#194 First dev job at 45 – Interview with self-taught freeCodeCamp grad Eric Carlson

Welcome back to the Free Coke Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher. and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. And today we're talking with Eric Carlson, a self-taught developer and FreeCodeCamp grad who got his first software engineering job at age 45. First, some community news. FreeCodeCamp just published a course on how to build your own model context.

protocol server with Python. MCP servers are like APIs for AI agents. Lots of developers are now building them to help agents interact with their websites data more accurately. And this course will teach you how to leverage the open. sourced fast MCP library to build a calculator project that agents can directly interact with. This is a one hour YouTube course on the free Coke camp YouTube channel. Watch it after you finish listening to this podcast.

Next, we just published an awesome course by Andrew Brown, who's a CTO, who's passed. practically every DevOps exam under the sun, and he's going to teach you how to pass Google's new generative AI leader certification exam. He'll give you a business level understanding of Google clouds, generative AI offerings. And by the end of this course, with the help of Andrew's practice materials, you'll be ready to sit down and pass the exam. You can also.

Learn how to teach your apps how to make apps. You can learn how to teach systems how to essentially create algorithms for themselves. This comprehensive machine learning... fundamentals course will walk you through building systems smart enough to create their own algorithms. You'll use C++ to implement a perceptron, which will then...

Look at images of shapes and figure out ways to reliably label them. This is a very cool Python machine learning computer vision course. Check it out. It's fully interactive taught by. Dr. Mark Mahoney, computer science professor. Then Free Code Camp also publishes tutorial on Strix. which is a relatively new open source tool for testing the security of your apps and identifying vulnerabilities. It's essentially an AI powered white hat attacker that you set loose in your code base.

This tutorial will explain how it works and how you can use it to harden your apps against common exploits. The fun link for this week, I have to share, this is so cool, the Space Elevator website. learn fun facts about the atmosphere and space or riding the space elevator. Did you know the fastest elevator in the world moves 42 miles per hour? And even at that speed, it would take 80 minutes to reach space. Pretty cool.

I learned a lot from this and I think you'll really enjoy it. Just go to the website and scroll up, do it after you finish listening to the podcast. And this week's song of the week, since we've got a Canadian in the house from Ontario. I wanted to get an awesome Canadian band. And of course, I'm a huge fan of 1980s progressive rock band, Saga. They have this classic 1980s song, Don't Be Late, and it features lightning-fast keyboard arpeggios. They are so precise.

And this was before sequencers. The keyboard player is actually sitting there and doing this. very fast and very steadily throughout the song. It's amazing. And also the vocalist, just the clearest enunciation of lyrics ever. This song is perfect for late night driving.

And then this free cold camp shirt I'm wearing, you can get one every episode. I'm always wearing my free cold camp shirts. I've got like five of them. Uh, and you can get yours free shipping anywhere in the U S 20 bucks. You get a tri blend shirt.

Personally screen printed by Rafael Hernandez, who hosts the Spanish Free Code Camp podcast and also runs a screen printing business in Virginia. Go to shop.freecodecamp.org. Now let's talk about today's interview. Eric Carlson. self-taught software engineer at Cisco in his early twenties. He worked his way up to manager at the busiest Domino's pizza in Canada.

He eventually went to college and studied liberal arts. Then he worked as a teacher for two decades before teaching himself programming using Free Code Camp. He got his first developer job at age 45 by using his programming skills to pivot into a more technical role within a big... telecom company. If anybody's familiar with Rogers, it's basically like the AT&T of Canada. And he's since gone further down the stack and he's now doing backend work and even DevOps. So Eric's...

Going to share some tips for teaching yourself programming while raising young kids, building up your mental stamina so you can program for many hours in one sitting. how to learn just in time so you don't waste time chasing shiny objects and tools, and how to reinforce your learning by taking detailed notes on pretty much everything. He basically archives every aspect of his life. Super chill, dude. This is going to be an awesome interview.

Eric Carlson, welcome to the Free Code Camp Podcast. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. Yeah. And I want to just dive in. You're a developer. You're working at a big corporation and you are... probably inundated with new tools that are coming out every day. You see them on like hacker news. You see them on Reddit, uh, new frameworks, new AI assisted code gen tools, things like that. Like how,

do you process all that and filter out what needs to actually be learned by you? Because nobody can learn everything, right? Yeah, that's right. For me, I mean, I haven't really been focused on what I need to learn, what I need to know. to do my job and so the next project is really where i'm focused on and and i i mean i guess i've been lucky that i've had i've been able to move from different technologies so it's not like i've been working in the same technology

the whole time. I started with jQuery. I had to learn React for the next project. I used Vue.js for some projects. So I've had to learn a series of different technologies, but it's always been for my next project. And so it's been a real, I've really been focused on, you know, what do I need to learn, like, now, just in time for the next thing I need to do. So it's been a very pragmatic sort of situation where I'm learning at work.

And I'm getting paid to learn the next thing. You know, I'm not learning it just sort of on the side for myself. And so I feel lucky that I haven't chased a lot of... things, a lot of technologies that didn't work out or, you know, I've always been focused on really what I'm, what I'm working on now. Okay. So to an extent, it's almost like boss driven learning. Like what does your boss want you to learn?

for the current project that you're working on. Okay, I'm going to go learn that. There's no speculation. Oh, this might be useful. You know it's useful and your boss is asking you to do it. And as you said, you're getting paid to learn. Yeah, that's right. And I'm... Sometimes I volunteer. I'm like, I'll take that project. And sometimes the boss says yes. Sometimes they say no. But there was a time when I was working in my company.

And I was working on the front end in React, and another developer was working on the back end in Node.js and a SQL database. But he got pushed off away to a different company, and I'd been making all these tickets. for him to from the front end i need this to be done on the back end you know i need a i need an end point here i need this and that and the other um but he's gone and and this was at this like sort of in near the start of the pandemic and this is kind of hard to believe but

It took us like six or eight months to hire a replacement for that person. It was so hard for us to hire somebody who could do a backend in Node.js in 2021. During that time, I sort of put up my hand. I said, I'll take a crack at it. You know, I'll try to do those tickets on the back end, even though I hadn't worked professionally on the back end before. And they said, okay.

