The freeCodeCamp Podcast

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

  Eric Carlson is a self-taught software engineer at Cisco. In his early 20s, he worked his way up to manager at the busiest Dominos Pizza in Canada. He eventually went to college and studied liberal arts, then worked as a teacher for two decades before teaching himself programming using freeCodeCamp.  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. And he's since gone further down the stack, doing back end work and now DevOps. Eric shares 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 object" tools - How to reinforce your learning by taking detailed notes on basically everything Links we discuss during the show: - Eric's 2022 freeCodeCamp forum post about his journey into software development: https://forum.freecodecamp.org/t/i-got-a-dev-job-after-9-months-on-freecodecamp-or-was-it-2-years-and-9-months/516049 - The 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-teYcHSWkg Links from the Community News intro:  1. freeCodeCamp just published a course on how to build your own MCP server with Python. Model Context Protocol Servers are like APIs for AI agents. Lots of developers are now building them to help agents interact with their websites' data more accurately. This course will teach you how to leverage the open source FastMCP library to build a calculator project that agents can then directly interact with. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-mcp-essentials-and-how-to-create-secure-agent-interfaces-with-fastmcp 2. Learn how to pass Google's new Generative AI Leader Certification Exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps exam under the sun, and he teaches this course. He'll give you a business-level understanding of Google Cloud's gen AI offerings. By the end of this course, with the help of Andrew's practice materials, you'll be ready to sit for the exam. (3 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/pass-the-google-generative-ai-leader-certification-exam/ 3. Teach your apps how to learn. 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 Preceptron, which will then look at images of shapes and figure out ways to reliably label them. (interactive course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/machine-learning-tutorial-how-to-program-without-creating-your-own-algorithms/ 4. Strix 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 codebase. This tutorial will explain how it works and how you can use it to harden your apps against common exploits. (15 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-strix-the-open-source-ai-agent-for-security-testing/ 5. Learn fun facts about the atmosphere and space while riding the space elevator. Did you know that the fastest elevator in the world moves 42 miles per hour and even at that speed, it would take 80 minutes to reach space? https://neal.fun/space-elevator/ 6. Song of the week: 1980 progressive rock classic Don't Be Late by the legendary Canadian band Saga. This song features lightning fast keyboard arpeggios that are so precise (and before the era of sequencers). And the clearest annunciated lyrics ever. It's perfect for late night driving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYt7dWb2knc

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• #193 From injured athlete to software engineer with Kaleb Garner

  Kaleb Garner is a software engineer working at a medical technology app company. He got a scholarship to play baseball at a state university, but a serious knee injury ended his career and he dropped out. After moving back in with his parents and working at an optometry office, he decided to teach himself programming. He used freeCodeCamp and 100Devs to learn for free, and got his first front end developer job when he was only 19. He has since expanded his skills to work on large legacy Python and C# codebases. We talk about: - How his Major League Baseball goals and his dream of becoming a doctor ended in the same catastrophic semester - His grind to get his first developer role after only 20 carefully researched job applications - Getting laid off right before his wedding and losing all discipline in his frantic job search - Tips for making your skillset and your network layoff-resilient Links we discuss: - Recent NY Times article Quincy mentions about people struggling to find developer jobs ("They're doing it wrong") [paywalled]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html - 1999 movie Office Space trailer about a simpler time in corporate life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_fG_zLbBeU - Leon Noel's 100Devs program and community that Kaleb used alongside freeCodeCamp: https://100devs.org/ Links from the news section: 1. freeCodeCamp just published an in-depth Harvard course that will teach you SQL and relational databases. You'll learn key concepts like CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). You'll also learn how to normalize data, join tables, and index your databases for faster performance. You'll use real-world datasets and write your own queries in SQLite, before moving on to working with PostgreSQL and MySQL. (11 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-databases-and-sql-from-harvard-university 2. This advanced Python Machine Learning course will teach you the history of computer vision architectures. You'll learn about design philosophies like LeNet, AlexNet, Xception, and Vision Transformers. You'll see side-by-side comparisons, and learn how they've progressed over the past few decades. (5 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-history-of-deep-learning-vision-architectures 3. freeCodeCamp also published this handbook that will teach you all about JSON Web Tokens, which are key to modern authentication and security. You'll learn their history and how they work, through a series of helpful diagrams and code examples. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-json-web-token-handbook-learn-to-use-jwts-for-web-authentication/ 4. Learn how developers are using the Compound Components Design Pattern to clean up their messy React code. You can code along at home and refactor several components. This will help you solidify your understanding of this design pattern and tighten up the front end logic on your projects. (30 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/compound-components-pattern-in-react/ These are just some of the many open source learning resources that the freeCodeCamp community published this week. We have ridiculous momentum right now. We're teaching more and more programming topics, as well as world languages like Spanish and Chinese. If you're looking for a modern equivalent to the Library of Alexandria, well, we're building it. Start supporting our charity and our mission today: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

