#151 Automating a coffee shop chain using self-taught coding skills with Eamonn Cottrell

I hope I will always be a lifelong learner and we throw that term around very loosely but I really sincerely mean it because I freaking love learning how to improve my professional self and how to go into coding and different skills and level up technically and then how to just do things smarter by nature of how I can stitch things together in my business and in my personal life. There was a guy.

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Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larsen, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week we'll bring you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. This week we're talking with Ayman Catrell. He's a software engineer who also runs local chain of coffee shops in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ayman taught himself to code using free code camp, and he since published 37 free code camp tutorials on using spreadsheets for productivity and automation. I also want to point out the 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 wixstudio.com and support also comes from the 11,113 kind folks who support free code camp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and get involved in our mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org. Amen, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Good to see you, Quincy. Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk with you. You are one of my big inspirations, somebody that I often look to in terms of just like how much you get done. It's remarkable. I'm just going to rattle off a few interesting facts about you. You are the father of four kids, four young kids.

I'll under eight years old. Yes, you run big deal you run several coffee shops like an entire chain basically and you work as a developer and create all these tutorials on

Google Sheets excel sheets like leveraging these tools that people completely underestimate how much you can get done, but you can write Python, you can write JavaScript, you can put these right in there and you can write, you know, Google scripts, you can, you can write visual basic, you can do all kinds of stuff within the context of the spreadsheet to automate and simplify your data with a workflow and you do all that.

So it's super chill and I'm proud to kind of like cast a spotlight on you and like let the world learn a little bit more about you and how you do what you do. For sure. I'm happy to be a part of this. Thanks for inviting me on to the show. I've listened to tons of these over the time that you've done them.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's start off by just diving into what you're working on right now. Yeah. Where to start? One of one of the probably bad things that I do is starting a lot of things. And I have my hands in a lot of things at any one time. Present day, though, my primary focus

I have my day job and we can talk about that here in a minute, is operating this and running a coffee chain. I've been with them for over a couple decades now, so I've got a lot of time into that. But in terms of online coding content and YouTube and articles,

I operate a newsletter that I started last year that I started before I felt like it was time to start a newsletter called Got Sheet and it's more of what you just mentioned. I write coding tutorials much inspired by how FreeCodeCamp has done project-based learning over the years to where I have little bite-sized projects or pieces of automation and just walk people through doing that.

So I have that as a newsletter that goes out weekly, and I pretty well have been able to hold to that. And I have a YouTube channel that sort of is paired up with the articles. And I'll typically, if I have an article, I'll have a YouTube video going over that. YouTube's the thing that I got into, I guess about a year and a half ago. I've had a channel for like a decade probably, but I actually started putting dedicated time into it for the purpose of teaching others last year.

And then I've got another newsletter about addiction and recovery. So totally left field in in another realm That's actually a daily newsletter this year that I put a lot of time into and a couple other YouTube channels So I I love creating things and like yourself I love teaching other people how to do these things that you know the year ago me or the five year ago me Was clueless about and I can kind of walk people through that just because I've been through those experiences and

Yeah, and I want to talk about some of those experiences and the background that brought you through this because you are relatively young to have so much experience running coffee chains. I have so much experience like just life experience, you know, pushing through addiction. And then of course, one thing that I didn't mention is you

are an ultra marathoner, which I don't even know if a lot of people know what that is. But basically, you know that like, you know, half marathons, like 13 miles of all marathons, like 26 miles. And then like, there's like entire categories of races that go like way into like, I don't know, like,

Ridiculous distances 100 plus Miles and by the way when I say miles This is a very like we're both North Americans, but a mile is like approximately like do kilometers like Yeah, that's a very rough estimate. I'm not gonna do the exact calculation, but but running a Half marathon, which is the longest distance I've ever run I think was like

20 kilometers or something like that. I can't remember exactly. But yeah, like what you're doing, it sounds like maybe you can give us some insight into that just because that's totally novel. I think you're the first ultra marathoner we've ever had on the Freeco Camp podcast. Although I have met some other people that do it. It's just like this very select hardcore few that want to go out and spend like an entire day just running.

And it's literally days at a time. I ran its coincidence. Last weekend, I ran a 100k race, and it took 15 hours. And run is a generous term, because what you end up doing, I do, is walking a lot of it. And so it's a lot of hiking, jogging, running, back and forth.

But yeah, it's a ridiculous sport to get into. Definitely not a good one if your schedule is tight and mine should be, but I love doing it. I guess I'm eight years into something like that. I started Ultra is about eight years ago.

Yeah, maybe you can give some more context. And so I mean, I have all kinds of questions about the kind of person who wants to do that because it just sounds absolutely grueling. Like me running half a marathon was just it felt brutal on my knees. And like, I actually changed the entire way I run to like run on like the forefoot, just so I wouldn't have the same like shock in my knees and stuff like that. And I got my heart rate down into the 50s. And I was just like, yeah, and then since that I've like, I just do like vigorous walking.

