How to Prepare for the Future of Programming – Transcript

00:00Go back to school. Don't go back to school. Learn to code. Don't learn to code. Forget coding. Now it's all about prompt engineering. Now it's all about specification. Now it's all about AI agent app development. Hype. Hype. Hype. Money. Money. Money. Call your mom and ask her. Have some healthy skepticism. Have some unhealthy skepticism. Doubt. Believe. Move to the woods. Bury your laptop in the backyard.

00:22Get bored. Dig it up again. Coding is back, baby. Start another course. Work on it for a few days. Panic. Repeat, repeat. You're not alone. As a writer, I'm also panicking. Why watch this when you could ask the same question to your element of choice and have a lively discussion, perfectly tuned to be as broad or technical, long or short, playful or serious, as you want it to be. I've had trouble writing scripts because every time I thought of a good topic, I wasn't sure if there is

00:50anything I could say that a chatbot couldn't. The thing that saved me was remembering why I made this series in the first place. It also helps that I enjoy giving unsolicited advice. I wanted to create a resource for learners to better understand programming within context of our new AI world.

01:06>> Assessing situation. >> I made a case for why it's still worth learning to code, explored the psychology of beginner programmers, and discussed whether you should use AI at all. So now what? We know that programming has changed, but how exactly and how much? What knowledge will remain fundamental and what will die as a temporary tool in computer science history? There are a variety of answers depending on where you as the answerer

01:33stand. Is your net worth positively correlated with AI hype? Is your job too complicated, social, or important for AI to safely help it? How is your relationship with risk? How do you feel about change? What do you believe about what the future needs? These are not questions anyone can answer for you. Not me, not a tech CEO, not your mom, and certainly not a chatbot. We live in a world where platforms and educational

02:00institutions are jumping to answer, "What can I learn?" A reminder to check out our catalog of free courses. But there are very few resources that will give good answers to questions like, "What should I learn?" and "Can you really justify why? And can you promise me it will remain useful?" I can't guarantee that anything you learn will remain useful in the years to come.

02:22But I am certain that learning will. The fact is we no longer need to understand tech to do things with it. We can build apps, write code, and generate designs without understanding the underlying systems. It's useful and fast. But as a writer and a coder, I do worry about what we lose. If we go all in on outcome over craft, we might forget that developing deep knowledge and understanding can be fun and good for

02:48us. It might even be a requirement for our mental health and self-esteem to not only be able to make an app, but to take pride in the fact that you learned how to. Well, I can't tell if that last part was inspiring or just really depressing. The good news is I do have a few ideas about some easy practical things you can do to understand your situation better and start to answer these big questions for yourself. Given the state of programming education, you're either in a large institution struggling to update

03:15its curriculum, costing you money and time. you're not entirely sure is worth it. Or you're trying to learn it yourself, but are overwhelmed and lacking a network of peers or mentors, wondering, "Will anyone really respect my skills if I don't have a degree to show for it?" Neither of these are ideal, but their drawbacks can be overcome as long as you know what you need to compensate for. Is your education giving you a broad overview of the field, like a bachelor's degree, or is it leading you toward a

03:42specialization in a specific job, like a boot camp or internship? Both of these approaches are useful. they're just working on different timelines. A broad overview can give you more options when the field changes, while a specialization can help you in the short term. Either way, try to compensate in the direction of your weaknesses so you're not left either overqualified and undermployed or just straight up unemployable when your only skill becomes redundant. If you want to make sure this lesson lasts

04:08beyond the length of this video, I have homework for you. Grab a notebook and take a few minutes to reflect on your education from a zoomed out perspective. Think about the people, the program, what it did or is doing well, and what gaps you might be left with when you're done. If you write your reflection in the comments, I will be there providing feedback and bonus points for effort. Personally, I find it really hard to specialize. At one time, I'm juggling like 10 different

04:34hobbies. music, writing, photography, embroidery, collage, coding, print making, home improvement, event organization, Wikipedia lure dives, and oh yeah, making YouTube videos.

