freeCodeCamp Podcast

freeCodeCamp.org

  • 1 hour 40 minutes
    #150 To code is to struggle! I interview Tech with Tim, who got a job at Microsoft at age 19

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tim Ruscica, the software engineer and prolific programming teacher behind the Tech with Tim YouTube channel. He's also developed courses on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.

    We talk about: - How Tim managed to get a $70k salary by hacking his way into a Microsoft internship when he was just 19 - How he learned computer architecture as a kid by playing Minecraft - Lessons he learned from a failed tech startup - Why he recommends Python as a first programming language. "It's the least overwhelming thing to get your hands dirty."

    Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 11,133 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - The classroom montage from Real Genius that Quincy mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o

    - One of Tim's mock coding interview videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q_oYDQ2whs

    - Tim's course: https://techwithtim.net/dev

    15 November 2024, 8:09 pm
  • 1 hour 58 minutes
    #149 The State of AI with Stanford Researcher Yifan Mai

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Yifan Mai, a Senior Software Engineer on Google's TensorFlow team who left the private sector to go do AI research at Stanford. He's the lead maintainer of the open source HELM project, where he benchmarks the performance of Large Language Models.

    We talk about: - Open Source VS Open Weights in LLMs - The Ragged Frontier of LLM use cases - AI impact on jobs and our predictions - What to learn so you can stay above the waterline

    Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? I put the entire cover song at the end of the podcast if you want to listen to it, and you can watch me play all the instruments on the YouTube version of this episode.

    Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - Yifan's personal webpage: yifanmai.com 

    - HELM Leaderboards: https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/ 

    - HELM GitHub Repository: https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm 

    - Stanford HAI Blog: https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/

    8 November 2024, 9:26 pm
  • 1 hour 40 minutes
    #148 Open Source is WILD. The craziest things The Changelog has seen in 15 years.

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Adam Stachoviac and Jerod Santo co-hosts of The Changelog – the longest-running software podcast in world. They interview devs about Open Source projects, and they also have a weekly news episode that I always listen to. 5 years ago, Quincy interviewed them for their 10th anniversary episode, and now he's back catching up on what they've been doing for the past 5 years.

    We talk about: - How open source is changing - Open data and open LLM models - Self-reliance and self-hosted infrastructure - The business of running a developer community

    Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - Honeypot episode Adam mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/557

    - Steve Yegge episodes Quincy mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/549

    - Open Source Civilization episode Jerod mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/428

     

    1 November 2024, 5:29 pm
  • 2 hours 52 minutes
    #147 From Stealing Cars to Self-Taught Software Engineer with Dorian Develops

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dorian Develops. He's a software engineer and prolific YouTube creator. 

    Dorian grew up in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. He's the child of a single mother that arrived as a refugee from Cuba. After a rough childhood and dropping out of high school in 9th grade, Dorian eventually made a living as a valet car parker in Las Vegas. It was here that he realized he needed to make changes for the sake of his family's future.

    Dorian taught himself to code using freeCodeCamp and other free learning resources, and has since gotten several 6-figure jobs as a web developer.

    We talk about:

    - How Dorian survived his 20s by waiting tables and parking cars in Las Vegas

    - How he taught himself to code using free learning resources and built his network through months of attending local developer meetups

    - How he's worked as a remote developer so he and his kids can travel the world

    - And how he's 1 year into his recovery from a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction

    Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - Vagabonding book by Rolf Potts: https://rolfpotts.com/books/vagabonding/

    - A documentary on "Advantaged Play" in Blackjack that Quincy mentions. [Note: I don't gamble and I don't condone gambling. Still, this is still an excellent video that developers interested in information security should consider watching]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6aPOkCt84

    - A recent HTML tutorial by Dorian: https://youtu.be/sWYdumJckMw?si=nB8j5d9WQR5u5_Mb

    - Dorian's video about his journey to sobriety: https://youtu.be/pGoeG5aY3S0?si=aanGEowSfWd-runm

    - Dorian's video about his love of Brazillian Jujitsu but how it's left him with permanent injuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAHPG66H000

    25 October 2024, 3:10 pm
  • 1 hour 30 minutes
    #146 From Failing Programming Class to Senior Software Engineer with Tadas Petra

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tadas Petra. He's a software engineer and a Senior Developer Advocate at Agora.io. After learning embedded development in university, he switched to building mobile apps. He's gone on to build dozens of mobile apps and create tutorials to help other devs learn Flutter and other mobile dev tools.

    We talk about: - Immigrating to Chicago from Lithuania - The Computer Engineering he studied in school, and how it's different from building consumer mobile apps - His transition from Senior Dev to YouTube creator to Developer Advocacy - The overlap between mobile dev and web dev, and what he's learned from each

    Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 10,943 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    You can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday.

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    Tadas's History of freeCodeCamp video (20 minute watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5n1-hD-x5g

    Tadas's video about how to control the lights in your house with Flutter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eib_62D-kSA

    Tadas's course platform for learning cross platform app development with Flutter: https://www.hungrimind.com/

     

    18 October 2024, 2:31 pm
  • 1 hour 50 minutes
    #145 Open Source Superstar and Roadmap.sh Founder Kamran Ahmed

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kamran Ahmed. He's a software engineer and founder of Roadmap.sh, which has skill tree roadmaps for lots of developer fields, such as DevOps. As a teacher, he's also a Google Developer Expert and a GitHub Star.