So I would describe it like mall walking in air condition. I'm a softie now. I can't go out in the Texas sun and just run a half marathon. That would be brutal. But maybe you can talk a little bit about what that entails. And for everybody listening, I promise we're going to talk a lot about software development. We're going to talk a lot about automation, productivity, things like that. But I just want to peel back some of these layers on the ultra marathon thing.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've always had a lifelong goal. I think we'll call it a lifeline goal of running a marathon. Rewind 10 years ago. I think I ran my first marathon about 10 years ago.

And I just had gotten it in my head, hey, I know I want to do this at some point in my life on Earth. So why don't I just start training for it? So I got a training buddy, downloaded one of these zillion plans on the internet, and just did whatever it said to do. You know, step one, day one, week one, do this, run a certain amount per day.

did that, got to the end. And I guess it was 12 years ago because I was newly, I think I was newly married at that time to my wife and got to the end of it and I was like, man, that was kind of fun. I guess I'll just keep doing it. And so from then to present day, it hasn't been a total linear progression where it's just like more, more, more, every year.

But the boundary started to get pushed further. And so I'll do another marathon the next year. And then when we move to Tennessee, which we'll talk about all that in a minute, maybe two, I got curious about the ultra distance. Like, OK, people hold up. People run more than a marathon because it was a novel thing to me.

And it came to find out I had one friend, my good buddy John, who lives here now as well. And he ran Altras and had been doing so for like 10 years. And we're talking, this guy's a machine. He runs 100 miles left and right, stuff like that. And so I started talking to him.

tell me more. How do you have to be a superhuman to do this? What's the appeal? All the things you're probably curious about. Yeah. Unfortunately for me, my curiosity turned into more curiosity. And then into, oh, can I do this? And then I ran my first 50k 50 kilometer race when we moved here, which would have been

2017, I think the fall of 2017, you know, seven years ago or so. And then from then on, I just, I love doing it. It requires a lot of time with kids. It requires an early wake up time more than anything. If I'm not running in the morning, it's probably not going to happen. So like 4 a.m. is not unheard of out the door and running through the streets, the suburbs where I live, and basically getting back showered before other people are waking up.

Yeah. Uh, so you're a really morning runner. Most, most people I talk to you to run running the morning because you don't have to worry as much about sun exposure and you don't have to worry about it. It's not as hot and fewer cars out too, which is a nice thing if you're running through like suburbs and stuff.

for almost every aspect of it that I enjoy, it's better. Now, the only downside is if you're a trail runner too, which I enjoy trail running, and that's what a lot of ultras are fixated on trails, you know, you got to go get a headlamp and you're running stumbling through tree roots and everything. It's a little bit more technical, but I do most of my training on the roads, even though I run trail races just because of that.

Yeah. So first of all, just some quick math for people that are curious, like that are unfamiliar with either kilometers or miles. I'm going to do. So 50 kilometers or yeah, 50 kilometers is 31 miles. So it's like 31 point something. Yeah, it's like.

five miles longer than a regular marathon. And then obviously 100 kilometers is 62 miles, which is a lot of running. Like how long does it take you to run 62 miles?

So I've done both my fastest 100k and my slowest 100k this year. And the fastest was on roads earlier in the year at just under 12 hours. And that was a personal milestone as well as one of my goals, like can I hit sub 12? The slowest was last weekend, 15 hours, right under 15 hours on a trail race that I'd done a few times before. And I'd set out to run that one in 12 hours, but things did not transpire.

As planned. Yeah, well, let's talk about like what it's like to actually run like so when I run like I would always listen to like the like podcasts And just you know double speed my podcast or I'd find like I built an entire playlist of music that was exactly 180 BPM or 90 BPM So like you know that is like a nice steady pace and with your camera you can kind of run with the beat of the music and

And that was like a comfortable pace for me to run at. Maybe people listen to music at 200 BPM or 240 or so. Obviously you need to cut it in half or else the music is just like a humming effect. I think in your musician, your musician as well. So you're probably aware of this effect that like the brain can't even like differentiate between beats once you get up to like hummingbird rate of like 400 plus BPM or something 500. It sounds like a stable tone.

So anyway, sorry, this isn't like a psychoacoustics podcast. But I guess, what do you do? I've talked to some runners who just don't do anything. They just run and they just get in the zone and they don't think about anything. Their mind goes blank and it's a great release for them from the stress of being an executive or being a software engineer or whatever it is they do. But what is your routine? Let's talk, what would a daily training routine, do you train, how many days a week do you go out and run?

I try to do four or five days a week, and that depends on family commitments and my willingness level to wake up at the butt crack of dawn. But yeah, four is probably a guarantee where I'm out there running anywhere from eight to 12, 13 miles on a, that's like a healthy training run for me, just keeping the legs warm.