04:47And I rarely stick with anything long enough to be competitively good at it. When I was searching for a job, I realized that my technical skills didn't measure up with those of my more focused peers because I had used all of my extracurricular time to widen my interests rather than deepen them. I love having wide interests, but I also want to be good at stuff. So, I've had to figure out ways to actually stick with a topic in a way that doesn't

05:13feel painful for the dopamine addicted rat in my brain. The homework I gave myself in this area consists of three ways of tackling the problem. Get advice from someone who's already where you want to be. Ideally, someone who can personally mentor and motivate you. One of the scariest parts of being a new programmer in today's landscape is how distant we feel from the wisdom of people actually working in the field.

05:36How am I supposed to know how to be useful when I barely understand the landscape? Trust me, older developers love to complain about what they think is useless. Just make sure that they do it while you're in the room. The next is simple but hard. Choose a course and seriously commit to it. Don't worry too much about choosing this perfect specialization.

05:57The point here is just going with something and letting it take you somewhere. This could be anything, anything at all. I mean, we do have specifically tailored specializations that you can take, but if not, that's fine. I won't be jealous, probably. Finally, the biggest hack I found that allows me to be able to engage with the same topic over and over again has actually been about how I prepare my mind to learn. When I

06:23notice my motivation waning and the novelty wears off, I try to counteract it by curating my environment and media diet toward my target subject. Reading books and listening to podcasts and videos of people talking about it on a high level helps me remember what sparked my interest in the first place.

06:41There are even more sophisticated and sustainable ways to train a wandering mind to tolerate consistency, such as certain meditation techniques or simply finding other people to study with. But a little on screen content consumption can work in a pinch. Just try not to get stuck down there. If that wasn't relatable to you, congratulations. You have a functional dopamineergic reward system and marketable skills. But given the current situation and the fact that every two

07:09weeks there's a new tool claiming to make whole professions obsolete, you may also be a bit worried. [screaming] Isn't that nice? We have so much that unites us. We're all just worried. If you spent the last few years specializing in exclusively front-end development, I'm sorry to say that now is the time to foster curiosity about the wider scope of your field. I'll warn you that this will feel different than learning a practical skill since there

07:36are fewer concrete ways to assess your progress. Instead, pay attention to the moments when ideas from different domains click together. This is a sign that you're starting to expand your general knowledge and get a clearer view of the bank picture. It will also make you more interesting to talk to at parties.

07:55>> Oh, one of you is asking for homework. Well, thank you for reminding me JJ44. I bet everyone loves you. Your homework here is if you want something more sophisticated than a Wikipedia rabbit hole, you can try following short courses in other domains. Our computer science knowledge map can help you visualize what subjects you might find interesting to explore. Or you can even consider departing from computing altogether. Bringing technical expertise to a writing course might lead to great

08:23science fiction or mid-tier YouTube videos. Or you could check out like Docker or something. I don't know. Find someone with a different skill set and swap roles in a project. Try out being bad at something just for the sake of learning. It might be ugly and inefficient, but that's not a crime. If you consider yourself a technical person, focus especially on upgrading the person part of that. I'm talking communication skills and critical thinking and creative problem solving.

08:49These are especially important in navigating the uncertain future that we're facing since purely technical jobs are in many ways the easiest to automate away. Taking my own advice, I took a little break from my usual video production duties to brush up on my very rusty coding skills. JetBrains IDEs are free for educational purposes and I used WebStorm to code up a little interactive curriculum for all the homework I presented in this video.

09:15Do we have designers that could have done this for me? Yes. Is it a good website? No. But the point is now I know what Cobbweb is and I feel pretty proud of myself. I know that most of you are probably just watching for a little extra dopamine with an educational flavor. But if you want to allow yourself to be changed and prioritize learning over convenience, you can check it out. However, if you're not ready to leave the algorithm and face the world just yet,

09:40have a look at some of our other videos. Class dismissed.