. So I kind of get it. I don't like paying them money, but I kind of get why they charge so much. It's a lot to lay that last mile cable and connect us to those wires.




DNS




Cool. Next step that our request will probably go through is something called a DNS. Anybody know what a DNS is? Yeah, domain name server or system depending on who you're talking to, but let's say domain name server. A DNS is just another computer out there on this wire. And the computer's really good at doing one thing. It's a really fancy phone book. Hold that in your head for a second. It's a really fancy phone book. All right. If I was throwing a party and I asked you to show up at my back porch, please don't show up at my back porch. Please don't do it. It's not an invitation. But if I was having a party and I wanted you to show up to my back porch, What could I do, what could I give you that would enable you to get to my back porch? A lot of people are saying an address. Would an address get you to exactly my back porch? Get you close. It's not gonna get you exactly to my back porch. Coordinates, exactly. I could give you the GPS, the longitude and the latitude, right, to my back porch. And with that, you could get exactly there. The same thing's happening on the internet. We typed in dominoes.com. That wasn't enough to find that server. We needed something called an IP address. An IP address is kind of like the latitude and longitude to get you to that server. So remember, I said DNS was a fancy phone book. All that's really in that phone book is an address and the IP address. Because when I'm giving you the directions to my back porch, I could say, go to 37.111491912 comma negative 42.141119. Like that's the coordinates to my back porch. Like I could give you those coordinates. Will you ever remember? the coordinates to the back porch You got them right? No, you will never remember those coordinates and there's no way in hell You're remembering the coordinates for a bunch of other people So instead of latitude latitude and longitude and us having to remember all of those things we have addresses 32 Cherry Street. They're very easy. We can remember 32 Cherry Street instead of the latitude and longitude. You're all like, I got Anki now. I got it. Give me the latitude, longitude. And so the idea here is that we in the real world have addresses to get around and on the internet we have the same thing, but instead of addresses, we have URLs, dominoes.com. Well, dominoes.com is the address. it is not the latitude and longitude to that server. So we need a DNS. When we give them address, dominoes.com, the URL, it gives us the IP address. Here's the IP address for Dominoes. 139-772-442-101. That's not Dominoes' IP address. I'm not that bad, come on now. Give me a little bit more respect than that, all right? But the idea here is that it's something like that, where we would type in dominoes.com, our request goes through the ISP, if we paid the money, then it goes to our DNS, and then the DNS would give us that IP address, and with that IP address, we could eventually make it to our server. There are lots of other steps in between. This is just an overview. That server has some code running on it. That code hears that request comes in and knows what to do. Maybe it's gonna fetch some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Maybe it's gonna store an order, but that code listens to the request and knows what to do. And then once it's finished with that request, it sends a response. And that response goes all the way back to the client side. But guess what? That response is going back through all these hoops.




HTTP




Got through all these hoops. That we just jumped through to get to the server. And this all works because of a very important tool. A very important tool called HTTPS. HTTP, there we go, we'll say HTTP. We have HTTP. All this works because of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is the way that we were able to make these requests and send these responses. Hypertext Transfer Protocol actually sits on top of some other stuff, PCP, IP. There's a bunch of other stuff that like is happening to make this work. But the idea of being able to send a request from a client and get a response from a server is because we're sending all this through this protocol. Now something fundamentally changed about the web a while back. Something that changed this whole game for the better. Kind of gave it up already. What changed about HTTP that made all this better? The S, exactly. We got HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol secured. What used to happen is every single request you made went through this entire chain, this entire network across all of those cables and every single person in between, the hundreds of people in between, they all got to see what you were requesting and the response you were getting back. That sink in for a second. Back in the day, not me, not my friends, not people I knew, but back in the day, people would go to Starbucks and they would run a program called Fire Sheep. And when they ran that program called Fire Sheep, it would show them all the requests that were being made on that network so you could see all the sites they were signing into, all of their passwords, all that stuff before we had the S. Once we got the S, things got encrypted. The funny thing though is that you can still see what's being requested, and you can still see a lot of information about that user. You can see where that user is coming from, you can see what type of computer they're on, and you can see the site that they're requesting like the URL. So something really interesting happened with the ISPs is that the ISPs won a court case that said, hey, not only can we record all this stuff, like the site you're going to, the computer that you're on, not only can we record all this stuff, we can sell it to the highest bidder. And so all your ISPs are doing that now because they have like the legal authority to do it. So all the requests that you're making are going through this entire network and everyone can see them, cool. Now, who uses an incognito browser? Great. Incognito browser really doesn't do anything. It does one very specific thing. I'm about to show you the only thing an incognito browser does. You ready? About to show you the only thing an incognito browser does. You ready for this? Pay attention. Ready? Three, two, one. That's the only thing that an incognito browser saves you from. Did you see what I did? Hold on, let me slow down. All right, you ready? Boom. That's what it just saved me from. If I had used an incognito browser, the things that I looked for. The things that I searched for in the past aren't like stored locally on my machine. But does it mean that the websites I'm going to, nobody can figure out, like my ISP still knows that balloon website that everyone likes to go to. Like my ISP still knows what computer I was on when I went to those sites. And so you gotta be careful, folks. All the incognito browser does is just so that if your loved ones sit down and they wanna practice their Pomodoro, so they don't get surprised,