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• #192 Evan You – From Art School Kid to Open Source Legend

  Evan You is the creator of the popular Vue JavaScript library for front end development and the Vite JavaScript build tool that a lot of devs use as a boilerplate for their new projects. He's a self-taught developer based in Singapore. He shares tips for: - Getting involved in open source - Leading open source projects and attracting sponsors - And how to use AI as a thinking assistant rather than just as a coding assistant We also talk about his thoughts on the Chinese open source scene, a new documentary that just came out about Vite, and his new project: Void 0. Links from the news section: 1. freeCodeCamp just published a new in-depth course that will teach you full stack development fundamentals from the ground up. It covers front end development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then it moves to back end development tools like Node, SQL, and TypeScript. You can code along at home and build a variety of projects while getting exposed to a ton of concepts. (47 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/become-a-full-stack-developer-with-one-video/ 2. We also just completed work on this new Go programming course where you build your own movie streaming app. Go is a fast back end language, and here we're pairing it with the Gin-Gonic web server framework. As you build this project, you'll also integrate your movie database with OpenAI's API to analyze data and give your users personalized movie recommendations. (15 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-full-stack-movie-streaming-app-with-go-react-mongodb-openai/ 3. When browsing the web, you may see the error message that something has been “blocked by CORS policy.” CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. When fetching data, if the domain of the requester is different from the domain of the receiver, your browser will reject that request. It's an important security measure, but it can also be a headache for developers trying to maintain their web apps. Luckily, freeCodeCamp just published this tutorial – chock full of theory and code examples – to help you understand the basics. (20 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-fix-cross-origin-errors/ 4. You've probably heard people throw around terms like Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Generative AI. But what do they mean in relation to one another? This quick article breaks down the jargon for you in plain English. (10 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/machine-learning-vs-deep-learning-vs-generative-ai/ I'm proud of the freeCodeCamp community and all these open source learning resources we're building. If you're proud of it too, then please consider joining the 10,881 kind folks who support our charity and our mission: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Bare Metal Gaming: Zaxxon running on assembly (no operating system below it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHnbozz7b4 Song of the week: "Do the Dance (빌려온 고양이)" by Illit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXUeulskMuY Links from our discussion: The new documentary about Vite (40 minute watch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmWQqAKLgT4&pp=ygUPdnVlIGRvY3VtZW50YXJ5

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• #191 From manufacturing worker to first developer job at age 43 with Thomas Gooch

