#140 Surviving 40 years in the software industry with Jack Herrington the Blue Collar Coder

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 changing - Open data and open LLM models - Self-reliance and self-hosted infrastructure - The business of running a developer community Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Honeypot episode Adam mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/557 - Steve Yegge episodes Quincy mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/549 - Open Source Civilization episode Jerod mentions: https://changelog.com/podcast/428  

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 family's future. Dorian taught himself to code using freeCodeCamp and other free learning resources, and has since gotten several 6-figure jobs as a web developer. We talk about: - How Dorian survived his 20s by waiting tables and parking cars in Las Vegas - How he taught himself to code using free learning resources and built his network through months of attending local developer meetups - How he's worked as a remote developer so he and his kids can travel the world - And how he's 1 year into his recovery from a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Vagabonding book by Rolf Potts: https://rolfpotts.com/books/vagabonding/ - A documentary on "Advantaged Play" in Blackjack that Quincy mentions. [Note: I don't gamble and I don't condone gambling. Still, this is still an excellent video that developers interested in information security should consider watching]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6aPOkCt84 - A recent HTML tutorial by Dorian: https://youtu.be/sWYdumJckMw?si=nB8j5d9WQR5u5_Mb - Dorian's video about his journey to sobriety: https://youtu.be/pGoeG5aY3S0?si=aanGEowSfWd-runm - Dorian's video about his love of Brazillian Jujitsu but how it's left him with permanent injuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAHPG66H000

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 different from building consumer mobile apps - His transition from Senior Dev to YouTube creator to Developer Advocacy - The overlap between mobile dev and web dev, and what he's learned from each Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,943 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate You can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday. Links we talk about during our conversation: Tadas's History of freeCodeCamp video (20 minute watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5n1-hD-x5g Tadas's video about how to control the lights in your house with Flutter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eib_62D-kSA Tadas's course platform for learning cross platform app development with Flutter: https://www.hungrimind.com/  

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kamran Ahmed. He's a software engineer and founder of Roadmap.sh, which has skill tree roadmaps for lots of developer fields, such as DevOps. As a teacher, he's also a Google Developer Expert and a GitHub Star. We talk about: - Kamran's tips for finding the right open source projects to contribute to - The story behind Roadmap.sh, his popular developer website - Other specialized open source Kamran has built over the years - How Kamran became a Google Developer Expert and GitHub Star Can you guess what song I'm playing during the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,922 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Kamran's website, Roadmap.sh: https://roadmap.sh/ - Kamran's "Design Patterns for Humans" GitHub book: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans - freeCodeCamp's "How to Contribute to Open Source guide" Quincy mentions: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-contribute-to-open-source-projects-beginners-guide/ - Kamran on Twitter: https://x.com/kamrify

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dennis Ivy, a software engineer and prolific freelancer. He dropped out of college at 18 and taught himself how to build websites. He started his first agency, built and sold products, and eventually started teaching his skills on YouTube. We talk about: - Growing up in an immigrant family of 13 kids - Dropping out of school and working construction before learning to code - Figuring out how to get web development clients through trial and error - Selling his codebase to his employer $61,000 and using it to fund his journey into teaching Python Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,443 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - The Bussard Ramjet theoretical spacecraft Quincy mentions as an analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet - Dennis Ivy's React + Appwrite course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-sticky-notes-app-with-react-and-appwrite/ - Dennis Ivy's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/dennisivy - Dennis Ivy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dennisivy11

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews YK Sugi. He's a software engineer and prolific YouTube Computer Science tutorial creator. He's worked at Google and Microsoft. He runs the CS Dojo channel where he shares his insights on software development, AI, and developer career progressions. We talk about: - Emerging AI tools and how developers are adopting them - The role of interest rates in developer hiring - Japan's developer work culture VS the US - How not to burn out Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday. Links we talk about during our conversation: - YK's freeCodeCamp article on the resume he used to get a job at Google: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/heres-the-resume-i-used-to-get-a-job-at-google-as-a-software-engineer-26516526f29a/ - YK's freeCodeCamp article about leaving his job at Google to focus on entrepreneurship: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-i-left-my-100-000-job-at-google-60b5cf4ebefe/ - YK's popular CS Dojo YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CSDojo - YK on Twitter: https://x.com/ykdojo

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Meg Risdal. She's a data scientist and Product Manager at Kaggle, Google's Data Science competition platform.  Megan works closely with the global data science community, and on Google's Gemma open models project. We talk about: - Google's Kaggle, which hosts 300k open data sets and runs data science competitions each week that anyone can participate in. - How people talk in academia VS how people talk in tech - Stack Overflow VS Kaggle – how Megan contrasts what it was like to work on these two "communities of practice" - Linguistics and its importance in LLMs and AI research Can you recognize the song I'm playing during the intro? It's a punk song from 1994. Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech. Also, I want to thank the 10,779 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: Meg's blog: https://www.meg.dev/ The Sliced Data Science Gameshow that Meg co-hosted with Nick Wan: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PX3YIZuHhyQmXKnyZmVDzdgAYbzwgDw Meg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeganRisdal Kaggle's open learning resources: https://www.kaggle.com/learn The Gemma team at Google that Meg also works on: https://ai.google.dev/gemma

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Eddie Jaoude who is a software engineer and open source creator. He's worked more than 15 years as a developer everywhere from Germany banking sector to London's tech startup scene. He's now a dev rel for hire and runs several open source projects. We talk about: - Eddie's journey into open source - How he built his reputation through hackathons - How he leveraged his network to find his first freelance clients - His audio-video setup for filming tutorials Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's the theme from a 1982 police show. Also, I want to thank the 10,773 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: Eddie's YouTube channel with more than 700 tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5mnBodB73bR88fLXHSfzYA Eddie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eddiejaoude Eddie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddiejaoude/

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jack Herrington. As a kid he had to work to overcome Dyslexia and didn't have good enough grades to get into college. Despite this, he's worked as a software engineer for more than 40 years at companies like Nike, Adobe, and Walmart. He also runs the popular Blue Collar Coder YouTube channel. We talk about: - How Jack struggled with Dyslexia, had terrible grades that couldn't get him into college, but got really into GameDev in the early 1980s - Early developer job opportunities that took his family from his home town in Pennsylvania to Melbourne Australia - How he started blogging as he learned, and ultimately published 6 programming books Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1979 new-wave song. Also, I want to thank the 10,443 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: Blue Collar Coder YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jherr Jack on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jherr 1984 ad from Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I Edward Tufte, the academic Jack mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte Ben Affleck's funny drunk DVD commentary on Armageddon movie (this contains profanity so don't listen to with young kids around): https://www.tiktok.com/@alltherightmovies/video/7238180210527505690?lang=en

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Emma Bostian. She's a software engineer turned manager at Spotify and Prolific coding teacher. We talk about: - How at her first developer job at IBM, Emma's boss told her: "You need to get your stuff together or you won't make it in this industry." And the transformation that followed. - Emma's thoughts on Computer Science degrees. "Going to college gives you credibility and a network. You can get opportunities that way." - How Emma hires software engineers. (Hint: she tries to disregard degrees completely.) - How Emma intentionally procrastinates some big tasks to give her mind time to figure out the puzzle pieces Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1979 punk song. Also, I want to thank the 10,776 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Emma on Twitter: https://x.com/emmabostian - The Ladybug Podcast about women in tech that Emma helped host for several years: https://www.ladybug.dev/