the 3 youtube channels that taught me more than $200K+ computer science degree
I wish someone gave me this earlier
There’s a moment if you stick with this craft long enough you realize school didn’t really teach you how to think.
You learned how to pass exams. How to build things that kind of worked. You got good at memorizing syntax, grinding LeetCode, regurgitating sorting algorithms from memory.
But then you hit the real world. Real teams. Real systems. Real deadlines. None of that coursework prepares you for the chaos of building software that matters.
That’s where I started learning for real. Not from a professor.
From YouTube.
Here are the three channels that reprogrammed my brain. They didn’t only teach me code. They taught me how to think like an engineer.
1. Andrej Karpathy
I found Karpathy’s YouTube by accident, like when you try a new food and it’s actually delicious.
No flashy edits. No clickbait. Just signal.
Karpathy doesn’t teach like a regular YouTuber. He teaches like someone who’s done it for real and now wants to share what he learned the hard way.
His videos changed how I think about hard stuff. Backpropagation and Transformers didn’t feel like magic anymore. It felt like I could build something like GPT. Not because he made it super easy, but because he explained it in a way that made me feel smart.
Every time I watched Karpathy, I walked away a little sharper. A little more curious. And most importantly: a little less afraid of the hard stuff.
2. CS50
You could spend $200,000 on a computer science degree and still not learn as much as you do from the channel for free.
CS50 from Harvard isn’t just a good YouTube course. It’s one of the best ways to learn computer science, anywhere. Watch one video. You’ll see how clear, exciting, and fun it is.
But what really amazed me wasn’t just what course instructors taught. It was how they taught it.
They perform. They make you care about the ideas, the choices, the reasons behind the code.
And the homework? It doesn’t just check if you understand. It checks if you can keep going when it’s hard.
3. ArjanCodes
I shared a lot of knowledge with my team based on Arjan’s teachings.
There’s a gap most tutorials never cross: the line between code that works… and code that lasts.
That’s where Arjan comes in.
His channel is a masterclass in design thinking. Not academic UML diagrams. Not over-engineered theory. Clean, maintainable architecture. Explained like you’re sitting next to a senior dev who gives a damn.
He breaks down patterns and principles: SOLID, DDD, testing strategy, clean architecture. But he never loses sight of why it matters. That’s what makes him good.
After Arjan, I started seeing things I didn’t notice before. The hidden coupling. The tech debt traps. The slow rot of “just ship it” logic.
To sum it up briefly
We’re living in the greatest era of self-education in history. The tools are free. YouTube is free. ChatGPT is free. The knowledge is abundant. But attention? That’s expensive.
These three channels earned mine—and repaid it tenfold.
They taught me things my degree never did: How to design for humans. How to reason under complexity.
If you’re on the path and you’re serious about leveling up, start here. Watch. Take notes. Rewatch when it clicks. Let the knowledge compound.
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Until next time,
Adlet
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