Always Be Coding (ABC) Advice from David Byttow

David Byttow is a former employee of Google, and Square but currently he is building things on his own. He also works for Double Helix, Namco Bandai and Obvious. Aside from working in some of the world's prominent software companies, he has received offers from Naughty Dog, Activision, Riot Games, Blizzard, Pinterest, Goldman Sachs and many more. He made a name for himself after he worked with Google without a college degree and started programming with his own by learning from his mentors and without a formal programming background. He shared his techniques on how he was able to work with Google without the necessary papers needed just a pure programming knowledge. The tips and advice on how he landed a job at Google were revealed on his post at Medium, one of the fastest growing social network, currently at beta stage. Here's David Byttow's Advice (Always Be Coding or ABC): *** First Things First: Always Be Coding The more you code, the better you'll get, it's that simple. Through coding you are already practicing, but the best is always a focused practice. Have goals in mind, explore new areas and challenge yourself. Develop a portfolio of both finished and unfinished projects, the best place to put this portfolio is through GitHub. *** Master at least one multi-paradigm language: By mastering a language gives you a great sense of perspective, you must write a lot of code, read a lot more, and learn the best practices. The language must have a vibrant community and runs a lot of production code, such as C#, C++, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby. *** Know thy complexities: Read this cheat sheet, then make certain that you understand how they work. Implement common computational algorithms. *** Re-invent the wheel: Implement the most common data structures in your language of choice. Don't just rely on common libraries try to implement the following and write tests for them: vector (dynamic array), linked list, stack, queue, circular queue, hash map, set, priority queue, binary search tree, etc. You should be able to implement them quickly. *** Solve Word Problems: Spend at least 40 hours coding solutions to different types of problems. One of the best resources is TopCoder. *** Make Coding Easy: Programming is the most straightforward and simple part of being an engineer according to David Byttow. He often use the phrase "a simple matter of programming," because he believe the harder parts of being an engineer is before and after most of the coding takes place. Practice both white-boarding and pair programming. Google is basically all about whiteboard, whereas Square is effectively all pair-programming at real machine with your language and IDE of choice. Aside from the "ABC: Always Be Coding" article posted by David Byttow, he also shared his step by step ideas on how he was able to land a job at Google without the degree, through "Four Steps to Google Without a Degree."