VPN




okay? Now, a lot of you are looking at some stuff that you don't want other folks to know. You don't want your ISP to see, you don't want your DNS to see, you don't want all the people in between to see that website you love going to so much. And so there is a way to protect yourself, and it is a VPN. A VPN stands for a virtual private network. It is somebody else's computer that you send your encrypted traffic to, and then that computer makes the request on your behalf. So you run a program on your computer that encrypts your traffic. It goes completely encrypted through your ISP, through the DNS to this computer, where that computer decrypts it and then makes the request on your behalf. Now, VPNs love VPNs because they think it makes them more secure, but here's the thing. A VPN is only secure in the sense that you trust that provider more than you trust your ISP. All right, let's say that again. A VPN only works if you trust that provider more than you trust your ISP. There are ways to roll your own VPNs and stuff like that, but that's all it does. So even if you're using a VPN, you're still trusting somebody else to not log your searches, to not log all the things that you're doing. So if you want to buy your drugs and guns online, please don't do that just through a VPN. There are other ways. We'll save that for another class though. Save that for another class. Some folks are saying Tor, the Onion Network. Yes, there are things with the Onion Network where instead of it just being a request and a response to a server, you gotta bounce your request around to dozens of other computers each time it's peeling off a layer of the onion until it makes it to where it needs to go, and then it bounce through all those relays again. But please, if you are trying to buy your drugs and guns online, don't just use a VPN.




A Knight's Tale




All right, now, if you've hung around this long, You now know more about the internet than 99.999% of people on this earth. And I need you to go into the world and do good with it. So I'm gonna knight you all. Hold on real quick. You are all newly knighted developers of the web. Go on and do well with this information. You now know how you request, leave your client side devices and make it to the server. you now know that your ISP and the DNS are in between listening for it. You now know that a VPN can protect you if you trust your VPN more than you trust your ISP. You know, there might be other things like Tor that can keep you a little bit more safer. You understand that your requests are going across these wires using a protocol called HTTP. And at the end of the day, the way the internet works is by sending requests from a client and getting responses from a server. over these 30 weeks, I'm going to teach you how to write the code that runs on the client side devices, the code that runs on the servers and everything else you need to get a job as a software engineer that focuses in full stack web development.