And, you know, I kind of prioritized the tickets. What would be the easiest one to do first? And I just started. There were maybe 50 tickets. And I started on the first one. And I went through one by one. The harder they got. They got progressively harder as I got through the tickets, but eventually I made it through all 50 tickets, and that's how I learned to do the back end. Wow.

But from that point on, I was kind of a full stack dev. My title was still front end at the time. But now I could do the full stack. Yeah. And of course, you did gradually transition into a full stack developer role. But it's very interesting, your journey from kind of like being like an instructional designer, a teacher, essentially, into being a hybrid teacher slash developer into a full-time.

front end development role into a full time, full stack developer role. And these are a giant, you know, fortune 500 type companies. You're in Canada. I don't know if that like, like Rogers is a big telecom. In Canada, it's like maybe the biggest one there. And so you're doing this at like a big...

In a big structure, it's not like you're at a startup and your boss is the CEO and he's like, oh, we need to do this now. You're working inside of a large bureaucracy and there are lots of different stakeholders and decision makers in the chain of command that you have to...

essentially, please, all the way up the chain, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I've actually been sort of ensconced. In a huge corporation, there's all sorts of different teams and all sorts of different verticals and business. lines of business, I guess sometimes you call them. But I've been in the HR department and more specifically in the learning and development department.

which is a kind of a, it's really interesting. I didn't really know such a thing existed, but it's, you know, it's like the training. It's the people who do the corporate training in a big corporation. So if you're in a big corporation like Rogers. There might be 100 people just in the learning development department making training courses for all the employees, new employees, existing employees. And in telecom, it tends to be pretty technical content that you're teaching as well.

about the actual networks and stuff. And so I was sort of inside of working as an instructional designer in that environment. But in a big corporation, even in that learning development, we had a team, a full stack development team. that's inside of that learning development department, making apps, mostly employee-facing apps. And so I was able to sort of collaborate with them as an instructional designer. First of all, I was...

The very first thing I did was I was able to use JavaScript in order to extend the capabilities of these e-learning courses, these sort of web-based trainings. Just like any website, you can use JavaScript and you can sort of extend what you can do with just your basic web course. Yeah. So that's when I, there was a point where I just Googled.

how to learn JavaScript. And that's where I came across FreeCodeCamp. And I did the front-end certificate and learned to use JavaScript, learned to use it on the actual web courses themselves.

which was, you know, it kind of gave me some feathers in my cap as an instructional designer. It's like not too many people, not too many instructional designers can do the JavaScript as well. And there's a small handful. There's sort of forums where... where we meet where we those of us would meet and uh you know it makes you kind of a superstar as in that role you know you're kind of a hybrid you could kind of do all the the javascript in that department here and uh you know

that part of me thinks you know if i stayed in that role as an instructional designer who codes like there's there's really something to be said for that kind of a hybrid role where where you're you're you have this extra capability and like I never would have gotten laid off ever if you're that person. You're such a valuable member of the team.

Yeah. And, uh, that's basically what you described. Instructional designers who can also implement, uh, that is like basically the entire free cook camp staff, including myself. Uh, so, uh, yeah, 29 people that are like, teachers that are also able to go and update the APIs, for example, or do the database migrations and stuff like that. Yeah, super valuable on an instructional design team. Yeah, and you have like a classical...

kind of educator background. And we're going to talk a lot about software development, but you have a very unique history. Uh, like different from anybody I've talked to. First of all, of course, teaching yourself programming and getting your first developer job at 45 while you have, you know, like a three month old child and you're like,

teaching yourself using free Coke camp two hours a day. Like it is pretty epic, but you also have like this long family history. Uh, and, and you come from a family of educators. So maybe we can. jump back to your childhood and talk about, you know, your upbringing in Canada as an American who moved to Canada and is living in, you know, a Canadian city. Yeah. Well, I mean,

When I was a kid, I always loved technology and computers, like way back. And in high school, I was really nerdy. I was in the math club and the physics club and the chess club. band. You know, I was really into science and math in high school. But my parents never pushed me in these subjects. In fact, they were the opposite. They were these kind of 60s.

hippie kind of inspired um educators who were anti-institutional anti-schooling no traditional schooling that you can imagine a kind of a 60s culture that they carried forward into the 70s and 80s. And my dad was a proponent of homeschooling, like unschooling, where children sort of... lead themselves and drive their own education without any supervision or anything. And my sister did that program. They sort of encouraged me to drop out of school and lead my own education as a child.

But I just, I didn't, I was a bit skeptical about it as a child. I thought, you know, I miss my friends at school. I didn't love school, but you know, school, it was, I just didn't feel right about doing it myself.

So I stayed in school. I graduated. But I didn't go straight to university. I started working at Domino's Pizza, first as a driver, and then I was a store manager for a few years. I mean, I graduated high school very young. And so I was still, I was just 18 years old and I was managing one of the, I mean, the busiest Domino's Pizza store in Canada. Let's talk about that. You're 18 years old.

You just graduated high school. You don't have really a managerial experience, and yet maybe you can talk about what it's like being at the busiest Domino's in Canada and filling all the different hours. with people that are assembling pizzas, coordinating all the logistics of getting those pizzas to people, working with Domino's internal software systems. To the extent that you can describe that, maybe just give us a slice of life there. Yeah. Well, I mean...

I mean, as much as I was influenced by my parents, there were certain things that I veered away from. They were very slow and methodical in everything they did, as a lot of professor types are. When I started working at Domino's, it was shortly after. I wasn't there in the high period where they had that 30-minute or three pieces. It was shortly after that. They had to drop that, but they had these systems. Disasters.

And one of my favorite childhood movies, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they have the scene where the guy can't find the delivery address because it's like the sewers. And he has to put it through the grate. And he's like, all right, give me the money. And he's like, oh, you're 30 minutes late. Michelangelo's like 30 minutes 30 minutes or it's free dude and he just takes the pizza through the grate and like the guy's just standing there

Frustrated. Yeah, that was the era in the early 90s, I guess. Yeah, it was a sensation in the 80s. It was maybe the fastest growing corporation in the entire world. It was just like... because it was doing something that nobody else could do. They were delivering pizzas, fresh pizzas, made when you ordered it, which you have to do with pizza because McDonald's tried whatever they did and didn't work. But having all these systems in place.