And it's a little bit of everything to answer the, what do you do question? Because that's what most people ask me first. It's like, can't imagine being out there four, five, six, seven, eight hours. And I go through the gamut, like I've got the podcast playlist, just like you mentioned. I've got audiobooks, which I know that you've mentioned the Libby service that local libraries are hooked up to. Yes.

I've heard you talk about that before, and I may have started getting interested in it when I heard you years ago talk about it, but I've been using that and my kids use it for books and audio books alike. So I'll queue up an audio book a lot of times and listen to, you know, if it's a multi hour run, I'll listen to a couple hours of that at a time.

And then I've got music and silence. So I kind of rotate between all four things, because I do like the meditative aspect of it. And I do like getting out there and just, OK, this is my time to decompress, get centered before the day starts, get some exercise, get the blood flow and all that stuff, and then start the day.

Yeah. But I'm not one that will like, I'm not going to listen to an entire audiobook usually for a eight hour run and just knock it out. I've got to break it up into, you know, change it up into different sections.

Yeah. Yeah. And since you mentioned Libby and audiobooks, like I'm a big proponent of like listening to audiobooks just because like reading books is great because you can be completely focused in the book. But audiobooks, you can actually do other things because we're busy. They're like, they're kids to school. They're they're doing like, you know, washing dishes or cleaning the floor, any number of things. They're at the gym, like, and audiobook just fits in very nicely. And I consider podcasting audiobooks to be kind of like,

uh comparable in terms of very terrible engagement in a lot of ways yeah and Libby is this app it's kind of like the audible app or like apple books uh app um and it's basically like all these library chains create this thing and then they buy the license to

a book an audiobook and then they can check it out to like one person at a time. So it's kind of like a way of like piecing at the license. But one of the great things about that first of all is audiobooks are expensive and very little of the audiobook actually goes to the author. It's that it's incredibly like surprising how extractive audible is like their business model is ridiculous. Like so I wrote a book last year I think about how to learn to code and get a developer job. And I listened to it on one of my runs by the way.

Awesome, so if you true story if you want you can listen to that audiobook on the free cocaine podcast I just like recorded myself reading the book because I didn't want to like publish it on Audible like I take ethical issue with that platform and I try not to support it But sometimes I do get books off of it just because I think that it's like unfair and they had like all these restrictions

So Libby is like a very good app if you can use it because if you're in the United States, you're probably paying taxes and you might even be paying taxes if you're a US citizen abroad. And you should be able to use those taxes for the benefit of yourself and for your family. Why not go ahead and access those books that you've already kind of paid for through your library system. So Libby is the app that I guess you and I use to do that. And the other thing is like, you know, Apple Books, I've gotten a few on there. I like Apple Books.

Just because it doesn't have this weird kind of like subscription system, like Audible does, you just pay slightly more for the book, but then you just have it. But it's a one-off, you got it. You don't have to cancel some platinum plan or whatever with Audible. So anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm not going to spend the entire podcast complaining about Audible, but if anybody wants to launch a competing service, I think it can only get better than Audible, at least in terms of the relationship with both end users and with authors.

And Libby is great having kids now too because I don't know what I would do like we try to encourage reading and books over screens and everything and you know we do both but it's about limiting. But my kids listen to so many audiobooks through Libby and then my oldest two read so many through there. It's like they go through them left and right. It's so convenient for that.

Yeah, and like we're huge users of our local library system here in Texas. You've got a number of public libraries that have like like agreements. So you can like interlibrary loan pretty much any book you're looking for and we can go and use like Texas has some of the nicest libraries I've ever seen because they have, you know, like they they they have high property tax and a lot of that property tax goes toward things like libraries, which I think is a very good use of our tax dollars. So yeah, we make heavy use of that and like

Every week we go and we have this big like milk crate and we fill it with kids books Basically the kids go and grab and we'll check out like 40 books at a time And we take them home and then every night we read them and that is one thing like like parenting advice Get your kids reading read your kids like I mean, it's unsolicited advice, but like I genuinely think that if you're not like

getting your kids involved and reading. Like, it's one of the obvious kind of like easy wins as a parent in my humble opinion. And it doesn't take that much time. And it's just like a huge unlock. Like, nothing is greater than like I'm watching one piece with my daughter. She loves watching one piece. She loves Sanji.

And then all of a sudden, my son, he's like, yeah, I'm bored. And he just walks off and grabs a graphic novel or something, and he starts reading it. And I'm like, whoa. That's so cool that there's this really engaging anime. And he actually would prefer to be reading. That's the way I was like, yeah. Like, parent to win. I don't know how to win.

We've had to throttle Tristan is the name of my oldest son. We've had to throttle his reading because he would just spend all day, whether it be a physical book or if he's got the Kindle version, whatever. He's like, can I read some more now? It's like, well, yeah, but let's put a limit on it. Let's do go outside also. But it is such a good win to see them just light up and really grab on to that.

Yeah, so maybe we can talk a little bit about your family routine because you are one of the most busy people I know and it's because you fill up your schedule with like just tons of stuff, right? It's not like you're being pulled in a bunch of different directions by other people.

