The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Today Quincy Larson interviews Rachel An Fernandez. She's a computer science student at Stanford and the youngest instructor at the entire university. She recently helped organize TreeHacks, Stanford's annual hackathon, which narrowed 15,000 applicants down to just 1,000 participants. They built projects over a single weekend and competed for a million dollars in prizes. Rachel grew up in Westmins...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Rose. She's a dev and teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla and lots of open source projects. We talk about: - How the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better thinker - The Bad Website club, a free online bootcamp where people learn front end development together that starts this Apr...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Mark Mahoney. He worked as a dev before becoming a computer science professor. He's taught computer science for 23 years at Carthage College, a 180-year-old US university. He's also taught thousands of developers through his free programming courses built on top of his own open source course platform, Playback Press. We talk about: - Why learning programming the hard...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prolific streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a "snowboard bum" doing odd jobs at ski resorts to facilitate him spending as much time on the mountain as possible. At age 28 he taught himself PHP programming and started building websites for friends. In 2018 he started streaming himself programming on Twitch...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Landon Gray. He's a software engineer who worked at agencies for years. Then he taught himself AI assisted software development. And now he's helping other devs do the same.  Landon's famous for proving that RAG pipelines can be written in Ruby and popularizing Ruby as a language for building machine learning projects. He works as an AI Engineer at a enterprise softw...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Coyier. He's a front-end developer and co-founder of CodePen and the CSS Tricks blog. He has also recorded more than 700 podcasts about software engineering. We talk about: - How he thinks front-end development tools are 90% of the way to where they need to be - How developing for the web is "just as good as mobile, and you can reuse it everywhere." - And why h...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Luke Ciciliano. He's a front-end developer who runs Modern Website Design, a software consultancy that builds solutions for small to medium sized businesses. He taught himself programming in the 1980s and started landing clients in the 1990s. He's going to share tips for building your own software consultancy in your city and winning clients. We talk about: - How AI...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Justin Searls. He's a software engineer who cofounded a software agency 15 years ago that's still going – even after he figured out how to make a lot of money quickly and retire at age 38 once he had enough savings. These days he's gone from solving problems for client to solving solving problems for himself by building open source software. Often using emerging tool...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Carl Brown, who runs the Internet of Bugs YouTube channel and has worked as a dev at Amazon, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and startups for over 37 years. We talk about: - The hype versus the utility in LLMs and agent code generation tools - Why you might want to target developer jobs at smaller companies, and how these differ from "big tech" - How everyone will face agism...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Shawn Wang. He's a software engineer, founder of the AI Engineer conference, and host of the Latent Space podcast focused on applying the latest models toward getting work done. We talk about: - How even if LLMs plateau, there will be still paths to better output through surrounding harness code - And three big areas researchers are exploring to further improve model...

Today 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 software consultancy he created two decades ago. He's done work for Nike and lots of other companies....

Today Quincy Larson interviews Tapas Adhikari. He's a software engineer who runs a firm of 20 developers who build projects for companies around the world. He's also a prolific teacher, having written 300 programming tutorials - including 47 for freeCodeCamp – and runs a popular English and Bangla-language YouTube channels. We talk about: - The changing nature of software engineering - Tips for bu...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Sumit Saha, a software engineer and prolific teacher on YouTube. Sumit is based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he runs a developer agency building projects for clients throughout Asia. We talk about: - How the hunger for learning is dying and people are increasingly drawn to shortcuts over taking the time to truly understand concepts - Sumit's information diet and his t...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Mike McQuaid. He's a software engineer who previously worked at GitHub, and now serves as lead maintainer of Homebrew, a Mac package manager used by tens of millions of developers. He's based in Edinburgh, Scottland. He's worked remotely as a dev for nearly two decades. We talk about: - What does a career in open source really look like - What skills are going to be...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Zubin Pratap, a software engineer and manager from Melbourne, Australia. After nearly two decades working as a corporate lawyer, he taught himself programming using freeCodeCamp.org. Within two years, he landed a job as a software engineer at Google. We talk about: - How tools are making programming easier, but other parts of being a developer harder - How 2009 - 202...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Santosh Yadav. The son of a textile worker, he grew up inner-city Mumbai and studied hard to get into university. From there he's worked as a software engineer for 16 years. Along the way, he's picked up every distinction imaginable including Google Developer Expert, GitHub Star, and Microsoft MVP. Santosh shares tips for: - How to get promoted as an Individual Contr...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Jason Lengstorf. He's a college dropout who taught himself programming while building websites for his emo band. 22 years later he's worked as a developer at IBM, Netlify, run his own dev consultancy, and he now runs CodeTV making reality TV shows for developers. We talk about: - How many CEOs over-estimated the impact of AI coding tools and laid off too many devs, w...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Kunal Kushwaha. He's a software engineer and prolific computer science teacher on YouTube. He failed the JEE, the Indian Engineering Entrance Exam, TWICE. But he persevered. He did 4 years of university but attended ZERO lectures. Instead he built his own learning path by contributed to open source projects and using free learning resources including freeCodeCamp. He...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Andrea Griffiths, who taught herself programming using freeCodeCamp while working in construction. She moved to the US from Colombia when she was 17, and within 6 months she joined the US Army. She ran a chain of gyms before landing a support role at a tech company, then ascending to Product Manager and ultimately Developer Advocate at GitHub. Support for this podcas...

Today Quincy Larson interviews Alison Co and Cindy Cui, two university students who won the NW Hacks hackathon with their tool that helps people who are losing their vision learn to read Braille. He met them when GitHub invited them to their big San Francisco conference, GitHub Universe to present their project. Alison Co is a software engineer who's graduating Fall 2026. She's among the prestigio...

Dr. David J. Malan teaches computer science at Harvard. Over the past decade, millions of people have taken his CS50 course both in person and online. He joins us to talk about: 1. Why he still recommends learning the C programming language in 2026 2. How he intentionally nerfs hist student's coding editors and LLMs to help them learn fundamentals faster 3. His vision for self-paced learning, and...

Abbey Perini taught herself programming at age 27 while working as an admin at an engineering recruitment agency. She has worked extensively with large legacy codebases and taught best practices to developers internationally. We talk about: - How to hit the ground running with a large legacy codebase - How to get employers to remember you and actually respond to you - How she adapted to her ADHD d...

Patrick Hartley is a self-taught developer with nearly a decade of software engineering experience. When he was 21 he had to dropped out of college to provide for his family. He taught himself programming while working at a thrift store. After building his own apps and freelancing, he became the founding engineer at startup that got acquired, and has since worked as a dev at other tech companies....

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 tech...

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...