So perfect staffing, perfect training, and then having but the same price as the competitors, you know, as Little Toosers or Pizza Hut. And yet we were getting it there in 30 minutes. So it was just this kind of exciting, fast-paced... place completely different from my my household with my parents and it just really appealed to me as i started working there when i was in high school like when i was 16 i started driving part-time and then it was just it was so much fun as a young person

I started working there full-time after I graduated. And we were not just any of those either. We were the best. We were like the franchisee, the local franchisee. He went on to own hundreds of Domino's pizzas, probably thousands now across the US. He became a kind of superstar within the corporation.

In the 80s, everybody was doing well. But then in the 90s, the corporation kind of flattened out and he became this kind of star that carried forward that energy even without that 30-minute guarantee. It was fun to work with him. He trained us. We read business books. He had a library of all these nonfiction managerial books, how to get the most out of your people. And we were all like...

You know, the managers, we were all like 18, 19. Everyone was like in their 20s. He was 25 or something at the time. Wow, that's crazy. Man, I need to learn about this guy. Man. Well, I mean, Domino's had... He didn't have any money either. He didn't have money to buy the corporation, but they had this thing in place back in the 80s. It was shortly after him. It's no longer worked anymore, but everybody was succeeding once they had a Domino's pizza.

So what they would do is once you've been a manager for just one year, the corporation would guarantee a loan for you so you could buy a Domino's store for yourself. And so anybody with no money, no credit. As long as you'd been a manager for one year, they wanted people who knew the operations of the star. They would lend you the money. That is such an opportunity. I can't imagine how many entrepreneurs were forged there.

Who never would have had a chance to raise additional capital, but had natural kind of like managerial instincts. Yeah. But for that to work, most of the stores had to be successful. And then, you know, once the sensation of the 80s... wore off in the 90s. I think they had to drop that and they needed to get people in who had more money. But there was a time, you know, there are these waves. And I think in software as well, you have these waves.

where if you can catch a wave that's kind of a sensation for the time, you can really ride that wave. I sort of came in at the very end of that dominoes wave, so I sort of missed it. I mean, people I worked with at the time, a lot of them did manage to become franchisees as well. But, I mean, that's kind of the point where I left, not because I didn't... I didn't see a future in working at owning a Domino's Pizza, but I just didn't feel like I was in the right place for me.

And that's why I decided to go to university. And I just, I went to university and I just, I had this feeling of like, I was sort of starving for intellectual stimulation in a way that's different from working at the store. You know, it's a very... Being a manager or working at a Domino's, it's a busy store. It's physically very difficult. You clean up at the end of the night.

You work 12 hours. You get there at 3 p.m. You close at 1 a.m., but then you clean up and do the books and everything. You're there until 3 in the morning on weekdays, 5 or 5.30 in the morning on Fridays and Saturday nights. And, you know, you're kind of jazzed up. We used to go and play. We'd go to like an all-night pool hall at 5.30 in the morning, play for a couple hours, and then go to bed after that.

Yeah. So it's not a lifestyle that I could have lived for much longer. Yeah. You start to feel those all-nighters after a while, don't you? Yeah. So let's talk about your decision to go to school. And, of course, she studied the same thing I studied and that many people listening to this podcast probably studied if they went to university, liberal arts. And one fact about liberal arts.

About a third of all CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are liberal arts majors like you and I are. It's actually a very common kind of like springboard into a wide range of careers because it gives you. like a pretty big toolkit for reasoning through pretty much anything and thinking critically. Right. Can you talk about your reasons for choosing liberal arts? Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'd had that period, you know, I'd been the.

math and science guy in high school then i worked worked at domino's and that it maybe even five years since i graduated and i i was just when i i just was not interested in doing math and science in my undergrad I was really into philosophy, English, history. I wanted that sort of classic college experience of reading and thinking, reading Plato and Aristotle.

That sort of college experience. But it's another time in my life when I really had to ramp up on a new skill because I'm now an English major and I'm competing against people who had... won the English award when they were in high school. Most people, that was their thing, whereas there weren't a lot of math lovers who are the English majors now. And so I managed to ramp up.

The skills I had were academic writing, essay writing, analysis, and reading a lot of text. I had to build up the ability to... just the stamina to be reading six or eight hours a day of fiction or nonfiction, various things, and then to think critically and write critically. It was a big wrap-up, but I managed to do it. I even went to graduate school. I went to England for a master's degree, came back to Canada.

started teaching. I was in the PhD program and I ended up going all the way to the PhD. Yeah. And Queens College, which is kind of like a big public research. institution one of the more prestigious schools in Canada. You have a PhD from there. You don't list it on your LinkedIn, which I thought was very interesting. Why not list your PhD on your LinkedIn? Well, it used to be on there.

And I've just sort of experimented. And so taking it off, putting it on, seeing what sort of reaction I get from recruiters. Because my LinkedIn page is really there mostly for recruiters and maybe for hiring managers if I was on the job market. And, you know, it's a kind of a – I've had some people kind of be like, what's the deal with a PhD? I'm not sure it really adds.

to my story as a... I mean, you better believe if I had a PhD, I'd be like, you have to call me Dr. Quincy. I'd be like, Quincy Larson, comma, PhD. period D period my business card shows me like you know in like I don't know the professor They wear the blazer with no tie. I guess it's the same kind of tech outfit, but I'd have the corduroy instead of the black blazer. I'm just joking. I don't know that I would actually do that if I had a PhD.

I've never seriously considered going back there. It's a weird thing to have because you have all this status. You have this title of doctor. But you don't actually – people also kind of make fun of you. You did a PhD in English. You kind of have –

Like, well, what are you going to do with your life other than become a professor? Yeah, which very few people can do. Yeah. It's a pretty big pyramid. With only a few PhDs at the top and a whole bunch of graduate assistants below. And now it is. Yeah. Yeah. But like in the 60s, when my dad got a PhD, it was just a ticket.

