How To Learn To Code From the Free Content on YouTube, With Jessica Chan

Meet Jess Chan 🇺🇸! Jess's YouTube channel, Coder Coder, has almost 400,000 subscribers at the time of recording. She's a web developer turned educator, and when she's not teaching her subscribers JavaScript and CSS, she's working on her first course. This episode is about learning, YouTube, and learning on YouTube!

In this show, you'll learn how to evaluate a course and quickly decide if you can trust a YouTube tutorial. Jess and Alex talk about how YouTube evolved over the years and why it might be an underrated place to meet other developers. You'll hear about Jess's long and meandering road to coding and learn why it's okay if you don't become a full-time developer in just three months. Finally, Jess will reveal, once and for all, what's the best camera for YouTubers.

🔗 Connect with Jess

⏰ Timestamps

On Coder Coder, and why Jess loves web development (and enjoys teaching it) (01:33)
Why you should remember what's it like to be a beginner at something before teaching it (03:33)
Can you teach problem-solving on YouTube? (04:55)
How Jess went from Pre-Med to photography to becoming a developer and, finally, an educator (06:24)
Why it's okay if you don't become a full-time developer in three months (07:51)
On becoming a developer in the era before bootcamps (09:33)
Can you judge the current state of the industry from YouTube comments? (12:41)
How would Jess approach cracking her first coding interview today? (13:22)
Why you should look for other people's job interview experiences on YouTube and how the YouTube landscape has changed over the years (14:33)
On Jess's YouTube content, the barrier to entry, and the democratization of educational content (16:51)
Should new developers make their own YouTube channels? Can you learn soft skills on YouTube? (19:20)
Hard skills vs. soft skills - what's more important when it comes to getting your first junior dev job? (21:04)
They say you should "be so good they can't ignore you." What does this mean? (22:51)
There are a lot of content creators on YouTube. How can you know who to trust? (24:51)
Jess's new course on responsive web design, and can you learn without a mentor (30:21)
Can you combine resources while learning? (33:25)
Quick-fire questions: mechanical keyboards, music for coding, best social networks for developers, and best cameras for YouTube

🧰 Resources mentioned

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