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freeCodeCamp.org

The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp.org open source community. Each week, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech.

Learn to math, programming, and computer science for free, and turbo-charge your developer career with our free open source curriculum: https://www.freecodecamp.org

freeCodeCamp Podcast

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews James Q Quick. He's a developer, speaker, and teacher.
 
James grew up in Memphis. He was an athlete who played violin, and knew nothing about computer science but chose it as his college major. Since then, he's not only worked as a dev at Microsoft, FedEx and many tech startups. And he's given more than 100 talks at conferences about technical topics.
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
We talk about:
 - How coding a Harry Potter Trivia app launched James' developer career
 - Getting laid off then getting back onto the bike
 - How to go about getting a first developer job
 - How to make a name for yourself through conference talks and creating tutorials
 
 Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
James's website: https://www.jamesqquick.com/
 
Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

#153 How to get a Developer Job – even in this economy – with James Q Quick

Take our year-end freeCodeCamp podcast listener survey real quick: https://forms.gle/2M9NW776723uSdDT7
 
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kevin Powell. He's a designer, a software engineer, and an expert in CSS. He's runs a CSS-focused YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers. There's nothing sensational there – he literally just teaches people CSS.
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
CORRECTION: I (Quincy) say during the interview that the Uber found a way to access microphones on iOS without users' knowledge. There have been documented cases of malware doing this (like Pegasus) but Uber didn't do this. They did do a lot of other shady things, like continue collecting data even after you deleted their app – but mic spying was not one of them. Yes, early Uber was an ethical tire fire. But it's important to get facts right here.
 
We talk about:
 
- Why you should still learn CSS in 2025
 - How teaching concepts improves your own understanding of them
 - How learning to skateboard helped Kevin escape Tutorial Hell
 - Massive improvements coming to CSS
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Kevin's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/kevinpowell
 
- Original Space Jam website Kevin mentions: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
 
- The article that coined the term Responsive Design: https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/
 
- Kevin's freeCodeCamp article on how learning skateboarding helped him out of tutorial hell: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-learning-to-skateboard-helped-me-find-a-way-out-of-tutorial-hell/
 
- Kevin's freeCodeCamp course on building and deploying a portfolio page: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-a-portfolio-website-and-deploy-to-digital-ocean/
 
- Playable Minesweeper in CSS that Quincy mentions: https://codepen.io/bali_balo/pen/BLJONZ
 
- Acknowledged mistakes that are permanently coded into CSS: https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes
 
- Talk on why is CSS so weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUtMbJw8iA

#154 Why developers needn't fear CSS – with the King of CSS himself Kevin Powell

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jiquan Ngiam. He's a former Google Brain engineer who's building tools to make AI useful for everyone – not just developers. We talk about the power of AI and it's practical capabilities, and separate those from a lot of the hype surrounding the AI space.
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,113 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
We talk about:
 
- How AI agents work
 - Where AI is going and its limitations
 - How non-developers can leverage AI 
 - And how developers can REALLY leverage AI
 
Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro?
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Jiquan's company, Lutra AI: https://lutra.ai/
 
- Jiquan's article on generative agentic interfaces for working with large spreadsheets: https://blog.lutra.ai/generative-interfaces-for-ai-agents
 
- Jiquan's article on OODA loops for AI Agents: https://blog.lutra.ai/ooda-loops-for-ai-agents
 
- A paper Jiquan mentions, Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030

#156 AI Reality VS Speculation with Google Machine Learning Engineer Jiquan Ngiam

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Lane Wagner. He's a software engineer, prolific contributor to freeCodeCamp, and founder of the Boot.dev online learning platform.
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
We talk about:
 - Lane's thoughts on college and computer science degrees
 - Back end development and why it resonnates with him
 - Why he's so enthusiastic about the Go Programming Language
 - What Lane's learned about how people learn
 
 Quincy mentions the number of engineers graduating every year from Indian and Chinese universities (including computer science majors, which is usually the most popular engineering degree). It's hard to find exact numbers but...
 
- India: more than 1 million engineering graduates / year
 - China: more than 1 million engineering graduates / year
 - US: only about 200,000 engineering graduates / year
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Lane's 4-hour course on how to get a job as a developer: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-get-a-developer-job/
 - Lane's 5-hour HTTP Networking course: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/http-networking-protocol-course/
 - Lane's SQL for Web Developers course: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/sql-for-web-devs/
 - Lane's freely available books published through freeCodeCamp Press: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/wagslane/
 - Khan Academy founder's talk on mastery learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTRxRO5SRA
 - The Zone of Proxmial Development education concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

#157 Getting a developer job in 2025 with Lane Wagner

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Rishab Kumar, cloud engineer and developer advocate at Twillio. 
 
