On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kelly Vaughn. She's a self-taught software engineer who ran her own developer agency. She was also the founding CTO at financial technology startup. Kelly runs the popular Ladybug Podcast focused on women in tech. We talk about: - How to freelance and ultimately create a developer agency and get clients - Tips for navigating the current developer job market - How to move from freelance to working for someone else - Tips for recognizing burnout so you can know when to take break 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 11,384 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to http://donate.freecodecamp.org Links we talk about during our conversation: - Kelly's website: https://kvlly.com - The Ladybug Podcast talks about tech, career, and code lead by women in tech: https://ladybug.dev - Kelly's engineering leadership newsletter: https://modernleader.is - Kelly's new burnout-focused newsletter: https://afterburnout.co
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#175 From electrical engineering student to CTO with Hitesh Choudhary
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 extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com. Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to https://donate.freecodecamp.org Links we talk about during our conversation: - Hitesh's TypeScript course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/programming-in-typescript/ - Hitesh's project-oriented Appwrite course on freeCodeCamp https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/comprehensive-full-stack-react-with-appwrite-tutorial/ - Hitesh's Git course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-git-in-detail-to-manage-your-code/ - Hitesh's TED talk on time management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KrFy_3LYQ
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1:21:23
#174 How to Survive in Tech When Everything's Changing w/ 21-year Veteran Dev Joe Attardi
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: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/joeattardi/ Joe's website: https://joeattardi.com/ Joe's Web API Cookbook: https://www.webapis.info/ Joe's open source projects on GitHub: https://github.com/joeattardi What Joe's desk looks like: https://x.com/JoeAttardi/status/1849819837360480658 Some games Joe's recently played: https://backloggd.com/u/jattardi/games?page=1
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#173 Laid off but not afraid with X-senior Microsoft Dev MacKevin Fey
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 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 11,423 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org Links we talk about during our conversation: Mack's Oscilliscope course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBfhD_4FPIYsQ9LiWYoHVrLbuvwnb_bvC
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1:18:51
#172 How to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life
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 good way to practice your skills, update your knowledge, and motivate fellow devs How to participate in coding competitions and hackathons even if you feel intimidated Support for freeCodeCamp comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support our charity through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and aid us in our mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org Support for also 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. Correction: Quincy mentioned half of all articles on Wikipedia are English. While this is no longer true, as of 2025 half of all Wikipedia pageviews are still for English articles. Links we talk about: Quincy's interview with Eammon Cottrell who automated his coffee shop chain: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/self-taught-coding-automating-coffee-shop-chain-eamonn-cottrell-interview-151/ MNIST character dataset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database Zepeto tool for creating your own V-tuber avatar: https://page.zepeto.me/en/u4EEl3wK89atkdyUiivGEck Hugging Face AI Agent course (freeCodeCamp also has several courses on this on YouTube but this is the one CL mentioned): https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/en/unit0/introduction A video of Code;Life doing a Kaggle data science competition: https://youtube.com/live/WGLqd_sGiVA?feature=share
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
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