    We talk about:

    - Kamran's tips for finding the right open source projects to contribute to - The story behind Roadmap.sh, his popular developer website - Other specialized open source Kamran has built over the years - How Kamran became a Google Developer Expert and GitHub Star

    Can you guess what song I'm playing during the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 10,922 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - Kamran's website, Roadmap.sh: https://roadmap.sh/

    - Kamran's "Design Patterns for Humans" GitHub book: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans

    - freeCodeCamp's "How to Contribute to Open Source guide" Quincy mentions: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-contribute-to-open-source-projects-beginners-guide/

    - Kamran on Twitter: https://x.com/kamrify

    11 October 2024, 2:06 pm
  • 1 hour 48 minutes
    #144 How to Become a Street Smart Developer – From Dropout to Selling his Company w/ Dennis Ivy

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dennis Ivy, a software engineer and prolific freelancer. He dropped out of college at 18 and taught himself how to build websites. He started his first agency, built and sold products, and eventually started teaching his skills on YouTube.

    We talk about:

    - Growing up in an immigrant family of 13 kids - Dropping out of school and working construction before learning to code - Figuring out how to get web development clients through trial and error - Selling his codebase to his employer $61,000 and using it to fund his journey into teaching Python

    Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro?

    Also, I want to thank the 10,443 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    - The Bussard Ramjet theoretical spacecraft Quincy mentions as an analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

    - Dennis Ivy's React + Appwrite course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-sticky-notes-app-with-react-and-appwrite/

    - Dennis Ivy's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/dennisivy

    - Dennis Ivy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dennisivy11

    4 October 2024, 1:38 pm
  • 1 hour 31 minutes
    #143 The reality of the developer job market with ex-Googler YK Sugi
    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews YK Sugi. He's a software engineer and prolific YouTube Computer Science tutorial creator. He's worked at Google and Microsoft. He runs the CS Dojo channel where he shares his insights on software development, AI, and developer career progressions. We talk about: - Emerging AI tools and how developers are adopting them - The role of interest rates in developer hiring - Japan's developer work culture VS the US - How not to burn out Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday. Links we talk about during our conversation: - YK's freeCodeCamp article on the resume he used to get a job at Google: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/heres-the-resume-i-used-to-get-a-job-at-google-as-a-software-engineer-26516526f29a/ - YK's freeCodeCamp article about leaving his job at Google to focus on entrepreneurship: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-i-left-my-100-000-job-at-google-60b5cf4ebefe/ - YK's popular CS Dojo YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CSDojo - YK on Twitter: https://x.com/ykdojo
    27 September 2024, 12:55 pm
  • 1 hour 49 minutes
    #142 From PhD drop-out to Google Data Scientist with Megan Risdal

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Meg Risdal. She's a data scientist and Product Manager at Kaggle, Google's Data Science competition platform. 

    Megan works closely with the global data science community, and on Google's Gemma open models project.

    We talk about:

    - Google's Kaggle, which hosts 300k open data sets and runs data science competitions each week that anyone can participate in.

    - How people talk in academia VS how people talk in tech

    - Stack Overflow VS Kaggle – how Megan contrasts what it was like to work on these two "communities of practice"

    - Linguistics and its importance in LLMs and AI research

    Can you recognize the song I'm playing during the intro? It's a punk song from 1994.

    Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.

    Also, I want to thank the 10,779 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    Meg's blog: https://www.meg.dev/

    The Sliced Data Science Gameshow that Meg co-hosted with Nick Wan: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PX3YIZuHhyQmXKnyZmVDzdgAYbzwgDw

    Meg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeganRisdal

    Kaggle's open learning resources: https://www.kaggle.com/learn

    The Gemma team at Google that Meg also works on: https://ai.google.dev/gemma

    20 September 2024, 12:10 pm
  • 2 hours 4 minutes
    #141 Lessons from freelancing for dozens of startups with Eddie Jaoude

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Eddie Jaoude who is a software engineer and open source creator.

    He's worked more than 15 years as a developer everywhere from Germany banking sector to London's tech startup scene. He's now a dev rel for hire and runs several open source projects.

    We talk about: - Eddie's journey into open source - How he built his reputation through hackathons - How he leveraged his network to find his first freelance clients - His audio-video setup for filming tutorials

    Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's the theme from a 1982 police show.

    Also, I want to thank the 10,773 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    Eddie's YouTube channel with more than 700 tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5mnBodB73bR88fLXHSfzYA

    Eddie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eddiejaoude

    Eddie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddiejaoude/

    13 September 2024, 6:32 pm
  • 2 hours 4 minutes
    #140 Surviving 40 years in the software industry with Jack Herrington the Blue Collar Coder

    On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jack Herrington. As a kid he had to work to overcome Dyslexia and didn't have good enough grades to get into college. Despite this, he's worked as a software engineer for more than 40 years at companies like Nike, Adobe, and Walmart. He also runs the popular Blue Collar Coder YouTube channel.

    We talk about:

    - How Jack struggled with Dyslexia, had terrible grades that couldn't get him into college, but got really into GameDev in the early 1980s

    - Early developer job opportunities that took his family from his home town in Pennsylvania to Melbourne Australia

    - How he started blogging as he learned, and ultimately published 6 programming books

    Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1979 new-wave song.

    Also, I want to thank the 10,443 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

    Links we talk about during our conversation:

    Blue Collar Coder YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jherr

    Jack on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jherr

    1984 ad from Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

    Edward Tufte, the academic Jack mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

    Ben Affleck's funny drunk DVD commentary on Armageddon movie (this contains profanity so don't listen to with young kids around): https://www.tiktok.com/@alltherightmovies/video/7238180210527505690?lang=en

    6 September 2024, 3:39 pm
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