On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kass Moreno, a Senior Front End Developer and CSS Artist. Kass started learning coding at age 28 and has since built a reputation as one of the most skilled artists who work with CSS. We talk about: Her childhood in Mexico and in Texas Making the hard decision to drop out of architecture school Her dreadful years working as a salesperson Learning from freeCodeCamp and doing the 100DaysOfCode challenge...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview Jabril. He's an indie game developer who's building a turn-based fighting game called ultrabouters. Jabril has developed tons of other games as well. He runs the popular Jabrils gamedev focused-YouTube. He's also published a 5-hour introduction to programming course on freeCodeCamp. We talk about: - How Jabril got into gamedev as a kid when he got a copy of GameMaker - Jabril's career working at a comedy club and a radio station - The...

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp Founder Quincy Larson interviews Leon Noel, founder of 100Devs and head of engineering at Resilient Coders. Growing up, Leon had it drilled into him that he had to become a doctor, lawyer, or dentist. But his ambitions grew and he went on to have an exciting career in tech. After a successful exit from a startup, Leon wanted to help folks who were struggling during the pandemic. He started 100Devs, a charity which has helped 10,000s of...

In this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Lord, AKA JLord. She's worked as a software engineer for more than a decade at companies like GitHub and Glitch.  Among her many accomplishments, Jessica created the Electon team at GitHub. Electron is a library for building desktop apps using browser technologies. If you've used the desktop version of Slack, Figma, or VS Code, you've used Electron. I recorded this podcast live and I haven't edited...

This week freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Phoebe Voong-Fadel about her childhood as the daughter of refugees, and how she self-studied coding and became a professional developer at the age of 36. Phoebe worked from age 12 at her parent's Chinese take-out restaurant. She was able to study history at the London School of Economics, before working in higher ed. She left her job to raise two kids due to the high cost of childcare in the UK, and spent years self-studying coding...

In this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson talks with developer-turned-CTO Cassidy Williams, also known as Cassidoo on Twitter and TikTok. She's worked in tech for over a decade as a developer at several tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Netlify. She has gradually progressed to senior developer and now CTO. Links we talk about during the interview: Cassidy's newsletter: https://cassidoo.co/newsletter/ Cassidy on TikTok:...

In this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson discusses AI and the future of education with Seth Goldin. Among other things, Seth is co-founder of College Compendium, an education charity, and studies computer science at Yale. Also, the quote Quincy mentioned isn't by Ben Franklin. It's by William Blackstone in 1769 who said: "the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer (innocent person be convicted)." Seth's free...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview Logan Kilpatric, a software engineer and ChatGPT creator Open AI's first-ever Developer Advocate hire. The week Logan started, ChatGPT hit 1 million users. (It now has 180 million monthly users.) During our conversation, Logan shares his journey from Illinois to Harvard, NASA, and now the world's most-watched tech company, Open AI. Along the way, he joined the board of NumFOCUS, which oversees Data Science Python libraries like NumPy,...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview orchestral musician-turned software engineer Jessica Wilkins. Jessica found success in the extremely competitive field of classical music, playing the Oboe in orchestras, recording sessions, and even at major events such as the NFL awards on national television. She started her own business – a sheet music e-commerce website. This not only helped her survive in the high cost of living city of Los Angeles – it also helped her learn web...

In this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Per Borgen about AI engineering and interactive developer education. Per is the co-founder and CEO of Scrimba and is a software engineer. 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. Links we talk about during the interview:  Per's HTML + CSS course:...

In this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Robby Russell. Robby created the open-source project Oh My ZSH.  Oh My Zsh is a framework for managing your Zsh configuration for your command line terminal. It's been extremely popular among developers for more than a decade. Robby is also the CEO of Planet Argon, a developer consultancy he created two decades ago. He's done work for Nike and lots of other companies. Be sure to follow The...

Beau Carnes has run the freeCodeCamp community YouTube channel for the past 5 years, taking it from 75,000 subscribers all the way up to 9 million. Beau started out working as a Special Education teacher at a Michigan high school. He taught himself how to code before working as a software engineer. He has since taught dozens of programming tutorials and helped curate more than 1,000 courses for the freeCodeCamp community YouTube channel. During our conversation, Beau shares the challenges...

