Episodes
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Colby Fayock. He's a Software Engineer and prolific teacher who has created 68 tutorials for freeCodeCamp, and more than 100 videos on his YouTube – all freely available.
We talk about:
- Colby's early days doing design work for local bands
- How Colby went to art school, then pivoted that into a software development
- His early career at ThinkGeek where he not only did web dev but also worked as a male...
Published 06/13/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dr. Chuck. He's a software engineer and Computer Science professor at University of Michigan, which has one of the top-ranked CS programs in the world.
Dr. Charles "Chuck" Severance is also creator of many popular free learning resources like his Python for Everyone and C for Everyone, which millions of students have taken over the past decade.
We talk about:
- What seperates a Master Programmer from an...
Published 06/06/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Suz Hinton. She's a software engineer, security researcher, and one of the first ever people to live-stream her coding on Twitch.
We talk about:
- How Suz started her career building browser ads in Adobe Flash, working around bandwidth early 2000s limitations.
- How she moved to the US from Melbourne to work at Zappos, and then Microsoft and Stripe.
- Her love of hardware and embedded development
- How...
Published 05/31/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jerod Santo, host of The Changelog, a podcast about open source software development that has been going strong for 15 years.
Jerod is plugged in to the world of Open Source, going to all the big conferences and interviewing all the big open source creators.
We have a fun, wide-reaching conversation about some of the current issues facing open source, such as AI models and Relicensing – essentially, a big...
Published 05/24/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews ThePrimeagean. He's a software engineer who streams himself programming. He recently left his job at Netflix to stream full-time.
We talk about:
- Prime's journey from his teacher telling him he'll never accomplish anything in life to working as an engineer at one of the most prestigious tech companies.
- Prime's love of "Nintendo Hard" video games, and how his love of challenge propelled him to "get good"...
Published 05/17/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Gary Simon, a developer and designer who started DesignCourse.com and has published several courses on freeCodeCamp.org over the years.
We talk about:
- Growing up in rural Ohio, marrying young, and staying out there despite his success as a developer and entrepreneur.
- Early client work, and how he designed thousands of logos for clients before becoming an all-out web developer.
- Using his skills to...
Published 05/10/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews prolific programming teacher John Smilga. John grew up in the Soviet Union. He worked construction for 5 years before becoming a developer. Today he has taught millions of fellow devs through his many courses on freeCodeCamp.
John spent his childhood in Latvia before the Soviet Union fell. He sought work in the UK as an expat hospitality worker on the tiny island of Guernsey.
But he had his sights set on...
Published 05/03/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Ben Awad, a game developer who creates developer tutorials on YouTube and TikTok.
I hope you enjoy our conversation. Can you guess what bass line I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1979 song.
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.
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Published 04/26/24
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Andrew Brown, a CTO-turned co-founder of ExamPro.co.
Andrew created this cloud certification exam prep website with another Andrew – also from Canada, who also loves Star Trek.
We talk about Andrew's early career fixing computers in the 90s, and his early freelance web development work. These ultimately lead to jobs and promotions that leveled him up to CTO.
Andrew also shares his advice to devs who want...
Published 04/19/24
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...
Published 04/12/24
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...
Published 04/05/24
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...
Published 03/28/24
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...
Published 03/22/24
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...
Published 03/15/24
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:...
Published 03/08/24
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...
Published 03/01/24
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,...
Published 02/23/24
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...
Published 02/16/24
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:...
Published 02/09/24
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...
Published 02/02/24
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...
Published 01/25/24
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...
Published 12/15/23
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...
Published 12/08/23
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...
Published 11/24/23
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...
Published 11/17/23