On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews former CTO and prolific programming teacher Hitesh Choudhary. We talk about: - The limits of AI in building a robust codebase - Time management - Higher Education in India - Lessons from training developers - Lessons you've learned from your travel 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 exten...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 175
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Attardi. He's a software engineer and prolific author of programming books. We talk about: How software development has changed over the past 21 years Tips for suriving AI's sweeping changes to the field The evolving role of Computer Science degrees Why people should still read O'Reilly style programming books on dead trees Links we talk about during our conversation: Joe's freeCodeCamp books and tutorials: ...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 174
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews MacKevin Fey. He just got laid off last week from his senior engineering role at Microsoft. We talk about: How Mack's approaching the job search after being laid off Tips for building your own financial safety net while working as an engineer How to use your dev skills to help people around you in the meantime And how Mack trains mentally and physically for the rigors of modern work Support for this podcast come...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 173
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews software engineer and live coding streamer Code;Life. For those of you watching the video version of this interview, she lives in Iraq and she uses a 3D avatar to protect her identity. We talk about: Training language models to work well with low-resource languages from Africa and the Middle East Growing up in Iraq and her early experiences with computers and the internet How streaming yourself coding can be a g...
May 16, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 171
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Sam Crombie. He's a software engineer and prolific open source contributor to freeCodeCamp. He abandon his job at Microsoft, got into Y Combinator, and is currently in startup pivot hell trying to decide how to use the half million he raised. We talk about: How useful are AI coding tools, really? Tips for getting new users to care about your projects What's its really like running a Y-Combinator-funded tech star...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 171
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Shashi Lo. He's a software engineer at Microsoft. He grew up the child of refugees. He wanted to start earning money and build his family so he abandoned his art school degree and taught himself how to program. He immediately hustled to land freelance development clients – something he still does today on top of his full time job and raising his 4 kids. We talk about: - Making ends meet doing freelance work - Ho...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 170
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tae'lur Alexis. She's a developer and security analyst. Instead of going to college, Tae'lur spent years working various fast food and retail jobs. Tae'lur taught herself Python and JavaScript using freeCodeCamp and worked as a software engineer for 5 years before specializing in security engineering. Now instead of building applications, she breaks them. We talk about: - Making ends meet working McDonalds in Fl...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 169
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Alyson La. She taught herself how to code while working as an accountant at GitHub and was able to transition to a data scientist there, then ultimately a software engineer. After one of her kids got diagnosed with autism, she left her career for 3 years to be a full-time mom. She then re-entered the workforce and now teaches other moms how to do the same through a charity called Tech-Moms. She recently won a te...
Apr 12, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 168
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jason Lengstorf. He learned to code out of necessity building websites for local emo bands. He dropped out of college but eventually worked as an engineer at IBM and has gone on to roles at many other companies doing everything from software architecture to management. He runs CodeTV, a Bravo-style reality TV channel for developers. We talk about: - Jason's winding path into development from building websites fo...
Apr 04, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 167
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Ryan Furrer. He's a Front End Engineer working on tools that help companies monitor their buildings for energy usage, water leaks, and other environmental factors. Ryan dropped out of college and worked as a musician and violin instructor. He spent 5 years teaching himself how to program before getting freelance gigs, and ultimately landing developer jobs. We talk about: - Life as a broke musician - Teaching you...
Mar 28, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 166
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Francesco Ciulla. He's a software engineer who has worked with the European Space Agency on code that powers the Copernicus satellite program. More recently he's published courses on learning Docker and the Rust programming language. We talk about: - How Francesco worked as a volleyball coach until we was 32, before getting serious about coding - Francesco's work on coding satellites - How he's given dozens of t...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 165
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jesse Hall. He's software engineer and a developer advocate at MongoDB. He taught himself to code while raising kids and working on the Best Buy Geek Squad fixing computers. Jesse has created tons of tutorials over the years on YouTube and on freeCodeCamp. We talk about his coding journey, how the field has changed over the few years, and how hype has distorted peoples' perception of getting into code. We talk a...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 164
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 network...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 163
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 cod...
Feb 28, 2025•2 hr 52 min•Ep. 162
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 le...
Feb 21, 2025•2 hr 12 min•Ep. 161
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, repla...
Feb 15, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 160
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 resou...
Feb 07, 2025•2 hr 2 min•Ep. 159
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 provid...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 25 min
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 ki...
Jan 25, 2025•2 hr 27 min•Ep. 157
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, the...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 156
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Elliot Arledge. He's a 20-year old computer science student who's created several popular freeCodeCamp courses on LLMs, the Mojo programming language, and GPU programming with CUDA. He joins us from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We talk about: - Building AI systems from scratch - How Elliot has learned so much so quickly and his methods - How he approaches reading academic papers - His CS degree coursework VS his s...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 155
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 develope...
Dec 20, 2024•2 hr 5 min•Ep. 154
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. W...
Dec 13, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 153
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Scott Tolinski. He's a developer who 14 years ago - after injuring himself breakdancing – decided to create a programming tutorial YouTube channel called LevelUpTuts. He is also co-host of Syntax, the most popular web dev podcast on the planet. 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, r...
Dec 06, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 152
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Eamonn Cottrell. He's a software engineer who also runs a local chain of coffee shops in Knoxville. Eamonn taught himself to code using freeCodeCamp. And he's since published 37 freeCodeCamp tutorials on productivity and automation using spreadsheets. 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 ex...
Nov 22, 2024•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 151
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tim Ruscica, the software engineer and prolific programming teacher behind the Tech with Tim YouTube channel. He's also developed courses on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. We talk about: - How Tim managed to get a $70k salary by hacking his way into a Microsoft internship when he was just 19 - How he learned computer architecture as a kid by playing Minecraft - Lessons he learned from a failed tech startup - Wh...
Nov 15, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 150
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Yifan Mai, a Senior Software Engineer on Google's TensorFlow team who left the private sector to go do AI research at Stanford. He's the lead maintainer of the open source HELM project, where he benchmarks the performance of Large Language Models. We talk about: - Open Source VS Open Weights in LLMs - The Ragged Frontier of LLM use cases - AI impact on jobs and our predictions - What to learn so you can stay abo...
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 149
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Adam Stachoviac and Jerod Santo co-hosts of The Changelog – the longest-running software podcast in world. They interview devs about Open Source projects, and they also have a weekly news episode that I always listen to. 5 years ago, Quincy interviewed them for their 10th anniversary episode, and now he's back catching up on what they've been doing for the past 5 years. We talk about: - How open source is changi...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 148
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dorian Develops. He's a software engineer and prolific YouTube creator. Dorian grew up in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. He's the child of a single mother that arrived as a refugee from Cuba. After a rough childhood and dropping out of high school in 9th grade, Dorian eventually made a living as a valet car parker in Las Vegas. It was here that he realized he needed to make changes for the sake of his ...
Oct 25, 2024•2 hr 52 min•Ep. 147
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tadas Petra. He's a software engineer and a Senior Developer Advocate at Agora.io. After learning embedded development in university, he switched to building mobile apps. He's gone on to build dozens of mobile apps and create tutorials to help other devs learn Flutter and other mobile dev tools. We talk about: - Immigrating to Chicago from Lithuania - The Computer Engineering he studied in school, and how it's d...
Oct 18, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 146