Institutions, universities in America were just hiring. It was expanding. And they couldn't get enough PhDs. They were desperate for PhDs. They would hire you before you even got your PhD. And my dad got a PhD in... adult education in you know in the late 60s and uh he had this choice of where wherever he wanted to go he told me this you know

when I was a teenager. And I had been growing up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, this northern small city in Canada. And my dad was born in Philadelphia, grew up in Philadelphia. And he ended up going to different universities around the United States. But he chose Saskatoon. He said he had basically anybody that was hiring that year. he could have chosen. So there was like University of Chicago.

There was like NYU. He could have chosen. Interesting. What was the rationale? Why choose to be out? No offense to people from Saskatoon, but I grew up in Oklahoma City, which... Uh, it's kind of like an intellectual backwater, not to slide it too hardly, but like, yeah, there are research universities there and you will find smart people in every city, but the concentration of smart people is not nearly what you.

find in like New York or Chicago or certainly not San Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the rationale is he had a very difficult childhood. He had grown up. like sort of in public housing and in a rough area, Philadelphia. And he just wanted to get as far away from a big American city as possible. And so... I think he liked the idea of University of Chicago or NYU, but he didn't want to live in New York or Chicago at that time. And he wanted to live in a kind of a smaller center.

And so me as a teenager, I sort of lamented that idea. I could have grown up in New York City in the 80s. Yeah, that would have been a wild experience. I watched this great documentary. Not to go off on too much of a tangent. It's from actually right before 9-11 happened. So it doesn't...

cover anything after nine 11, but it's like the full history of New York city. It's insane. It's like 14 hours long. If anyone wants to watch it, I'll try to find a link. I'll put it in the video description. Uh, but, but like what a city, what a history. And. Growing up in Oklahoma City, I fantasized, oh man, if only I'd been in New York City. Think about how worldly and fast-talking and street-smart.

I would be and think about how much money I could be making instead of working at Taco Bell for minimum wage. I really envied the people that grew up in New York City. I was so jealous of that. I had the same thing. I want to live in New York or London or Paris or something. And I had sort of idealized these places. And I live in Toronto now, and I love it here. But it's not like...

It's not like everybody here is, you know, smarter than everybody in Saskatoon. You know, I think you get sort of an inferiority complex or something growing up in the middle of the country in a smaller place. like that but it's it's not true it's like it's like in fact if you grew up in a place a small place often you're on your own you're intellectually on your own and and it it actually seems to engender a lot of kind of

self-starters and a lot of confidence in what you can do on your own outside of where you are. You know, if you get dropped anywhere in the world, I feel like I could sort of replicate my life.

outside of a large city or, you know, I'm not identified with being in one particular place. Yeah. And maybe you can talk a little bit about like your journey from school and this, this kind of life of mind studying in the UK, uh, studying at Queen's university or Yeah. Queens University. Moving over to Toronto. How do you bridge into software development? Because I know people are listening. I want to hear...

the story of how you had a three month old baby and you were using free Coke camp two hours a day for nine months. And then you got your first developer job because that's like, that's the dream that people can figure out a way to make that work. I mean, it was, it was not easy. I'll tell you how, especially having the baby and not sleeping, not having time, you know, my wife and I would, we would, we would switch back and forth. She would, she was off.

work for a year. In Canada, it's very often that one of the parents can stay home for a year, year and three months, actually, and get maternity leave. I only stayed home for maybe eight weeks. But then I went back to work. She was home with the baby all day, and then I would come home and be like, she needed a break. And so in the evening, you know, I'd make dinner.

put the baby to sleep. So there was very little time. I think two hours is probably a bit more than I had in most days. I remember being up, trying to find 30 minutes at lunch. to get through some of the free co-camp curriculum um try to learn some some stuff being up at like five in the morning baby would have woken up and maybe fallen back asleep so i'd have a baby on my lap and i'd be like

doing free code camp to learn what I had to do. But I was lucky in the fact that I was able to start applying what I was learning immediately. In my instructional design role, I could use JavaScript to extend the capability of these web courses that I was making inside of applications, like an Adobe application or something would actually generate these e-learning courses.

But there'd be a little window you could work in, a little JavaScript window. You can extend this. You can make it more interactive, which is always a big thing in online education. And I was able to start working in there, start getting... you know, some good projects where I was able to actually do something with JavaScript and some CSS and that as well. And that really got me started.

you know, in this way where I'm immediately applying what I'm learning to stuff at work. And I was very privileged to be in a role like that where I had the ability to apply what I was learning.

Yeah. So you were able to like learn new stuff because these tools were emerging, right? There is a good chance that at any given company, there wasn't somebody who was an expert in Node.js because Node.js was relatively new, for example. Yeah. Well, so I started just working within these web courses. But then, you know, I really wanted to work on, you know, I got in my head I wanted to work on proper sort of full stack development.

And in this big corporation I'm working at, even in the learning development department, we had a full stack team that was in this department making sort of employee facing apps. Just from scratch, full stack apps for employees still dealing mostly with, you know, training courses, learning things that they had to learn. But we had a suite of maybe 15 apps.

that the company had developed and that were used for all sorts of different kind of training roles. So I wanted to be on that team. I wanted to do that, not just work in... within these confines of these web courses that I had. So I would always just kind of volunteer if there was ever a project where it needed a little bit more.

sort of technical skills or some JavaScript skills. I would always try to volunteer, put up my hand, say, I'll give that a shot. And there was a time where a bigger project did come up. The other team didn't have capacity or they didn't. I had the desire to work on this particular adventure. That was your window. That was your opportunity. That was my opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know I could do it. I had no confidence. How did you get the curiosity or like the confidence?

To broach yourself as like, hey, I can do this. How did you get your managers to care and take them seriously? Well, I think they must have been desperate because they had no reason to believe that I could do it either. You know, I've been doing, I've made some good progress within those web courses. And they gave me maybe two weeks of my time to solve this project.