You have kind of like become the commander of your own destiny and just decided like I'm gonna prioritize running I'm gonna prioritize creating these tutorials. I'm gonna prioritize running this these these newsletters on automation with Excel and on Recovery and things like that like you is there any time of day where you're just like doing nothing? Yes

there probably should be pockets of it. In fact, yesterday was a day where it was just like a very lethargic day because I was sitting right here in my home office. I mean, this is where I work most of the day anyway. And I just, I didn't, I didn't prioritize breaking and like mixing it up and people talk about the Pomodoro timers and all that stuff. I've never done that, but there's very good sense in it. For me,

Like if I'm not, I typically don't leave for running like as soon as I wake up. I'll go in. I'll make a pot of coffee over here off camera. I've got a couch and I've got like my little quiet time area where I will center myself in the morning reading some healthy literature stuff. Just spend some quiet time to start the day.

And that centers the beginning of a day, and sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes it's 30. It just depends upon the day. Throughout the day, though, I mean, between everything you mentioned and kids and running around, taking them to and fro and everywhere, it's not really until we sit down in the evenings and, you know, we're early to bed, early to rise, both of us. And it's like 8.30 rolls around. We're both in bed like,

Okay. Do you want to talk? Nope. See you in the morning. Wow. 8.30. You could have been 8.30? Oh, yeah, bro.

I went to bed last night at like 10.30 and I was like, man, I'm being a very good boy. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's more normal than what I'm doing. Yeah. I will be, I will typically be in bed at 8.30 and I'll crack open a book like that begins my winding downtime. My wife usually can go to sleep much quicker, but I'm asleep at 9.30. Yeah, it's, I don't last longer than an hour. Once the kids are down and we're kind of settled.

Yeah. And kids, for anybody out there who doesn't have kids, they wake up like clockwork. I call them little roosters. I don't know if your kids are like this, but like 6.30, I start hearing noise in the kitchen. And I'm like, or I start hearing the piano, you know? I'm just like, well, I'm awake now. I guess he's mad that I went to sleep at like Vindai and struggled sleeping or the cat woke me up 10 times, you know, like the day has begun.

And that's one of the reasons that I manufacture and really hold to my super early mornings is because if I don't get alone time, quiet time, then running time as the case may be, it ain't happening. Because my kid, the first one of ours is a tap. He's been getting up lately at 5.30.

Wow. And we're like, whoa, hold on. Well, they're cowboy. He shares a room with his brother. So we let him come out, but he's got to stay upstairs in our room. He can't come down here and like start the day until six. Six AM and it begins. Yeah. Wow. Well, it sounds like you run like a very disciplined, like regimented, like routine household over there in the trail residence.

But I fall in line with my wife. She's better at keeping the family household routines than I am. But it works out real well for both of our personalities. Yeah. So I'm excited to learn more about

maybe your childhood and your journey recovery. And I would like, I'm not sure what the best point to start is. I mean, we can go all the way back. But like, is there a moment you kind of like snap to and realize, wow, like this is life. This is what I'm doing. And I guess more got more serious about life. Because I think everybody, most people have like a normal kind of like childhood experience. And they're just kind of doing what the grownups are saying. And they're looking around and entertaining themselves and stuff. And at one point, they realize like,

I'm going to be a grown-up one day. What am I going to do? I have to actually make decisions my own. I can't just rely on the grown-ups forever to tell me what to do. Was there like a moment for you that you remember or like some kind of like period in your life?

Yeah, I mean, for me, we've mentioned the addiction recovery stuff. In high school, pre-high school, totally normal, boring. We won't talk about all that. Boring good, right? Like it was a normal, both parents together, still together, two younger brothers. And high school started drinking, pot, other stuff, kind of got in the wrong crowd for a few years and led to a full-blown drug and alcohol substance addiction.

So my moment was, I guess it was a year post high school. I had started a community college here in Knoxville. And for the first time in my life was flunking classes. You know, previously school came real easy. Didn't really have to study that, you know, that kind of mode started flunking out. The addiction piece was progressing. And it got to a point, you know, we won't belabor all the bad stuff, but it got to a point of like, okay, I'm 19 years old. So I was young still.

I am not on the right path and know it was not raised anywhere near. I didn't know what recovery was. I thought AA was an insurance company when I was in the thick of my addiction. I was clueless about a lot of things.

And that was, for me, the time period. And it lasted like my peak addiction period was like short-lived. It was a six-month window where it went from bad to untenable. And we got to do something. And OK, let's go get shipped off to rehab facilities. What happened for me as I asked my parents for some help and wound up in Mississippi, central Mississippi middle of nowhere the next week back in 2002.

So yeah, that was the time period where literally waking up in another state, not really sure how I got here, like cognitively knew the chain of events, but just like, how did this happen? What do I do now?