  He's a self-taught software engineer who got his first developer job at age 43. He spent decades working in manufacturing while raising his kids, before using freeCodeCamp to learn programming. He was able to translate his JavaScript skills into working on enterprise Java apps, and now works at a semiconductor company. We talk about: What working 12 hour manufacturing shifts is really like Why he preferred freeCodeCamp's free curriculum over the paid courses that he tried When to use AI code generation and when to do it yourself Having faith in your ability to ultimately get a developer job Play snake in your browser's address bar [open source repo - links to the game itself]: https://github.com/epidemian/snake  Song of the week: Return of the Space Cowboy by Jamiroquai 1994 https://youtu.be/OPkjnRIdQXQ News items: 1. Learn how to code your own LLM from scratch with Python with this free 6 hour course. freeCodeCamp just published an in-depth Python course that will walk you through training your own Large Language Model. If you have some basic programming skills and want to get deeper into Machine Learning, this is an excellent place to start. You'll learn about key concepts like Reward Modeling, Supervised Fine-Tuning, Mixture-of-Experts Layers, RMSNorm, RoPE, KV caching, and more. Dive in. (6 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-an-llm-from-scratch-theory-to-rlhf/  2. We also published a Python course that will help you build production-ready AI systems. This no-nonsense course will take you step by step through building a sophisticated data pipeline that scrapes training data, cleans it up, and ensures its integrity before feeding it into your model. I love this dude's relentless teaching style. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-an-enterprise-grade-ai-project/  3. freeCodeCamp also published a course on building advanced AI agents. You'll use Python to implement interactive voice agents and intelligent research assistants. This course will even expose you to multi-agent workflows. You'll use sample codebases and popular tools like LangChain and LiveKit to code along at home. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-advanced-ai-agents/  4. Memory leaks are one of the most common performance issues with React apps. This JavaScript tutorial will walk you through the most common ways they afflict your apps. Then it'll equip you with the tools you need to track memory leaks down and fix them. It's chock full of code examples for Event Listeners, Timers, Subscriptions, and Async Operations. (15 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/fix-memory-leaks-in-react-apps/  These are just some of the many open source learning resources the freeCodeCamp community published this week. As you may know, we also launched daily coding challenges, which you can solve in Python or JavaScript – right inside the freeCodeCamp iPhone/Android app. We've got a lot of pots cooking, with tons more courses on the way. Please consider joining the 10,881 kind folks who support our charity and our mission: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate 

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• #190 Lone Wolf Dev turned Open Source Super Contributor Tom Mondloch

  Tom Mondloch quit programming after he finished community college. After a few years of odd jobs, he decided to get back into programming and discovered freeCodeCamp.  He was just learning his own way, and didn't think freeCodeCamp's linear curriculum would be worth his time. But he stuck with it, got good, and ultimately started contributing to our open source project. He's since joined freeCodeCamp's staff and archetected freeCodeCamp's entire relational database curriculum, which you can run in your browser or right inside your VS Code editor. Tom shares tips for: - Brushing up on your programming skills if you've taken a few years off - Contributing to open source - Using AI codegen tools sensibly and not relying too heavily on them He also talks about the role of vocational college, his love of the outdoors, and how working remotely allows him to continue to live in small town middle America without the need to move to a big city. A huge thank you to the 10,889 kind folks who make this podcast possible by supporting freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about: - freeCodeCamp's daily coding challenges in Python and JavaScript: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/introducing-freecodecamp-daily-python-and-javascript-challenges-solve-a-new-programming-puzzle-every-day/ - Mrugesh's article on AI Assisted Coding (that Tom used for his hackathon project): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-become-an-expert-in-ai-assisted-coding-a-handbook-for-developers/ - Jessica Wilkins who helped Tom with his hackathon project on the freeCodeCamp podcast episode #111: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/podcast-jessica-wilkins-classical-music-learning-to-code/ News items: 1. freeCodeCamp just published this comprehensive front end development course where you build your own browser-based code editor. You can code along at home and build your own single page app development environment with tabs for editing your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Along the way, you'll learn some intermediate JS techniques that allow for instant live preview, so you can see the results of your code changes right away. (4 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-your-own-code-editor/ 2. I also made a quick announcement about some big improvements to our core Full Stack Development curriculum. In short, we're breaking down our new coursework into a series of six new certifications you can earn along the way to the capstone cert. These include Python, Relational Databases, Front End Libraries, and more. (5 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/introducing-freecodecamp-checkpoint-certifications/ 3. freeCodeCamp also just published this new course that will help you pass the Databricks Data Engineer Associate certification exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps exam under the sun, and he teaches this course. He'll introduce you to key concepts like Clusters, Structured Streaming, Data Lakes, and more. (8 hour course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/prepare-for-the-databricks-data-engineer-associate-certification-exam-and-pass/ 5. Enjoy this breezy read about Cosine Similarity and the role it plays in Large Language Models. As its author, Manish, says, Cosine Similarity is “a bridge between human language and machine understanding. It allows a model to treat meaning as geometry, turning questions and answers into points in space.” Not only will you learn the math involved, you'll also see it implemented in Python code. (10 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-does-cosine-similarity-work/ 6. Krazam America's Next Top Model Context Protocol Server skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVrCPo8eB3A Song of the Week: A Taste of Honey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhD58dP9kq8

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