I ended up, after the two weeks, I had to solve a list of technical requirements, JavaScript-based. And by doing this, I was able to save the company about $100,000 a year. annual recurring costs that they were having. That is substantial. I mean, that's like your salary, basically. Like, hey, keep it on staff because I've already saved you enough money that you can keep it on staff indefinitely. Yeah, just on this one project.

And so I think that that was impressive to them because after that, they promoted me to be a front-end developer. I was no longer instructional designer. It's my title. Now I was a front-end developer. I would still work on some of the old projects. We had a learning platform where the other developers would sometimes work on it. That became my area. But then I also got to work with React.

in some of those apps I was telling you about, those employee-facing apps. And that was, for me, that was exciting. I did have this desire. I was like, I really wanted to work with React. I had been learning it. I had been doing a lot of jQuery inside the web courses, and it just felt like I was kind of in a legacy tool.

I really, it was exciting to me to get to work with React. But it was, again, it was another time where I really had to ramp up on the skill because the React that I was learning in tutorials, like in Udemy or in Free Code Camp, it was very different from what...

these professional developers were writing in these production apps. You know, there was, you know, state management. I'd learned some Redux on FreeCocamp, but they were using a different state management tool. They were using MobX, and it was... It was an older version. There wasn't very good documentation. I think we were hitting on here. Legacy code bases, you don't get to choose. You have to adapt to the engineering decisions made before your time.

And work within those constraints, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so that really got me focused, though. These are the technologies that we're using in the company. And so my next project was on React. I learned React. My next project, well, I was just doing the front end for this project, and another developer was doing the back end.

And he was doing some other things too. So he was sort of falling behind. I was making tickets for him to, you know, I needed him to make an end point that I was going to hit from the front end. But I didn't know how to do that yet. So I would just make a ticket for him. put it in to assign it to him and Jira and then go on. And, you know, I was able to kind of get as far as I could making the front end. And he had maybe 50 tickets had built up. It was time for him to get working on it.

Just at that point, he had gotten hired away by another company. So he was gone. And we didn't have another person for that role. So he's been this blocker and there's this huge... you know, backlog of work that needs to be done and you're basically blocked. What do you do? Yeah. Well, you think we could hire a new person right away. But this was 2001. No, sorry. That's 2021.

This was like a year, maybe a year into the pandemic. And like we, it took us at least six, maybe nine months to get another person in that role. Like it was really hard. to hire somebody in toronto you know for uh for a node.js back-end role um it just so um we had this this period it just kept going on and on and on in this

This work needed to be done. And another time I took the opportunity to just kind of put up my hand and said, I'll take a crack at these tickets. And they were like, have you done? JS before? I'm like, yeah, you know, I've done some tutorials. I'll do some on the weekend and I'll take a crack at it. And so what I did is I just kind of, I looked at these 50 tickets and I thought, well,

I'll prioritize them based on what's the easiest task to do. And I did those ones first, made some of those endpoints. The kind of skeleton was already there of the Node.js backend. It had a SQL. database. And I just sort of took them one by one and worked through all those tickets. And eventually I made it through all 50 of those tickets before we had actually hired a new developer. And that's how I learned.

to be a back-end developer, to do the full stack development. I had to learn how to communicate with the database. We used SQLize as a kind of ORM for the SQL database. Learned how to use that. And then... So that became my app. I had made the React front end. Now I had made the back end as well. And so I sort of owned that app and it kept expanding from there. And even when we hired a new person.

a backend developer, full stack developer, that became my, they, they, they put them on something else because they're like, Oh, Eric can handle this application. Now that's his sort of baby. And that's so cool. So you were kind of hashing out the requirements, just naively thinking somebody else was going to do it. And then you had to like fulfill your own requirements. It's so interesting of like you setting your future self up, like mapping everything out.

What I want to call out here is just the fact that you're learning just in time based on the requirements of a big, ambitious project with existing stakeholders that need to get things done in a specific way. It's not a toy project. you have like all the kind of like domain expertise of understanding it because in, you know, a learning capacity, like your instructional design background. So, I mean, in many ways.

I can imagine a lot of people working in companies who are in a similar situation. They need a specific type of tool. You can kind of be your own channel, channel your own inner.

Eric Carlson and just be the dev that you need. Learn the skills as you need. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, not everyone's going to have this opportunity. You know, but if you were, I found if you work in an office, like offices these days need, they seem like they need software. And there's always more software than you have developers. You know, in my experience, there's always more desire for.

software to be built than there is hours in the day for your development team. So there's always a sort of a priority queue where things are further down the list. And if you can get... If you can get into that queue, if you can volunteer yourself to do something, maybe something that's more related to the tasks that you're doing, the way that these web courses needed some work on them.

I was able to sort of convince them to at least give me a shot to work on that. But even when I was in publishing, Kindle and the iPad had recently come out. All of a sudden, we had all these digital assets everywhere. Nobody in publishing, this is another thing, when you're in developer circles, everyone wants to be a dev. It's like, it's this kind of, you get this feeling like everyone in the world.

wants to be a developer. That was not my experience working in publishing or instructional designs. Those people I worked with, none of them wanted to touch code. They were scared of it. I tried to get people to... to do five hours a week of their paid time as instructional designers to do the free co-camp css certification i i got one person one person did it i tried to get maybe 10 people on this on the team i was leading

to learn how to do just CSS. And these were designers. These were people who worked with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. They just didn't like the idea of writing CSS in order to produce. visual assets. Yes. Yeah.

Programming has kind of a math problem in that there are people that just like, I can't do math. I suck at math. And then that's the end of the discussion. Like I'm just never going to learn. I'll never be good at math, whatever. Somebody else will do it or all some magical AI tool will fall from the heavens and I'll just.

I won't ever have to learn programming. Wow. This is everything for me. You know, like people are always looking for that panacea. And unfortunately you just had to roll your, roll up your sleeves. Like that one person out of the 10 people you offered, man, I wish more. Companies would offer to pay people to just sit and go through free Coke camp. Like that'd be insane. Like in terms of just helping.

get more devs. Uh, and if anybody listening to this and wants to skill up and potentially have, uh, you know, farm their own Eric Carlson's within their, ranks. If they've got people that have like broad backgrounds and are curious and enjoy learning and stuff like that, please consider doing such a thing. It won't directly benefit free code camp other than just like the bragging rights of saying like, Oh yeah, we've got even more awesome alums.

that are working as developers, but like it would be super chill to know that more people are doing that. And thank you for doing that. I know it takes resources to marshal that and inside of a bureaucracy and be able to justify like, Hey, I really want to do this program and help.