HTML 5 & W3C




who's heard of HTML5? We talked about HTML being the content on the page. Talked about HTML being the content on the page. Who's heard of something called HTML5? Yep, I see a lot of you've heard of HTML5. HTML5 is the fifth version of HTML. It is the fifth version of HTML. The idea is that when the web first started, the web is like what we use to view these websites. The internet's the wires, the system, but the web is something that it's on top of it. And when the web first came out, then we had what we called the browser wars. All these companies said, if we make the best browser, we will own the internet. And so you would write code that worked for one that just literally didn't work for another. And so, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote in on their white horse, and they said, wait a minute, hold on, hold on, hold on. I helped make all this stuff. Why don't we agree to some standards so that the web will work for all. And people kind of ignored them for like 10 years, but eventually they came to their senses and people started agreeing to these standards and the Worldwide Web Consortium or the W3C was created. It's the standards body that says, hey, let's all come together. All the big folks from all the big browsers, all the big universities and people that are voted on boards to protect the web and push it forward. Well, we are on the fifth version. The fifth version of what HTML could be. And with this fifth version, we got some new stuff. If you've ever watched a YouTube video on the browser in your phone, you were dealing with HTML5 video. Back in my day, I had to open, Then I had to open another program on my computer to run videos. Then we got things like Flash and Silverlight which made running videos in the browse a a little bit easier, but then the web progressed even further. And now we have HTML5 video that enables us to run videos in the browser. If you've ever listened to SoundCloud or Spotify in the browser, that's HTML5 audio. If you've ever played those IO games, like the Agra IO, Slyther IO, like these games that happen in the browser, they're using HTML5 canvas for all the animations and stuff like that. Funny thing is that most of them are not multiplayer. If you turn off your wifi, you keep playing the game all the same. I didn't know that. That kind of broke my heart a little bit. A geolocation, when you go to a website, it can ask for your location. Like, do you want to let me know where you are? Or do I have to do shady stuff like sniff your IP address to figure out where you're from? And then the last thing that we got, well, not the last thing, but one of the last big things we got with HTML5 was this idea of WebSockets. It was like open peer-to-peer connections. And so if you've ever spent a late night on chat roulette or a Meggle talking about politics, you were benefiting from WebSockets. So all this stuff. Right? All this stuff is new. It came by pushing the web forward and we're on the fifth version of it.




The Golden Rule




Tonight, this is the most important thing that I am going to show you. It's called the golden rule or separation of concerns. The idea being here is that The idea being that we want to keep our concerns separate. Our HTML should be kept separate from our CSS. Our CSS should be kept separate from our JavaScript and never should these things mix. Remember, HTML was our content, CSS was our style and JavaScript is our behavior and interaction. So when you go to a website and I asked you If I asked you to add an extra paragraph. If I asked you to add an extra paragraph to your website, what technology would you use? If I asked you to add an extra paragraph, what would you use? HTML. If I asked you to make something pink, what technology would you use? CSS. And if I asked you when you click something, I want it to wiggle, what would you use? JavaScript. Remember, not Java. Java is a different language. JavaScript. Now, the idea here is that we don't want to put CSS into our HTML or HTML into our JavaScript. We want to keep them separate. Why is this such an important rule, the golden rule? Why is keeping our concerns separate such a big deal. Why do you think? Yeah, makes it easier to read and for organization. It's for organization for yourself and it's organization for the team that you work on. When I come back to my code and I want to make something purple, I know to go to my CSS. I don't have to look anywhere else. I go straight to my CSS. And when someone on my team wants to add more text, they can go directly to the HTML. And when I come back to my code six months later, I have no idea what the heck's going on, but I wanna make something wiggle, I know I can go straight to my JavaScript and I don't have to worry about anything ever being mixed. So a lot of tutorials that you will do we'll sometimes mix all these things together, don't. You wanna keep your concerns separate. It's one of the first kind of serious things you're going to accept as a professional software engineer, that there are these rules, these paradigms that you agree to to set a standard for your code.




