10 years of coding in 13 minutes

Finally, I get to make this video. I've seen this video being made by many, many tech YouTubers and um finally I can make it because it's been exactly 10 years that I've been coding. uh which means from 2012 to 2022 today year 2012 the year of initiation I joined the robotics club in school where we had to build a robot to compete in a competition called CRC. I was not a big fan of manual labor because um using any hand tools would potentially break my beautiful nails. So that was out of the question. There was only one thing left for me. Programming the robot's brain. Now, I didn't even know what programming was back then. I just read the instructions and tried to make it work so that we can control our robot with the joystick. What I used to do that was their own simplified language called robot C. Of course, our team won the whole thing, the whole competition, but that's also cuz we were competing against 14-year-olds and we were 19 at the time. So 2012 was also the year I started college at University of Waterlue and uh I took my first CS course called designing functional programs. So I wrote code like this. No loops, no variables but lots of recursion. So what I learned, no one is too dumb for computer science. Year 2013. In 2013 I became a finance wannabe. You have to pronounce it finance, not finance. So, I was a finance wannabe. Freshman year is a year of doing things just to pad your pitiful resume. You know it, I know it. No need to lie to me. My best work experience at this point so far, McDonald's, where I handled concurrent microtransactions in a fast-paced environment. So, clearly, I had to start a side project. And coincidentally, I built something that handled concurrent transactions in a high-speed environment. Like I made a trading bot. The site had people betting on events like whether the gold price would reach X amount by the end of the week. And uh you know, most people did it for fun and games, but I had to ruin their fun by um actually mathematically modeling the statistical likelihood of the outcome and bet on that. I sound smart, right? Not really. I just copied a Wikipedia article because there's a formula and that's it. That's all I did. So, did I make money? Yes. Was it luck? Absolutely. I never even hedged my positions. Now, back in university, I took elementary algorithm design and data, something like that, where I learned about linked list for the first time and uh object-oriented programming. I took that course where I learned how to finally organize my code in classes. And then also I took the class called logic and computation which I learned absolutely nothing. All that jazz helped me land an internship at Scotia Bank. Uh doing what? You guessed it. Automating option pricing with black shores model. If that means nothing to you, don't worry. It doesn't mean anything to me too. Just buzzwords. If you do understand, good job. No one asked what I learned. You can't rely on others to just hand you things. If you want something worth getting, you'll have to be proactive or else everyone else would also have it. Then year 2014, computer literacy. This was the year of demystifying computers. Uh, I took data structures and data management, aka how to lead code, which is great because I probably wouldn't be able to get my next internship without it if it wasn't for that course. And that next internship was Citadel. And holy cow, did I learn a lot at Citadel uh because because I was clueless, right? For some reason, I had to build web servers from scratch in C++. uh I had to implement websockets from scratch, meaning I had to construct the data frames with like op codes and stuff. I was so lost at first. My my manager just gave me a networking textbook and an OS textbook. So I just learned enough just enough to complete my project, right? So TCP UDP, bit manipulation, logs, concurrency, all just to implement some server and a web interface to display tiny numbers quickly for traders who barely look at them. What I learned finally understood how a simple text file can turn into a program, how bits turn into data, and how programs turn into production ready software. Year 2015. That year, I finally became a Silicon Valley baby boy by landing an internship at LinkedIn. While I was there, I wrote some C++ code that never got deployed. And I quote from there, "Your code was not only useless, but it was toxic. It held back our team for a whole quarter." Anyways, I got a return offer and a stellar review. Great experience. Five out of five. Would do it again. After the internship, uh, I decided to do some research assistant work for my favorite operating system professor. Uh, I even got my face to be on the paper. Totally undeserved. So, I was sick of doing the same thing. So, I wanted to try some data science. So, I went to intern at Facebook. I learned SQL. I learned how to make pretty graphs. I touched Mark Zuckerberg's hand and then he put me on a blacklist. Um, Yeah, that's it. Basically, I don't think I coded at all. Maybe a little bit of Python scripting, but mostly just SQL stuff. Uh, it was quite refreshing actually. What I learned, anything is learnable. Nothing is out of reach as long as you just sit down, be patient, and read from the beginning. I never did distributed systems, low latency networking. I never did data analytics but I just learned year 2016 rebellion ah senior year I took one of the hardest courses in our school apparently it was called