Let's pull up some of our people in publishing to understand, you know, HTML and CSS. I mean, LaTeX, there are lots of different technologies that you could argue that somebody in publishing would benefit from being familiar with. I want to boil some of what you've said down. You've got a very interesting journey pivoting. I want to understand like actionable tips that you would have.

for somebody who was in your shoes in their forties, uh, working a knowledge worker job and who wants to get more technical. Yeah. Well, I mean, The volunteering was volunteering and like finding something that, that, that your boss is going to, going to let you do, going to, you know, getting paid to code is like my, sort of my mantra.

I want to carve out some time. If it's 10%, if it's 5%, 20%. Over time, I gradually sort of increased the amount of percentage of my workday that I was being paid to code. It was a very gradual process. It didn't happen right away. But everywhere I looked, I said, where can I write code? And initially, like... Microsoft Excel has a place where you can write Visual Basic. And you can write some... I did some automation in there, like way early, even before I...

I thought about coding. I just, you know, I was just kind of technically interested in what could happen within these different applications. When the iPad and the Kindle came out in publishing, it was kind of a big thing. Digital publishing was a new thing. E-books were around. And I started working with those assets. I volunteered.

to work with that a bit. Even like Adobe programs, like we, even for paper books, you use like a program called Adobe InDesign to actually do the layout of the, of the paper books. Even if you're a person who doesn't love technology or something, you don't use a mechanical printing press anymore. You lay out the page in Adobe InDesign. And in there, this is another part of...

digital publishing is there's a regex box. They call it grep inside of Adobe InDesign. And there's things that you can do with regex where you can add a lot of value. things need to be done where we go from Microsoft Word to InDesign and then back to Microsoft Word. And you kind of need regex to remove a lot of the characters that get put into InDesign. So I did that for a while. I did a couple of projects there.

This is before I even learned to code. So one of the things I'm getting from you is people shouldn't be resistant of getting slightly more technical or using tools that may be intimidating, like regex, regex, regular expressions, essentially. which is a really cool way to like essentially filter through text that I use like practically every day. I use it extensively. And if you're unintimidated by that.

Then you'll learn it and you'll be able to move faster than the people that are, oh, I suck at math. I suck at programming, like dismissive of the skills or dismissive of their own ability to learn. Would that be an accurate takeaway?

from what you've just said? Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that maybe don't like, I think people often want to go from, from zero to just be like, now I'm a professional. full stack developer. Yeah, that doesn't happen. It takes years and years. It's a process. And I think a lot of people just...

They hear these stories in TV. It's just like, oh, they're a programmer. They've been programming since they were kids. That's just who they are. But it takes time and energy, and anybody can do it. You've done it. I've done it. Probably half the guests on the Free Code Game podcast over the past five years have been self-taught developers that don't have any academic background. You do have an academic background in learning. I mean...

You said it yourself. You're basically paid to learn at your developer role. And I want to talk about the role of your kind of like teaching background. And we talked a little bit about why liberal arts. How do you think that that teaching background and that critical thinking background that you developed has helped you in terms of accelerating your skills? And if somebody is listening with that kind of more liberal arts type background or just they're very interested in.

reading and they spend a lot of time reading. What are, what tips would you have for those people to like really make the most of that? Yeah. Um, I mean, I think one of the problems with an English degree or a liberal arts degree is that it's really hard to quantify or to narrow down exactly. I mean, it's also maybe one of the real strengths of that kind of a degree is that...

is that it's not just one thing that you know how to do. Yes, you learn how to do academic writing. You write essays, you have critical thinking, critical writing, but also the ability to learn a lot. a lot of things. The stamina to sit and read for eight hours a day, I didn't have that when I started my English degree. I was a math person in high school. I didn't read long novels and stuff.

If you major in English, as you know, you have to read a lot. Even if you major in poetry and you pick the shortest. possible genre of literature, you still have to read academic books. You still have to kind of think and read like... all day, every day. And I remember ramping up on that when I started university. I would read for an hour and then take a break. I would need like 20 minutes or 30 minutes for a coffee break and go back and...

and read for another hour. But then, you know, by the time I got my, I was in graduate school, I would, I would, you know, sometimes I would read six hours a day and then a couple more hours in the night. You know, I was just kind of built up a muscle, an endurance. for intellectual labor. I used to sometimes say, I think I can do one more unit of intellectual labor, which would be maybe two hours or three hours of, you know, solid reading and writing and thinking.

So essentially knowing yourself, knowing your limits and just building up like that stamina, like for example, with programming, initially I programmed for like. an hour and my brain would just be completely cached and I just, I can't do it anymore. And then gradually it's like, Oh, I can program for two hours now, or I can program for four hours. The same thing, like, uh, speaking foreign languages, for example, which is a big part of my social life and like my hobbies.

and stuff is spending a lot of time in Japan, spending a lot of time in China and just talking in those languages for like eight hours, going to Apache Conf in Beijing and not having a single conversation in English for like eight or 10 hours.

And like it cooks your brain and it's like, Oh, I'm so tired. I sleep like a rock after that. But it took a lot of years to build up to that level. And it's the same thing with programming. So if you had to like set up a. routine or, or like some sort of heuristics to get from I'm coding for like an hour and I feel incredibly tired or all the way to a, I'm working like in this big legacy code base for like a full eight hour workday. Like,

What are some tips you would have for people building that up? Well, the Pomodoro technique is a very popular way of... dividing your day into, into the amount of chunks and you can, there's kind of a default Pomodoro, maybe 20 minutes to 25 minutes or something. Um, but you can, you can make it much shorter. If you can only, if you can only focus for 15 minutes.

or five minutes, you can adjust the Pomodoro timer. So you work for a certain period, then you take a scheduled break, and then you come back to it, which a lot of people find. I've used it over the years. I kind of go into it and I come back sometimes because... I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I can just roll. I'll be like three hours into a problem. I'm not taking a break. If I feel like I'm really in a flow state.