Dipping our toes in HTML




The first thing I said we were going to cover is HTML. We talked about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript being the languages of the front end. The interesting thing is that HTML and CSS are not technically programming languages. They're markup languages, whereas JavaScript is a fully-featured programming language. We're gonna start off with HTML, then we'll move into CSS, and then we'll move into JavaScript over the next couple of weeks. HTML, like any language, has what we call its syntax, right, its syntax, meaning the rules and rhymes that we have to use when we write that language. HTML syntax is very simple. every bit of content on the page must be wrapped in tags. So here you see a little bit of text called hello world, right, still have a text called hello world, that must be encased in an opening tag and a closing tag, right, an opening tag and a closing tag. So here I have some text hello world, and I'm gonna have an opening tag and a closing tag. Now, there are lots of different kinds of tags that we're gonna learn on Thursday. Each of those tags has a reason why you would use it. There's a reason why you would use that tag as opposed to the other tag. And the interesting thing is that there's really only like 30 tags that you really need to know. So by the end of Thursday's class, will have a pretty good handle on all the tags that you're going to want to use. This makes you miss MySpace. Yeah, we're going to talk about that on Thursday, actually. A lot of developers got their start there. So this idea is that whenever you're writing HTML, everything must be wrapped in tags. There are like two tags that kind of cheat this, images and inputs. Since they're already content, they don't need closing tags. They're already content themselves, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Whenever you have content, wrap it in tags.




Click the following button to reveal written instructions specific for vision-impaired readers



VI Code

• An HTML tag is made by enclosing various letters, words, or phrases (called elements) within closing angle brackets.
• Angle brackets are the "less than" and "greater than" signs.
• You can type an open angle bracket by holding down the Shift key and pressing the comma key.
• You can type a closed angle bracket by holding Shift and pressing the period key.
• Tip: It's useful to adjust your screen reader settings to announce "Most" or "All" punctuation symbols when reading or writing code.
• In order to make an HTML tag you have to have...
1. The open angle bracket (less than sign)

    < 

2. A close angle bracket, "greater than sign"

   >

3. And at least one element between the angle brackets
• The lower-case letter p is the paragraph element. You use it to format a chunk of text into a paragraph.
• To make a paragraph tag (commonly called a p-tag) it would be

  <p> 

  (less than sign, p, greater than sign)
• This is the opening paragraph tag

   <p> 

• Most of the time you need to wrap your HTML in both an opening and closing tag.
• To make an HTML closing tag, simply type the same opening HTML tag and then add the slash sign (/) before the attribute.
• So a closing paragraph tag would be

   </p> 

  (less than sign, slash, p, greater than sign)
• Make sure to put the opening tag

  before what you want to format, and then the closing tag at the end of what you want to format.

• Now back to Leon




So, let me show you some code real quick, and then we're gonna stop for the evening. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and look at this about page, and then we'll stop with that about page. So, here's some code. Right now, it is just text. But if I want this to be HTML, if I want a server to be able to respond with this so that this file can run in my browser, I need to wrap every bit of content inside of tags. Please, don't code along tonight. We'll start coding together on Thursday. That's why I said after Thursday, you'll be true software engineers. You have written your first line of code. Tonight, just pay attention to what I'm doing so I can explain a concept. For Thursday's class, you're gonna need some sort of text editor or something like CodePen or Glitch where you can write code. But don't worry, we'll start off class with those things. You don't have to download anything ahead of time. This text editor is what I use called VS Code, and it's what I use to write pretty much all of my code. Here I have some plain text, and every bit of text must be wrapped in what, chat? All my text must be wrapped in what? Exactly, must be wrapped in tags. Remember I said there are different tags for different reasons or different purposes. When we're choosing tags, we care about one, the importance of that element, and two, the semantic meaning behind that content. And so what I will wind up doing is wrapping all of this text in actual tags.




Heading Tags




So here's a tag that I'm gonna wrap this in called an H1 tag (

<h1> </h1> 

) You're gonna notice that this H1 opens and then the H1 closes and the only difference, right, the only difference is that lovely little forward slash. So you're gonna notice that pretty much all your opening tags are gonna look like your closing tags, except for that forward slash. All right. Now I chose to wrap this first class 100 devs in an H1 because I thought it was the most important content on the page. There are going to be tags that we use that help us to know if something is important. There are gonna be tags that help us to know what type of content it may be. And so the idea here is that we're eventually gonna wrap all of our content in the appropriate tag. Right now, first class 100 devs, if you came to this website, that's what I want you to know. I don't want you to walk with anything else except for that, so it was the most important.



P-tag




If we look at this text here, we have a big block of text. If you were to read a book or a magazine and you saw a big block of text, So what would you call that big block of text in a book or a magazine? There you go. We call it a paragraph. So in HTML, we have a P tag. This right here, that open angle bracket and the letter p is the P-tag that opens

<p> 

and we go to the end and we close our P tag.