And Quincy, I moved down there for a 30-day rehab deal, like your standard treatment facility, and ended up staying there for 15 years because got out of the 30-day thing, went on to the next thing, became very apparent very quickly. Probably a bad idea to go back up to the same friends, same playgrounds, same school situation that I just got screwed up in for the last several years before that.

Yeah. So that was the beginning of me really growing up a few years after I should have started growing up and making a crapload of mistakes and setting back a lot of things, including my learning and education for a few years that all that growth got stunted for a little bit of time.

Yeah, so as you were kind of coming out of like, I've heard it described as kind of like a haze like is gradually lifting because I mean, even if you're just drinking alcohol, which is probably the most common form of substance abuse around the world, it does like kind of gradually put parts of your brain to sleep is how described her described. And so there is kind of like an awakening, awakening in a gradual return to your full normal power.

Can you describe that process of reintegrating into daily life there in Mississippi and maybe give us some context into whether you were able to stay in recovery or whether you had relapses and things like that? Again, I'm not trying to go anywhere that's uncomfortable or anything like that, but just to give people some perspective on the additional levels of difficulty you faced as a result of this legacy of addiction.

Yeah, sure. And I mean, I've talked about this so much through the years. No questions going to be off off bounds for you. So you're all good with that. Hello, do we have a visitor there? Yeah, this is Hello Kitty. Her name is Hello Kitty because Hello Kitty. She we were just chilling in the front yard in China. She's actually a Chinese cat, a naturalized US citizen. And she just walked up. She was just a stray that walked on into our lives and we grabbed her and we're like, she's ours now.

That's what Mark said. And so, you know, a whole lot of paperwork later and shots later, she's here. But anyway, I love that. Yeah, say hello, Kitty. And my kid just called her hello, Kitty. So that's literally her name.

We had a stray named Speedy when we were growing up at one time, walked up into the backyard. We fed Old Speedy for about a week or two before we, he sped off somewhere. Yeah, but sorry for the derailing you with the Hello Kitty presence, but she is a very needy cat and all good.

To answer your haze question, yeah, I had much the same experience for really like my first year of physically being sober. And for me, like I said, I was sent down there to a rehab facility and I kind of went through the motions of the full nine yards, if you will, of going through a multi-month

Inpatient and then outpatient you live in an apartment and then you get a job and then you move to the next phase they had like four phases of this and

At the sort of end, I guess the last third of the whole program, part of the treatment facility's goal is to get you a job or you get yourself a job. And then they integrate you into the recovery community at large. And so in addiction recovery, community and regular fellowship with others is like a huge part of a cornerstone, if you will, of

especially the early days and weeks and years of sobriety. But then, you know, past then, I'm still involved, not to the degree I used to be, but involved in, you know, reaching my hand back and helping the next person coming up these days.

Um, but as that first year went by, uh, there was a period of, you know, there's a period of mourning like, Oh, what have I screwed up? You know, what have I done? All that stuff, the self pity poor me type of stuff. And then that, that wears off and I went into the.

Kind of invigorated, you know 19 20 years old now and you know new start You know my my life is my own I can live down here away from my parents and and kind of got off into the more headstrong like energy of being newly sober and That can be as as dangerous as the the self pity parts of it But over the probably the

I'm going to use a year because that's what I most often remember time period wise. Over that first year, it was just like...

like coming up out of water and just like you've got you got your eyes open underwater and then you come up to the surface and it's like, oh, this is what clarity looks like. It's there's no more fog. There's no more. You kind of see things for as they are. Yeah. And I begin to see my past for what it was and also to look ahead at, you know,

I started to see the value of having the experience and how it could be useful to others, like the beginnings of that kind of mind shift, as I really just kept doing the recovery thing that was in front of me. And like I did, I went to recovery meetings for years. And to answer the last part of your question, yeah, I've stayed physically sober since then. So going on 20, I think 22 years now.

And, uh, and it's been, it's been great. Like now I look back on it like, oh, stupid. Amen. And his teen years did some dumb stuff, but I've got half of my life. The second half that I've lived so far has been really, really good.

and learned a lot from it, developed a ton of friendships and been able to help a lot of other people out who come in just like I did, screwed up and don't know what to do. So it's been, it's one of those things where it's like, I would totally change all of that if I had a chance to redo it. But I'm also really grateful that I've went through it and can pay it forward, if you will, now.

Yeah. And it takes some degree of humility to acknowledge that like there were mistakes made and that like regrets are real. Like whenever I talk to somebody who's like, I don't have any regrets or live without regrets. And I'm like, you haven't had much of a life. You don't have some regrets. Like what? You were you a total voice guy or were you just like,

Yeah, I don't know. I don't I don't get that or maybe that's like that almost sounds like sociopathic should not regret like mistakes that have been made. And I do think that they're like clear obvious objective mistakes that can be made. You can look back and you can say, yeah, that wasn't a good decision. At least that's what I can do. Yeah.