I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freeCodeCamp.org. And each week, I'm bringing you insight from developers, entrepreneurs, and ambitious people who are getting into tech. Today I'm joined by Kylie Ying. She's a software engineer and a teacher at freeCodeCamp. We talk about Kylie's 5 years at MIT, her time at CERN working on the Large Hadron Collider, competitive figure skating, and even poker-playing AIs. I hope these weekly freeCodeCamp podcasts are firing you up about learning...

Dhawal Shah is creator of Class Central, a popular search engine for online courses. Dhawal talk about the history of online courses and the Massive Open Online Course revolution of the early 2010s. We also talk about his childhood growing up in India, and how his life changed one day when he won a computer from a Cartoon Network sweepstakes. Tell your friends about the freeCodeCamp podcast. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech. Links we...

I interview Bruno Haid. He's a software engineer and tech founder from Austria. We talk about growing up in the European countryside, his early passion for computers, and ultimately his move to San Francisco, where he's founded several tech companies. Bruno's super excited about embedded systems and custom hardware. He's building home appliances that incorporate open source software and open datasets. We talk about so many topics here. From Star Trek to the European Pirate Party. I hope...

Today I'm joined by Dr. Curran Kelleher. He's a data visualization expert and has taught a number of in-depth data visualization courses on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. We talk about what it's like to get a Ph.D. under one of the pioneers of data visualization.  We also talk about how he uses his visualization skills in industry, his many years living in India, and his love of teaching. I think you're going to walk away with a deeper understanding of data, the human brain, and how we...

On this week's podcast, I meet with Arian Agrawal in New York City to talk about her journey into tech startups. Arian grew up in New York and studied at MIT. She worked in finance for a few years, then built her own Ecommerce Marketplace startup with a friend. Along the way, Arian went through the South Park Commons startup accelerator, and she now leads their New York City branch as a partner. We talk about technology, startups, and her journey from finance to building products. I hope...

Today I'm joined by Joel Spolsky. He's co-founder of Trello and Stack Overflow, and author of the iconic developer blog Joel on Software. I hung out with Joel in his New York City home to discuss his 4-decade-long career as a developer and a CEO. He shared his insights on software engineering, product design, running companies, and how he uses AI as a tool. This interview is the culmination of years of learning from Joel through his blog and using the tools he's helped make. I hope you...

Today I'm joined by Kevin Miller. He's a senior developer and host of the Coder Conversations YouTube channel. Kevin studied accounting in Texas and worked overnight for 7 years at hotels, making only $11 an hour. But his knowledge of spreadsheets lead to him learning more about programming and automation. After spending a year living with his parents and teaching himself to code full time, Kevin landed his first developer job. He immediately tripled his income.  Kevin has since worked as...

This is it – my full FREE 2023 book in audiobook format. How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job. Written, read, edited, mixed, and mastered by me, Quincy Larson. The text version of the book (also free): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-to-code-book/ Table of Contents: Preface: Who is this book for? 500 Word Executive Summary Chapter 1: How to Build Your Skills Chapter 2: How to Build Your Network Chapter 3: How to Build Your Reputation Chapter 4: How to Get Paid to Code...

Today I'm joined by Lynn Zheng. She's a software engineer at freeCodeCamp and at Salesforce. Lynn grew up in Shenzhen, China – the computer hardware capital of the world. Both of her parents were engineers. And from an early age, they encouraged Lynn to learn math and computer science. She got into the prestigious Computer Science program at University of Chicago, where she earned both Bachelors and Masters degree – all by the age of 21. I met up with Lynn at the Redwood City Public Library...

Ben Dunphy studied international relations and had a short career in finance. Among other things, he co-authored a bill that eventually got passed in his state of New Hampshire. But Ben saw the writing on the wall – that technology was becoming one of the most powerful ways to affect change. He learned to code and moved to San Francisco, where he and I first met back in 2013. He built Real World React – a series of evening events and corporate training programs – and ultimately helped...

Eric Leung grew up in Oklahoma and learned a lot of math in high school. His friends wanted to go to medical school and he originally planned to join them. But instead he got interested in the emerging field of bioinformatics – math applied to medicine. After 6 years in graduate school, he made the big decision to leave without completing his Ph.D. But he was able to transition into the field of data science, and he now works as a data scientist at Disney. Eric and I met up at a public...

Today I'm joined by Patrick San Juan, a software engineer who first learned to code in his 30s. I've known Patrick since the early days of freeCodeCamp. He has always been a positive, supportive force within the community. Patrick grew up the son of first-generation immigrants from the Philippines. His family didn't have much money, and what they did have, they plowed into his education. He studied economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, then went to work at a charity...