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 before b...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 115
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: https://www.tiktok.com/@cassido...
Mar 08, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 114
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 "Google...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 59 min•Ep. 113
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, Pandas, an...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 112
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 developmen...
Feb 16, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Ep. 111
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: https://www.fre...
Feb 09, 2024•50 min•Ep. 110
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 freeCodeCamp podcast in...
Feb 02, 2024•2 hr 8 min•Ep. 109
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 he fac...
Jan 25, 2024•53 min•Ep. 108
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 more ab...
Dec 15, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 107
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: D...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 106
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 these we...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 105
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 process i...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 104