Totally and I will say like on on the note of like, you know Drugs alcohol that stuff. I am proudly like even though I never struggled with addiction when my daughter was born I completely for swore any alcohol so like I haven't had so much as a drink of alcohol and like more than eight years and I encourage other people if you're looking if you're if you don't feel like You're as cognitively strong as other people around you and you're drinking

Even like periodically, there's a mounting amount of evidence that alcohol does hold you back. And certainly like marijuana and other kind of recreational drugs will hold you back. So yeah, like even little things like, you know, if you get like surgery or something like just not requesting the heavy pain pill, but just saying like, well, let's try ibuprofen first. Like you do not want to find yourself addicted to opioids like so many Americans are, but I'm not saying like you should like,

Anyway, I don't want to be like sermonizing or anything, but I do want to expound like if you want to live a life like aim is living where you're like in incredible health and you're incredibly productivity and things like that like please consider removing psychoactive drugs from your life. Yeah, alcohol being one of the most dangerous ones in my opinion.

There's really no downside to it, to at least try and it out. If, like you said, there's some negative consequence that, and you are partaking in something, even if it's not to an addictive level. Yeah. And that seems to be a more popular stance these days, just in general.

But both sides of it, right? Like society is such that drinking and drugs are now so normalized to partake, but then there's a whole camp of people that are saying exactly what you did, like trying months or a month of abstinence to, you know, flush the system, all that stuff. Yeah. And I think there's no downside to exiting it out even for a period.

Yeah. And certainly if you're like a young person, like it used to be extreme, like it would be very difficult for me to go to like my high school class and say, has anybody here not smoked marijuana during high school? And like probably everybody would have done that practically back in the day. It was just like so normalized. And yet I talked to people all the time who just like never drank alcohol. Even they're just not interested in that. They've seen what it's done to other people. And they're just like, I don't want to really want to go down that alley for just like a little bit of like artificial, because it's not real. Drugs aren't real.

It's just like things that you're doing to your brain too. But anyway, I don't like we're not going to talk about like the legality or anything like that on here. That's not the purpose of this podcast. But I do want to point out that like there are many examples of people on the free cocaine podcast who just don't play that game, you know, and just focus on other areas. The many other areas where one can spend their time and attention during this life we have here on earth. So.

Maybe you can talk about that progression from just working, like what were these early jobs like? What kind of skills were you developing? You did ultimately go back to school.

I did, yeah. So I had failed out, flunked out, dropped out. I think I moved to Mississippi. I know it did in the middle of the semester. So I went from being like a real good student in high school to, okay, I've got like a one point, something great point average I'm transferring. So I went back to a community college in the Ridgeland, Mississippi, which is right outside of Jackson Central Mississippi area called Holmes Community College. And I remember the,

the admission process, it took me about four years. So this was like four years after I had moved down there to where I finally said, okay, I'm going to get a college degree and I want to. I better just start taking classes. But in part of the admissions process, or maybe it was post admissions, I was applying for some scholarship money because it was cheap, but I also was completely broke.

And I remember applying for this. And I was writing a letter somehow to the dean of scholarships or the dean of somebody. And I basically got a call from him. And he said, you know what? If you can explain why, oh, it was after my first semester at home. Because he said, if you can explain why you failed English comp twice in Tennessee and then got an A plus last semester, I'll give you the scholarship right now.

So I was like, well, actually, it was because I was drunk all through the year and a half period, and then I dropped out of school and came down here. I said, oh, well, that makes sense. Yes, you can have the scholarship.

That was the beginning of what? I think I spent three and a half years doing two years of a community college program. And then I spent another two years finishing up at Milsap's College, which is like a small private liberal arts college on a business degree. I'm really taking my time.

I was taken just like half load at the community college and just, you know, what I'll take creative writing. I'll take history. I'll take this class because I like the teacher really treating it like an extended high school, which oftentimes community college can be.

And then finally got to the point of, well, I guess I should declare a major in some of my mentors at the time. They tell me a few different things, but the one that really resonated with me most was, well, just go get a, if you don't know what you want to do and I didn't.

You just go get a business degree. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be beneficial. Or I think he encouraged accounting, but it required a couple more classes, maybe a semester longer than I could afford. So well, some perspective real quick, sorry to be an interview flow, but the county is the most popular major in the United States. And I think it's really in like business majors in general. And the conventional wisdom is if you don't know what to study, just study business because it's inarguably useful to know how business works.

And that's true. That's a true statement. Yeah, and accounting, I like to say, is kind of like the physics of business in terms of like the money has to go somewhere. Where did it go? You're just like, it's like following oxygen passing through like the circulatory system or anything like that. Like money is kind of like the oxygen of the world.