 </p> 

We have this lovely open and we have the lovely close. Boom, open and close.



Lists




Now, we also have here a bunch of locations. We might say we have a what of locations. Yeah, a list of locations. Well, in HTML, there are two kinds of lists. There are ordered lists and unordered lists. To me, yes, these might be in alphabetical order, but nobody's getting in trouble if these are not in the right order. Think of like a recipe or, yeah, think of like a recipe. If you like try and make a recipe, but things are not in the right order. If you try and make a recipe, but things are not in the right order, you're gonna wind up in trouble. Like if you try to put like the cake mix before you put in the water and you put it into the oven before you stirred it, you're gonna have a bad batch of brownies. You're gonna have a bad batch of brownies. So for me, it doesn't matter if these are not in order. So I'm gonna use an unordered list.

I'm gonna have my

 <ul> 

tag that opens, and I'm gonna go all the way to the end and put a closing

 </ul> 

tag to make sure that my entire list is wrapped in ul tags.



List Items




Now, what do you typically have on a list? Like if I had a grocery list, what goes on a grocery list? Items, exactly. Items go on our grocery list. And so here I have a bunch of items that go in this ul tag. We're gonna call these list items. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I am going to wrap each one of these in

 <li> 

tags
And you're like, Leon, what is this developer magic that you are doing? Well, don't worry. You come back Thursday, I will show you how to do cool stuff like this. And this is the reason why we use a text editor. It's the reason why we don't just like open up a Google Doc and start writing code. There are tools and tricks and things that you can learn inside of your text editor, are these shortcuts that make writing code way easier. Right? Way easier. Now, down here we have another what? Another block of text, so we probably have another what? Another paragraph, exactly. So we're gonna reuse our p tag here. P tag's gonna open, and we're gonna come over here and our p tag's gonna close. Nice. Now the cool thing is we can save all of this and then what we can actually do is if we want, we can come back to our browser and see it in the browser. Don't worry about how to do this. We're gonna go over all this stuff on Thursday. But here is our lovely website that we just built. Using some very basic HTML tags. The thing that really catches my eye first is that this first class 100 devs is big, bold, black, and beautiful, much like myself.
But what's interesting about that? What should handle something being big and bold. What should handle that being big and bold? What should that be? That should be CSS. Did I write any CSS? Did I write any CSS? I don't think so, let me check. I don't see any. I don't see any CSS. No, I didn't. So this is the browser wars alive and well. Remember how I said the browsers kind of just did their own thing and they applied their own style and they did whatever the heck they wanted? Well, we're still fighting that battle. And so when we come back on Thursday, I'm gonna show you how to solve this problem and make sure that when we write HTML, it's just HTML. We'll eventually know how to write CSS to handle this. And we're gonna progress into learning the basics of HTML.



Wrapping Up




So I hope you learned some stuff this evening. I hope you had some fun kind of laying the groundwork for the course, laying the groundwork for what's to come, understanding how you really should approach the learning process, active recall, spaced repetition. I hope you had fun learning how the internet works at a very basic level, and I hope this little sniff of HTML gets you excited for Thursday, because we're going deep on it. And if tonight the HTML didn't make any sense, don't worry, we're gonna spend all Thursday just on HTML, making sure it makes sense and make sure it clicks.



Off-Topic Content

Now you don't want to run you want to hang around for a second because we are going to do a raid and when you raid you get more channel points so we're going to raid one of our best mentors in the community someone that always shows up time and time again for our community and so we're We're gonna raid them and whenever we do a raid, the whole point is just to spend, share some love and positivity to give them a follow and to see what they're up to and building. We only ever really raid folks that are developers as well. And so this developer is someone that really knows their stuff and turns up to help you all the time. So give them some love, give them a follow, and I will see y'all hanging out over there when you're done with the raid and you're done hanging out.


Make sure you do your active recall, start your spaced repetition, and I will see you all on Thursday. Thank you for a wonderful first class, everyone. Peace.

End of transcript