Software Engineer, Consultant, Speaker & Technical Trainer
I recently finished reading Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo. I was quite impressed by the quality of the book. It is one of the best computer science books I've read so far. A handful of others classify as such in my eyes.
But what makes this book so good, especially compared to other books in this genre - System Design?
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I've been working on my course - Learn Programming with Go, One Game at a Time, for nearly a year & made many mistakes along the way.
Nevertheless, I finally published it & earned $2,158.25 in a month:
Here's what I've learnt along the way 👇
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For nearly a year now, I've been building my first online programming course - it's about learning to program with the Go (Golang) programming language. 👨💻
It contains nearly 26 hours of instructional video, covering the fundamentals of programming via the Go programming language. 🎥
But apart from just covering some basic concepts in a handful of videos, it also consists of 75 well crafted exercises, which aim to help you master what you've learnt in the videos, but also stretch you with some extra challenges, so that you become more and more autonomous as the course progresses. 🔥
I prefer that you sweat a bit now and become very resilient for what's to come later in your career rather than having a "feel-good" experience to begin with and struggle once you get your first job. 💪
However, this course is also about building stuff. 🧱
When I first started programming, the intellectual challenge of solving random coding challenges was exciting, but what sparked my passion for the craft was using it to build something meaningful.
For me, that moment came when I built my first video game. The feeling of making a character move on the screen for the first time is hard to describe. 🎮
That's why I won't even bother doing that. Instead, I'll let you experience that joy yourself by building some of the most popular arcade video games using what you've learnt in the course:
✅ Snake 🐍
✅ Pong 🏓
✅ Hangman
✅ Zombie Shooter 🧟
So, if that all got you excited, embark on this awesome journey and make sure to have fun along the way 🚀 :
Growing up as software engineers, we typically spend the first few years of our careers studying various technologies and concepts from the programming area - what a list is, what a hash table is, what's JavaScript, what's HTTP, what is a client-server architecture...
The goal of this venture is for one to accumulate the necessary skills & knowledge to land their first jobs.
But apart from understanding "what" something is, over the years, the preliminary knowledge required to land your first job has expanded to also cover topics which help one not just write software that works, but also write "good code".
Most aspiring software engineers nowadays are advised to read up about the SOLID principles, about what "clean code" is, they're also taught to split up their applications using the MVC "architecture" and have separate models, views and controllers.
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If you've read my last article and taken action, you should now have plenty of time allocated for you to study throughout the week. Now it's time to create your study plan.
Simply having the study time, does not necessarily mean we can use it effectively. Often times, we meaninglessly drift through online courses, textbooks and side projects without really finishing anything.
Sooner or later, you will end up in a situation where you've bought numerous Udemy courses and you've merely completed 10% of each of them.
That, indeed, is one of the greatest challenges of self-study - organising your curriculum & study plan.
But fear not. In this article, I will show you how to bring order to your course catalog mess. One step at a time.
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This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
When I wrote my first program, my trainer told me I merely wrote the source code. Now, I have to translate it to a language understandable by computers. We call that compilation. It happens by clicking Ctrl+F5 (In Visual Studio). And there you have it, your program is now an executable. That's how they initially thought me what the build process of a program is. And that is a good enough explanation for beginners. But at one point, I realized that when I click Ctrl+F5, some processes happen behind the scenes which we don't see. Those processes we will explore in today's article. And did you know, that when you click Ctrl+F5, the processes used are different for different languages? Have you ever wondered why is it harder to code in C++ than it is in C#? Well, we won't be able to explore the whole details of the last question. That has a lot to do with language design and the decisions being taken during the years. But we will explore the fundamental difference between those languages. That difference lies in their build process. …