You know money is the operating system that the United States at least operates on and pretty much everything involves money and like the sooner you kind of like acknowledge that and For me it was a big struggle like it just took me a long time because I was very idealistic headstrong and I didn't want to believe that it all came down to money but over time I've kind of like come to terms with that and I

I've had a very complicated relationship with money, you know, like I've talked about this on the podcast like basically living in my car for a year after I dropped out of high school and all that stuff and just like wanting to pretend that like there was some sort of

you know, hanging out in the public libraries and things like you can kind of delude yourself into thinking like I don't actually need that much money to survive but then you think about like all the things that can go wrong and how little of a safety that there really is in society to save you and then you start thinking like well I just the rational thing to do is to make as much money as possible and save as much money as possible so that I am sure that

Regardless of what happens, I will be okay. And you know, later when you have a family, it becomes even more important to do this and things like that. But getting a business degree is a great way to just kind of have that understanding of how the world works. And then like learning economics, which is kind of like the incentives around scarcity.

That gives you a framework for understanding the world and understanding why countries, nation states make the decisions they make, why individual actors in a local community do the things they do. It just provides you with this great framework for understanding the world, and a lot of it is theory, and it doesn't really hold up in practice, but it is still better than nothing. A bad model is still better than no model at all.

So anyway, that concludes my endorsement of youth studying business. I do think it's a reasonable thing to study. I think if you don't know what to study, study computer science, because that is the highest paying, and the skills are transferable to so many different fields, you're going to learn all this math, engineering, concepts, stuff like that. But I don't think that accounting is a bad major, and I don't think general business administration is a bad major either.

So sorry, I'm kind of like teasing lessons out of what you're saying and repackaging them for people listening with through my own filter. Well, let's get back to you. And I would endorse everything you just said. I totally agree with that with with the same caveat. And in fact, one of my mentors was encouraging me to go to engineering at a school. What was it?

I think it was Mississippi State because Mississippi State had a real good engineering program. But to do that, I would have had to leave my job, move over two hours this way. My wife and I had just started dating the year prior to this. I'd rather go two miles down the street from my house, which was literally where the college was that I ended up going to.

like if there was something in my school and I would change, and it'll be apparent in a minute why, because I ended up kind of trying to do this, I would have done engineering first, or computer science would have been what I had landed in, just because, yeah, just because.

it ended up being the thing I was much more interested in. I just didn't know it soon enough in my story. So take us from your schooling and congratulations on getting that scholarship and it sounds like you were able to finish your degree program.

Yeah, I did. I was able to transfer in and I had some help getting into this other college, you know, a couple letters of recommendation from community members. I didn't mention this whole time I've been working for the same coffee shop as a barista that I now help run. So I was doing that in the mornings and then going to school primarily in the afternoons and the evenings.

And by nature of the, you know, it was a central coffee shop in Jackson. So I knew people from, you know, the streets to doctors and lawyers. I served them all and knew just a lot of people. And so I got some letters of recommendation ultimately from contacts I met in the community that helped me get into the school that I graduated from.

and got that business degree. That was 2012 when I graduated. A cool decade after I probably should have been finishing up. But you were able to work your way up in the coffee shop chain to running multiple locations. And I'm really excited to dive into the logistics of how you run multiple coffee shops. But maybe you can talk about what it's like to work as a barista in a coffee shop because this is one of the most common jobs in the United States.

Coffee shops are everywhere. I think Starbucks alone employs like more than 100,000 breakthroughs or something. And Starbucks is probably just like, I don't know, 25% of the coffee shop market, even though they're by far the market leaders, like there are so many other coffee shops. And of course there are like local chains, like the one that you're involved in. Maybe you can talk about what it's like, what your day is like as a barista.

Oh, man, I loved it for most of those. I pretty much did that for 10 years. And I went from being hired on straight out of that rehab facility. This was my first job. I got hired on to as a night worker. So I was working at the time, like 6 p.m. till 11 or 12 at night. We stayed open a lot later than we do now.

and I'd get off work and go home and crash and then get up. I'd go to a recovery meeting at noon and then I would repeat the process. And I went from that to flipping the script and working mornings, so I'd get there at 5.30 in the morning, work till noon, and then go to classes when I eventually started going back to school, you know, all afternoon. And some of my earlier years I was

I think when I was, I know when I was in Holmes, the community college, I had some days where I was working afternoons, because I had a morning class. But by the time I got to Milsaps, I had all the business. Most of the business courses met in the afternoon anyway, so it worked out real well to just split the day between those things. But as a barista, I mean, many people listening to this, if not everybody, has the experience of being a customer at a coffee shop, probably.

And as a barista, I loved being the hub, kind of the nexus of the little town that I was in, where all I got to do is show up at work, make some cool drinks, like, I'm an artistic guy by, you know,

by nature and so I like the arts and crafts version of it, of your creating something with your hands. I really enjoyed that and it's one of the reasons web development was appealing. I'm creating something from scratch. I can see what's going on. I see the results, the fruits of my labor.

And so that was real fun for me. But more importantly, the craft part of it aside, you just got to rub elbows with the community every day. And I have a lot of friendships that I met at those coffee shops that I worked at in those early years. One, my buddy Brian, my best friend down there. I've been friends with Brian since his kids were this big. And they're in college now.

