today I'm joined by Brian Douglas. He's a software engineer who's worked at tech companies like GitHub and Netlify. And now he's an entrepreur runs his own startup – OpenSauced.pizza. Brian grew up in a small town in Florida, and his family was the only black family in town. He worked hard in school and earned a full scholarship to Florida State University, where he studied business. He started off working in sales, but gradually taught himself how to code. It took a while to get into the software, but he was ultimately able to move his family out to the San Francisco Bay Area. If you dig this ..read more

Today I'm joined by Sarah Shook is a software engineer who started out as a recruiter, then started learning system administration on the job at a school. She didn't finish university. She learned to code on the job, from studying freeCodeCamp, and from attending a short bootcamp that she won free admission to. And she did all of this while raising 3 kids. She is a career-long remote worker, and insists she will never work somewhere where she needs to be away from her kids. Today she runs software development agency and works with clients.  Sarah and I talk about her coding journey, how s ..read more

Welcome back to the freeCodeCamp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freeCodeCamp.org. And I'm bringing you insight from developers, entrepreneurs, and ambitious people getting into tech. It's been 4 years since we published a podcast episode. It's good to be back. This is the first of three interviews I'm publishing this week – my interview with Danny Thompson. Danny's a bit a legend among career changers.  He had a kid early in life. For 10 years he worked at a gas station in Tennessee, frying chicken for people to eat. He sometimes worked 80 hour weeks just to provide fo ..read more

If you're over the age of 20, you might think you're too old to learn how to code. But 56 year old VM Vaughn's here to tell you that's not true. In this podcast, he shares his epic beat-down of his critical inner self and lays out his path towards an exciting second career. Written by VM Vaughn: https://twitter.com/vmvaughn Read by Abbey Rennemeyer: https://twitter.com/abbeyrenn Original article: https://fcc.im/2oJnBY1 Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Transcript:  I’m 56 years old and learning to code. W ..read more

In this special crossover episode, we celebrate 10 years of The Changelog. It's the home of the biggest podcast focused on open source, and a favorite of freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson. This 4-hour episode is actually 2 interviews: 1. For the first 2.5 hours, Quincy interviews Changelog co-hosts Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo about how they got into software development and podcasting, and the history of their legendary podcast. 2. Then we end with Adam and Jerod turning the tables and interviewing Quincy about the past and future of freeCodeCamp.org. If you haven't heard of The Changelog ..read more

This week, for the last podcast episode of 2019, Abbey chatted with freelancer and content creator Jessica Chan - known as CoderCoder on social media - about how she got into tech and started her educational website and YouTube channel ..read more

On today's episode of the podcast, Abbey chats with software engineer Jackson Bates who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Jackson used to be a high school English teacher, but gradually taught himself to code and landed a pretty sweet gig as a React dev, partly by chance. Today he works part time as a developer, part time as a stay at home dad, and volunteers his time with various open source projects. Finding his way into tech Jackson grew up in England, and studied English in school. Although going into education seemed a logical choice, he dabbled in other fields - like working at a ..read more

In this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy Larson interviews Ruben Harris, who runs Career Karma, a social network for people interested in attending coding bootcamp. He also hosts the Breaking into Startups Podcast. Ruben just finished Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, where he and his team raised their first round of venture capital funding. Ruben grew up in Atlanta and worked in finance. He met his future co-founders - Ukrainian-born brothers Artur and Timur Meyster - years ago. The three of them agreed to spread out, get jobs in different industries, then later regroup ..read more

On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey interviews senior software engineer and prolific content creator Ohans Emmanuel. They discuss how he got into tech, how he ended up in Berlin, what goes into writing a book, and how he stays focused through it all. When Ohans was young, he learned a very important lesson from his parents: you must take responsibility for yourself and your actions. He was lucky enough to grow up with a computer in the house, and gradually learned computer basics. In school, he studied engineering, but didn't learn much programming. So he had to teach hi ..read more

On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with UX designer and musician Andi Galpern about how she creates engaging and unique experiences in the tech world. Andi shares stories about past jobs, how she started her company, her favorite moments from events she's produced, and how to break into the design market. Andi grew up in Florida and was first and foremost a musician at heart. Once she decided that she needed a plan other than becoming a rockstar, she picked up and moved across country to the Bay Area. After attending various tech events and taking photos, she star ..read more