On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Eamonn Cottrell. He's a software engineer who also runs a local chain of coffee shops in Knoxville. Eamonn taught himself to code using freeCodeCamp. And he's since published 37 freeCodeCamp tutorials on using productivity and automation using spreadsheets. Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Emma Bostian. She's a software engineer turned manager at Spotify and Prolific coding teacher. We talk about: - How at her first developer job at IBM, Emma's boss told her: "You need to get your stuff together or you won't make it in this industry." And the transformation that followed. - Emma's thoughts on Computer Science degrees. "Going to college gives you credibility and a network. You can get...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Hiroko Nishimura. She's a special ed teacher turned system administrator turned technical instructor.  Hiroko grew up in Japan and moved to the US as a kid. In her early 20s, she was diagnosed with a vascular tumor in her brain. After life-saving surgery, she had to work to regain the ability to walk and talk. She still lives with disabilities to this day.  Despite this, she's gone on to author technical...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Rahul Pandey. He's a software engineer who left his $800K / year FAANG job to build his own startup. We talk about: - The post-layoff developer job landscape - Developer interviews and how to differentiate yourself - Why salary negotiation still makes sense - His belief that 10x engineers exist – and even 100x and 1000x engineers Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Angie Jones. She's a developer and holder of 27 software patents. She's worked at companies like IBM and Twitter, doing both test engineering and developer advocacy. We talk about: - How a bad performance review from her boss early in her career taught her to be less timid and more vocal about her ideas. - How she invented lots of software testing processes and holds 27 software patents. - Her work at...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Angie Jones. She's a developer and holder of 27 software patents. She's worked at companies like IBM and Twitter, doing both test engineering and developer advocacy. We talk about: - How a bad performance review from her boss early in her career taught her to be less timid and more vocal about her ideas. - How she invented lots of software testing processes and holds 27 software patents. - Her work at...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Ken Jee. Ken's a Data Scientist. He's also a Sports Analytics practitioner who works with US Team Golf and USA Basketball.  Ken hosts the excellent Ken's Nearest Neighbors podcast and the Exponential Athelete podcast. We talk about: - How an injury pushed Ken out of pro sports and into data science - How Ken explains his statistical insights to coaches and players to help them improve their performance -...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews John Washam, a software engineer at Amazon. John's also creator of one of the most popular open source projects of all time, Coding Interview University. This is John's first-ever podcast interview, and the first time he's told his story. Interviewing him was an absolute honor. We talk about: - How John delivered pizzas to save enough money to buy his first computer in the 90s. "I was tired of being a...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Daniel Bourke. He's a Machine Learning Engineer and creator of many popular tutorials on YouTube. He's also a frequent freeCodeCamp contributor. We talk about: - How as a kid he hacked into his school's network and gave himself good grades, just like the kid from Wargames. (Don't try this at home.) - What he learned from helping fix 5,000 people's computers - How Machine Learning actually works. What the...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Chan AKA Coder Coder. She's a software engineer has worked in the field for more than a decade. Interestingly, she studied photography in school and never took a programming class. We talk about: - How she and her sister ran a dial-in Bulletin Board System (BBS) back in the pre-web days - How her first year as a dev she "was just living in abject fear of losing my job." - How she stayed at her...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Scott Hanselman. Scott's a developer at Microsoft, a prolific teacher, and has hosted the Hanselminutes podcast for nearly two decades. We talk about: - How he leads a fully-remote team from his home of Portland, Oregon - His 11-year journey to getting his degree - What he learned from teaching programming at community college - What he's learned about software development from recording 980 podcast...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Alison Yoon. She's a Software Engineer who started off in fashion design and taught herself to code using freeCodeCamp. We talk about: - What it's like to work in fashion. "You're surrounded by exhausted, unhappy people." - How she used freeCodeCamp and the 100DaysOfCode challenge to learn to code and start her software development career - How she learned English and how to work on engineering teams in...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Adrian Twarog. He's a Software Engineer who started his career by working as the office IT guy at a school and other offices for 10 years. He's since published YouTube courses that millions of people have watched. We talk about: - How Adrian built his development skills by volunteering to taking on web design projects at work - How he started making design tutorials on YouTube and published 300 in a single...