But I mean, I guess the university degree is a really, the liberal arts degree is, it's not like I had to ramp up on learning coding. Like I could learn when I was, I didn't have time immediately, but once I got the job, I could code six, eight. I could write code and read code about the same amount physically as I could reading a novel. I found that intellectual muscle was able to.

to transfer over to a different kind of intellectual work. You're still reading, you know, still a lot of reading and thinking. Debugging sometimes is more like... bash yourself in the head sometimes i never felt like that so much in in english studies but which which is that's the time to take a break when i'm about to when i feel like i'm gonna slam my head against the the wall that's that's when i

I need the break. Yeah. So you just feel it coming on like, okay, the fatigue is real or the exhaustion. Frustration. Yeah. Frustration. Yeah. And I can manifest as lots of different things. You're like, I need to take a break. Let's talk about your information diet. Like you are an avid listener of podcasts, for example, and a detailed note taker is my understanding that you, you take notes on everything. Yeah. Yeah.

I learned to be a note taker in university. You know, I would be someone who would, if I would go to a presentation, like if you go to like someone give a presentation on anything, I feel like I. Now I can't just sit there without taking notes. Like even if I'm never going to use them again, it's just sort of part of my, the way I take in information. And even, even when I'm listening to pocket, I often listen to a podcast.

Sometimes I'll be home, and so I'll just type out little notes to myself just to kind of feel engaged with it. And if I ever want to look at what exactly was that podcast talking about. And so I also listen to the podcast in the car a lot. And so I hate, I just, I don't like to listen to a podcast and have zero record that I've done it because I'll forget. It just goes out of my mind.

And so I'll pull over the car, quickly to the side of the road, and I'll just write a few notes on my phone about the key points that happened in that last half hour or something. And it's like, you think, well... What's the use of taking all these notes? I do this when I'll watch the React conference on YouTube. It'll be like a yearly React conference or something. I'll take little notes during that.

As I watch the presentations, I'll listen to them. I'll have YouTube on in the background. I'll be listening. I'll be doing the dishes or something. And I'll still just take little notes about what the person talked about. You listened to the Free Code Camp podcast. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. You listened to the Free Code Camp podcast, for example, and you said that sometimes you will literally pull over your car.

And you'll take notes if somebody says something really interesting. I thought that was awesome. How do you organize all these notes? It's just in folders inside of Google Docs. That's my, it's my latest thing. And you can, you know, you can search, you can search, you can find anything really, really fast. You know, if I want to, I wanted, I wanted to think what did Danny Thompson say when he was on the free code gap podcast, you know?

And so I can just go and look up Danny Thompson. I can see that that file comes up. I can go and I see this is exactly what he talked about. You know, so it's like I have these different levels of. I like to keep some notes. Same with my coding. If I solve a problem, I have these different levels. There's certain things you want to just be like, I can Google this or I can...

I don't need any record of it myself. If it's boilerplate for React or a new Express server or something, I don't need to put that in notes. I can Google that. But if there's something, if there's like a specific problem that I've solved that was not easy to Google, you know, I'll make a little note on that. I'll keep a folder in my Google Docs as well. I have like coding notes and I'll say that.

It's in a React folder or something. I saved it there in case I need to refer if I come across that same problem again in the future. And then there's the things that I want in my short-term memory to keep. And I do Anki flashcards for that. I never used to do that. I can just Google everything. But it's for the stuff that I want to have. But you can't. And stuff gets buried in Google too.

Yeah. Yeah. Google has become less usable lately with all the AI slop articles clogging it up. FreecoCamp is getting a lot less traffic because Google wants to give you its AI. overview instead of like actually just sending you to the article. So it does become harder to look certain things up.

And I struggle with that all the time. And I'm like, man, I really wish I'd written that down somewhere. What I do is similar to what you're doing. I basically just send emails to myself. And then I just search in the Gmail inbox. But you could easily do this in Google Docs. Um, like, like you're doing. Uh, so the heuristics based on what you just said, uh, like rules of thumb for remembering, uh, or when to take notes. If it's something novel that, uh, nobody has, uh,

necessarily written about, like you're facing a problem that maybe is unprecedented and you need to track your solution to that problem. And then the other thing is things that you cannot easily look up. And I 100% hear you. I went through a phase where I could just look stuff up. I don't have to write anything down. This is so convenient. And I feel like to an extent that era has passed, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it was more true.

And in the Stack Overflow, so the height of the Stack Overflow days when I felt like it was, I mean, sometimes you still have a problem, but maybe it was more common to just get a really quick answer off of Stack Overflow. But yeah, maybe not quite so easy anymore. Although I guess ChatGPT has kind of tried to step into the breach there. Yeah. I mean, it's doing its best, but like...

Come on. I want to read stuff written by experts that know what they're talking about. Not AI generated on the fly stuff. Like I understand that it can, in theory, synthesize a whole lot of.

you know, insights from various academic papers and stuff like that. But if I can't be confident in it, what use is it? So I still think it's useful and I still use it a lot, but I use it less than I used to use it, frankly. And I think it will be good for like certain aspects of AI assisted code gen, but I'm not convinced that it's going to be like making one X developers into 10 X developers.

I'm still in the maybe 1.2x developer kit. I don't know where you fall, like in that spectrum and how you're using like AI assistance in terms of building things. Yeah. Well, in my current job, we have very strict guidelines. We're not allowed to just use our code and just sort of... paste code into ChatGPT or something. But we do have an enterprise license for GitHub Copilot. And I don't think everyone knows this, but in GitHub Copilot, you can choose your LLM.

