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Phase 2 · 3–6 months
Computer science basics
These are the thinking skills behind coding. They are exactly the part that AI cannot do for you — so they make you valuable.
What to learn
- Git (= a tool that saves every version of your code so you can undo mistakes) and GitHub (= a website that keeps your code online). Every project from now lives in a repo (= a project folder Git watches).
- Ways to store data: lists, stacks, queues, hash maps (= super-fast "name → value" lookups), and later trees and graphs.
- Step-by-step methods (algorithms): searching, sorting, and recursion (= a function that calls itself to solve a smaller piece of the same problem).
- Big-O (= a simple way to say how much slower your code gets when the data gets big).
Videos to watch
Practice on your own
- Write a "binary search" (a fast way to find a number in a sorted list).
- Reverse a word without using the built-in reverse.
- Solve 10 Easy problems on LeetCode (Easy only — be kind to yourself).
- Put all your old projects on GitHub, each with a short README (= a note that says what the project does).
Build this
A GitHub page with 15–20 small problems you solved, sorted by topic. This is the start of your "proof" that you can code.
Move on when: You can save and upload code to GitHub on your own, and you understand why one solution is faster than another.