How to Code Like Mark Zuckerberg. Based on different interviews from Mark…
By: Sajid Lhessani
Tags: Code, Artificial Intelligence, Data, Programming, Data Science

#Tips2: Spend money on yourselves.

Let’s take two fresh computer scientist, both of them are willing to be a video games developer. The first student doesn’t want to invest his money while the second one is buying a course on how to develop a video game. Thanks to this course, he has been able to develop a video game during his Christmas holiday.

6 month later, both of them got an interview with Ubisoft, guess who gonna be hired?

We can’t answer this question, but student number two who invested money on learning and equipment has a significantly higher chance get paid more and have a higher percentage of chance to get a job quickly. (Just good sense)

Investing in a course, a tool kit, or equipment will increase your chance of success. According to Seneca, a Roman philosopher, “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity” — (Quote inspired by James Briggs)

And Mark Zuckerberg explains it very well during this interview (Second part):

Tips number 2 between 1:50 to 3:27

To recap, there is no secret to success. Warren Buffet would never be the king of Wall Street if he did not invest 100,000$ in education. Andre Agassi (Tennis Player champions) would never be the best tennis player worldwide if he did not get a Tennis racket at 3 years old.

It is similar for a programmer if you don’t want to invest money in learning; you will never be a super-efficient programmer. Sometimes, we must be humble and take some time to listen and learn from people who have more experience in a specific field.

As Mark Zuckerberg explains, if his parents wouldn’t buy him a computer at the age of 6, he would probably never be admitted at Harvard and never created Facebook.

Sometimes life is determined by cumulated actions.

To resume, if you want to become a good programmer, don’t be ashamed to pay for it, you will get reimbursed over time by getting better opportunities and a better salary.

So let’s jump to the latest most important tip from Mark Zuckerberg.

#Tips3: Have fun!

Even if discipline is key, having fun whilst you are coding is even more important. By having fun, you will increase both productivity and discipline.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, our goals should be uncoupled from productivity or the idea that you need to account for this time. That’s the secret to how he has been able to work day and night to code Facebook in one month.

If you have 3 minutes and you want to laugh, have fun, and take programming languages less seriously, I recommend to take a look at this brilliant TDS article:

But having fun is harder than you would think since we exist in a competitive environment, and we must get up to date with the latest practice if we want to survive. But the only relevant metrics must be fun and productivity during the time spent.

From my perspective, I find out when I try to learn something I think will be useful professionally; I’m much less likely to enjoy it and get myself immersed even if I am learning useful stuff at work each week.

I feel like an inverse relationship exists between being forced to learn something ‘useful’ and learning something ‘useful’.

Here two goals which I recommend to set:

Feel happy when you finish coding. Do something measurable.

We will never say it enough; you must learn coding by having fun. Don’t start a programming language with no idea on the back than learning code structure, function, and loops.

I am saying that because I made this mistake a few years ago. I started learning Python & R because I knew it was necessary. I gave up 7 times until I start applying for machine learning and algorithmic trading.

I took much more fun by seeing myself coding and seeing my algorithm following the Market in real-time and predicting the future values of different shares than just learning how to create a good function.

Here an example of a programming application that you can follow if you want to start learning a programming language:

And guess what, I spent nights and days improving my model, got promoted two times in less than 2 years, and became one of the best Python developers at work.

That’s all about the top 3 tips taken from a programmer master. You can find more about Mark Zuckerberg in the extra resources.