Rishab grew up in India and moved to Canada for school. But he couldn't afford to finish. He resorted to delivering pizzas and working at a gas station. But he worked hard to teach himself how to code and how to build cloud infrastructure, and eventually got a job Google.
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
We talk about:
 - How to teach yourself cloud engineering
 - Getting repeatedly rejected from FAANG jobs but persisting
 - Filling up the Infinity Gauntlet with cloud certifications
 - How DevOps and Cloud Engineering are changing
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Rishab's Terraform course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-terraform-to-deploy-a-site-on-google-cloud-platform/
 
- Rishab's LangChain LLM deployment course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-langchain-for-llm-development/
 
- Learn to Cloud guide by Rishab and his friend at Microsoft, Gwyn: https://learntocloud.guide/
 
- Rishab's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@rishabincloud/videos

#158 From Gas Station to Google with Self-Taught Cloud Engineer Rishab Kumar

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Peggy Wang. She used freeCodeCamp to learn coding. She then worked in Big Tech as a robotics engineer. And now she's cofounder and CTO of Ego AI, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that builds human-like agents for video games.
 
We talk about:
 - How she grew up a first generation American and public school kid in Milwaukee
 - How her love of robotics helped her get into Stanford
 - How freeCodeCamp served as a key resource to build her developer chops
 - The near future of humanoid robots, self-driving cars, and human-like AI agents in games
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,224 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
 Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Peggy's GameDev company, Ego AI: https://www.egoai.com/
 
- Quincy's interview with hardware engineer Bruno Haid that he mentions toward the end of this episode: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/podcast-hardware-engineering-bruno-haid/

#159 From freeCodeCamp to CTO with Robotics Engineer Peggy Wang

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Julia Undeutsch who is a self-taught software engineer and accessibility specialist. She works at a big European company making software more accessible for people with disabilities. She taught herself to code in her 30s using freeCodeCamp.
 
 Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
 We talk about:
 
- Julia's coding journey from poker dealer to self-taught software engineer
 - How she creates tutorials in Japanese
 - Her passion for making software easier to use for everyone
 - Working remotely at a big European software consultancy
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Julia's website: https://www.juliaundeutsch.com/
 
- Movie trailer for the 1999 Clive Owen movie "Croupier" that Quincy mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDWzeq5QGiA

#160 She taught herself coding in her 30s for zero dollars

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Vaughn Gene. He's a self-taught software engineer who works with lots of freelance clients. Vaughn lived in Japan for 10 years, and speaks Japanese, speaks Spanish, plays guitar, plays piano, and is skilled at MMA. He's obsessed with learning new skills.
 
We talk about:
 - How Vaughn struggled with high school and joined the Navy
 - How he learned Japanese so he could work as a personal trainer in Japan
 - How he learned coding using freeCodeCamp as a way to make more time and more money
 - His pragmatic approach for teaching himself new skills for free
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Vaughn's YouTube channel and his approach to pursuing multiple skills in tandem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTnsjmsgJS8
 
- Vaughn on Instagram where he posts guitar: https://www.instagram.com/vaughngene/

#161 How to go full-on Renaissance Man mode in 2025 with Vaughn Gene

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Anjana Vakil. She left academia to learn to code and got her first developer job in her 30s.
 
Anjana was an English teacher who studied computational linguistics, and found building software to be more fun than actual research.
 
She's worked at ton of tech companies and has freelance clients. She shares some excellent tips on learning new skills and avoiding burnout.
 
We talk about:
 
 • How Anjana taught herself to code in her 30s
 • Being an American dev working in Europe 
 • Stress, burnout, and how she gets by
 • How skills from your previous non-developer career can help differentiate you as a developer 
 
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,243 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
 • "How to be the ideal newb" article: https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/
 • "Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle" book that Anjana mentions: https://www.amazon.com/Burnout-Secret-Unlocking-Stress-Cycle/dp/198481706X 
 • Anjana's website: https://anjana.dev/

#162 How to become a developer in your 30s with Anjana Vakil

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Caleb Curry. He's a software engineer and prolific computer science educator. He recently started mentoring dozens of developers directly and helping them with their skills and careers. We'll talk about his experience getting laid off as a dev and how we prepared for his mid-career job search.
 
We talk about:
 - How Caleb got laid off and went about landing his next developer job
 - How most people sleep on networking and recruiters, but shouldn't
 - Why Caleb is so serious about teaching system design concepts
 - How Caleb pairs his deep focus with broad extracurricular learning through podcasts and white papers
 
 Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
 
Support also comes from the 11,343 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
 
 Links we talk about during our conversation:
 
- Caleb's course on Database Design: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/database-design-full-course-43233664125b/
 
- Caleb's system design lecture playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e7yQ43bUtg&list=PL_c9BZzLwBRLSs6x50D5WIH76VCUxJs9E
 
- Caleb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebcurry/

#163 Learn fewer skills but go deeper - the Caleb Curry interview

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 discussed:
 
Dhawal's article: Here are 850+ Ivy League Courses You Can Take Right Now for Free: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ivy-league-free-online-courses-a0d7ae675869/
 
Dhawal's article: I uncovered 1700 Coursera Courses that Are Still Completely Free: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/coursera-free-online-courses-6d84cdb30da/
 
Dhawal on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dhawalhshah
 
Dhawal's 3 recommended Massive Open Online Courses:
 
- Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects: https://www.classcentral.com/course/learning-how-to-learn-2161
 
- University of Alberta's Mountains 101 Course: https://www.classcentral.com/course/mountains-101-7455
 
- Stanford's Data Structures and Algorithms Course: https://www.classcentral.com/course/algorithms-18869

#106 The History of Online Courses with Class Central Founder Dhawal Shah

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