You don't have to use GPT. I've been using Claude. I think it's a 4.5 now. But I've been getting really good results inside of VS Code. with GitHub Copilot, asking very specific questions. I don't ask it to write a full function for me. I ask it to do very specific things. or to debug certain things or to explain to me something from an existing code base that was written five years ago.

developer's gone and there's no comments, you know, stuff like that. I find that's really, really helpful. And to be able to do it inside of your VS Code, you know, with a sanctioned... license from your company where it's privacy and you don't have to worry about breaking any rules or giving away any secrets and proprietary code and stuff. I find, for me, it's just a nice managed environment. Yeah, I find it very refreshing that you have such a balanced take on these.

incredibly pragmatic. That's one thing that's come throughout this conversation. Like I'm learning what my boss wants me to learn. I'm using the tools the way my company wants me to use it. And I'm careful and I use it for things that identify it's useful for. And I,

don't buy into hype and just blindly follow hype. But I like experiment for myself and figure out, okay, is this useful in my workflow for this specific thing that I'm trying to accomplish here? And it sounds like you are finding lots of ways that it is useful. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Where do you see your job going and your work just in general? Like over the next 10 years of your career, like what directions would you like to grow in?

Well, I mean, right now I'm learning AWS. I did it. I mean, if there's one constant throughout my life, it's this thing where I keep volunteering myself to learn. a new technology or a new piece of something I want to learn that I can get paid to learn at work. And so at my current job, the backend is in AWS. You know, I did the backend Node.js in the past.

But I never worked with AWS before. So once again, we had someone leave the company. That role wasn't going to be filled. And so as a volunteer, I said, I'll take it. I'll take a crack at the AWS this time. And once again, you know, another ramp up period. AWS is, I didn't realize how huge of an ecosystem it is. Just so many services.

There's the core services that, you know, the EC2 server, the S3 buckets that I'd heard about before. But then I didn't realize there was so many other things that I didn't know what a Lambda function was. But these are the things that were already in use. So I've been getting up to speed on those. And it's been fun, actually, to use some of these new tools to do a similar.

kind of job as the middle kind of backend, but to do the AWS tools. And within this ecosystem, it's an incredibly sophisticated ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. So big. It's overwhelming a bit, but then also, like, I kind of feel like being given the keys to, like, Starship Enterprise or something, you know, it's like it can do these amazing things and, like, things I don't need it to do.

but it could you know it could it can run netflix's back end apparently that's what that they always say um and it can do a work it can create a pretty uh complicated yeah yeah you can you can You could start a startup. I guess that's maybe the prototypical example is you could start a startup and you could scale it out with your AWS services to a global system the way that I guess Netflix probably did it like that.

If you're using it in a concentrated way, you don't need to know everything about everything. You don't need to know how to use CDNs on the other side of the planet. You can just focus on what you need to know. And it has, there's so many choices of what you can do. And the security, like in my old job, we used to have to do our own DevOps and our own security. And we would sometimes come in on weekends.

When everything was down, we had to upgrade the security and stuff. And with AWS, a lot of that stuff is handled by AWS, which seems like a really, at least if you're working within a certain confines. That seems like a really great thing to have. But then also, I've also been learning their AI services. I've been using AWS Bedrock. And once again, I came up with an actual...

use case for it. With the AI in the past, that's one thing I've learned where I didn't have a use case for it. For like seven or eight years, I've taken that same... I took that same Stanford course, the Andrew-ing kind of intro to AI. And I never, I always thought of it as a kind of a theoretical thing. I just kind of did on the side. Until ChatGPT came out and I was like, oh, this can actually do something. It made it so real. And now in Amazon Bedrock, you can actually kind of use these LLMs.

within the AWS services. There's a free code camp video that was recently out, which was a very good overview on how it works. But the use case I came up with was in, I'm still working in, you know, in the learning and development and sort of within a learning platform and with instructional designers. And they often have to put stock images. other kinds of images into e-learning courses. And they're supposed to have, supposed to have alt text, you know, every, every image you put into. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a huge, huge thing. Free code camp. We put all tax on everything. I think we try to, and it's very important for people that are using the web with screen readers, but it's a lot of work and it's not fun. It's hard. Yeah. But the LLMs can do it. If you give them a good prompt, they can give you a really good descriptive prompt. GTP can do it. Just the website can do it. I never really thought.

You know, you think you put in the text prompt, you get text. It's the standard thing. You can put in text and ask it to generate an image. But you can also put in an image and ask it, give me a descriptive alt text of 140 characters long. And it does a pretty darn good job. And within AWS, you can make this programmatically. You can do batches of images, and you can have it automatically put the alt text into the image files.

So that's something I've been building is a kind of an automatic alt text generator. I think I was using Claude as the LLM. So just... I think those are perfect use cases for using AI tools where the work maybe wasn't even going to get done because it was just too labor intensive and on fun. Like we use it for.

We use it for like generating timestamps on this podcast. If you look like there'll be like a breakdown of what we talked about. And like, I'm not going to listen to each passage of the podcast and try to like classify. Okay. What exactly were we talking about here? But it turns out LMs are very good at like some.

and kind of annotating. And that's what they're doing with alt text. It's not a controversial use case of it. You're not generating weird images that may not be accurate or look uncanny or anything like that. You're just... describing the image literally so that people that are visually impaired can understand the image too. It was great use case. You can, you can compare like.

a range of dip in LLMs. How do they perform on this task? How much does it cost for each one? Because there's a cost per token when you're working in bedrock. And so it's an interesting environment to work in.

where you can do stuff within the confines of kind of the AWS services. So just to recap our lengthy conversation, Eric, you've kind of gone from, you know, academic uh to like like teaching uh of course there was a stint running the busiest domino's pizza in all of canada which is very cool uh and then you've gone into instructional design and then you were able to pivot by learning just in time what you needed to learn just being extremely pragmatic you pivoted into

uh, software development. And then you were doing front end development. Then you learned the backend as you struggled to find a backend developer. You did, you were your own backend developer and now you're doing full stack development and now you're kind of moving into, uh, essentially like AI ops and doing lots of really cool DevOps type. So you are just continually growing your skill set. And I think that's very inspiring. I am linking to a post.

That you made back in 2022. When you were talking about your journey. Check out the description everybody. You can read more about Eric's journey. And I think there's so much. actionable advice that you've given here for people, especially people that are mid-career, they want to pivot into a more technical direction. So this has been an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you coming on, Eric. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. Everybody tuning in. Until next week, happy coding.