computer graphics it wasn't that hard conceptually it was just a lot of work basically during the whole course I rendered so many pictures of balls and more balls and balls of different colors balls of different transparency levels balls of different gloss bossiness. I made Dragon Balls. Um, so my last internship was at Microsoft. Uh, they promised it would be a product management type job, but I ended up just prototyping Windows server security products using PowerShell. What I learned, absolutely nothing, nothing. Year 2017, passion meets career. So, I was on track to getting a prosperous career in tech with my resume. But somehow between 2016 and 2017, something went terribly wrong and I suddenly wanted to become a YouTuber. So, I worked at BuzzFeed as a data scientist, hoping that I can appear in some of their videos. My actual job was to try to understand Facebook videos and how to grow their Facebook pages. But at some point they told me I should stop trying to appear in so many videos. Then I became depressed because it didn't make me famous. Anyway, after that uh I decided to go back to Facebook as a data scientist telling myself that I will never do YouTube again. Funny how life works because I did join the Facebook's video creator team. So that was cool. And also that's when my YouTube channel blew up. What I learned, the things you learn and the skills you gain that are completely unrelated to each other often actually compliment each other surprisingly. Like for example, my obsession with videos helped me understand the Facebook video platform intimately as a data scientist, which helped my job. Year 2018, burnout. I really enjoyed working at Facebook because it was related to videos. I live and breathe video platforms. That's me. But I was also growing on YouTube a lot. So my focus was split, you know. I I I didn't stop to think about what I really wanted in life. I just did things, grew my channel, chased numbers, and got burnt out. I didn't quote a single line as a data scientist. So nothing there. What I learned, one of the best skills to work on in your life is the ability to be self-aware and understand yourself. Just like coding, sports, or video games, it all comes down to practice. The more you work on trying to understand yourself, the more you'll be literate in your own emotions. And having that understanding of yourself will allow you to make way better decisions. Year 2019, rebirth. So, I needed to press reset on my life and think about what kind of life I wanted to live. I wanted to chill. So, I chose to be a software engineer. I was scared. Um, I haven't coded in so long and my last software job was in 2015, right? My last internship at LinkedIn. So, I did the typical leak code grind, huge imposttor syndrome, applied to two big companies, got extremely lucky, and got both offers. I was so so relieved. So much of my mental health quickly got better. Basically, year 2020, disillusionment. I never worked as a software engineer full-time, so I thought I would have to really work hard to play catchup. But then I learned that everyone else was as clueless as I was. Coincidentally, once again, I was mostly working in C++. Same thing every time. I know I did a lot of info work even though I was in a product team. But but I also did a lot of analysis as well because it was a product team. So you had to do analysis to kind of justify your projects to to see if it's even worth pursuing. So for stuff like that, the fact that I came from Facebook as a data scientist, it really came in handy and uh and also my presentations were always beautiful because I used to be a data scientist. What I learned in the end work is just work. Your technical abilities and your expertise don't matter as much as you'd think. What matters more is your grit and just if you can get stuff done. So just be a doer and make things you're proud of and the rest will come. Coding, YouTube, film making, it doesn't matter. They're all the same. You're building something. Year 2021, moving on. This year, my YouTube channel became pretty big. I can't really call it a hobby anymore, but um the crazy thing is I'm loving it more than ever before. And the craziest thing is I wanted to be a YouTuber when I was like 15 and it actually came true. I am so grateful that I have this YouTube channel. It gives me so much flexibility, allows me to express myself creatively and it gives me access to some pretty impressive people in the tech world. All because I make silly videos on the internet, right? It's crazy to think that I probably wouldn't have made it as a YouTuber if it weren't for my coding videos, if it weren't for me being a programmer. So, I got really, really lucky. I am very lucky, but I also worked hard. So, what I've learned, there are lots of ways to be successful and also success is defined differently for everyone. A good rule of thumb is to pursue projects and opportunities that you can learn from, that you can grow from, because in the end, successful outcomes are pretty much luck. So, if you want to succeed, it's a numbers game, like rolling the dice. So, keep rolling the dice. You can't control the outcomes of your dice rolls, but you can control what dice you use. And the more you work on yourself, the more the dice become weighted to your advantage. So eventually you'll hit jackpot. As long as you keep rolling the dice, you'll achieve success, whatever that means for you specifically. Anyways, that's it for the video. See you.