So I love the community aspect of it. And I was a introverted, I am an introverted person by nature. So it forced me into a situation that I wouldn't actively seek out, but I learned to become comfortable in, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean what you're describing almost kind of like reminds me like if you ever seen the 1980s show Cheers Yeah, oh, yeah, the parallels right there are up and down a lot of people a lot of my old-timer customers would compare their visits and their Experience and cups the coffee shop to cheers like straight up. This is like this is like cheers the Jackson cheers

Yeah, and I'm going to give a very quick overview of Cheers for the people who weren't alive in the 1980s, which is probably at least, you know, maybe half of our audience. But basically there was a show in the 1980s called Cheers, and it was a phenomenon. It was like one of the most beloved kind of situational comedies of all time. And it centers around a recovering alcoholic, Sam, who when he was, you know, a drunkard, I'm sorry, that's probably not the most

But he was always drunk. I think he got injured as a professional baseball pitcher or something like that for the Boston Red Sox. I think it's the Boston Red Sox. And when he was really drunk, he somehow bought a bar.

But then he went into recovery. So he's like a recovering alcoholic who just happens to have to work in a bar all the time to keep the lights on, right? And he's got like all these kind of recurring characters. You know, there's the know it all mailman. There's the kind of angry lady Carla who's like despises her customers, but like has this charm about her. And then there's like, it's kind of like it's a show about like class.

Essentially, you've got the working class people, and you've got the educated people coming in for their martinis and stuff, and they're all kind of like mixing in this social kind of like town square type location of this bar in Boston. And the thing that I think a lot of people like about it is it's like real. They address a lot of real topics.

on the show like like one of Sam's you know baseball team members comes out as gay and then there's like an episode where they're like well is this gonna become a gay bar now like there were people that are like no you can't like gay people into this bar and they had pressed these social topics in the 80s when very few people were talking about them and a lot of this stuff was just you know kind of avoided by mainstream media

So it's seen as this really good kind of like just something that kind of defines the era in a way. It's a capstone. And it is still pretty funny. My wife loved watching it because she was like learning more about American culture. And we were actually in Boston a few weeks ago when we went to the Cheers Bar. It was easy to get a seat, but we did walk through and we got some photos and stuff. And yeah, it's just really cool.

It sounds like being a barista is kind of like being Sam there, like polishing the glasses and like talking to people and learning about their daily lives and giving somebody to talk to while you're fixing them fancy lattes. Yeah.

And even more so the longer you stay. So like, I spent 10 years doing that, which is abnormal, especially today, to spend that many years in that environment doing that. It worked out great for what I was doing also at the time. But as you stay for multiple years, you really become cemented in

that community into whatever role, like character role that you fall into, and pigeonholing others into their roles. And it was a real neat time in my life. I appreciate that part of it while I was in school.

Yeah. So one of the things that I'm really excited to learn a little bit more about is you went really deep down the rabbit hole of getting really good at doing latte art. And what is latte art? Because my understanding is like you checked out a bunch of VHS tapes and like just kind of learn how to create elaborate latte foam art.

Yeah, so this was, I guess, mid-2000s when apparently VHS was still a thing because I remember getting a VHS tape and playing it out at our warehouse where we roast all our coffee. So we have this big warehouse where we roast coffee and have a training set up and everything.

But basically, when you combine espresso, you know, from the espresso machine, these little short shots of really condensed coffee, if you will, with a little layer of crema on top, which almost looks like a caramely colored cream layer, a real thin layer, but it's present on a good espresso shot. When you combine that with froth milk, which is not like

fluffy foamy milk, but just a real microfiber, almost like velvety texture milk. You can pour it in such a way, and I don't have anything. I can really demonstrate. But if you kind of tilt your cup and pour it in a certain way and wiggle it around, you can draw on that caramely colored top layer with the white milk, little geometric designs and stuff. You can do a little rosetta, you can do a heart, you can just swan.

And those things were becoming real popular in those mid 2000 years in the barista scene, which also was quite pretentious in those years, if I might add. Yeah. And I was a part of the problem for a few of the years, at least.

But we all got real interested in doing that. And me and my buddy Joe, we bought a bunch of gallons of milk and went out to the warehouse and spent like a Saturday watching the, you know, like pausing the VHS tape. Like, how did he, how does he do in his roast? Just total geek out stuff, like, you know, that you do when you're a barista five years in to attend your barista career.

Yeah, I mean, like the narrative, at least in like popular opinion that you hear is like, this is a quote unquote starter job. I never liked that term. But basically like, it's you move on, right? You're not meant to be waiting tables when you're 70. People will say stuff like that. But the amount of pride and craft craftsmanship you took in it, I think belies like a level of reverence for getting things on right.

Even if it's something as pedestrian as putting some foam on top of a drink that somebody's going to drink while they're rushing out the door to get to work or something like that. So I applaud you for taking it seriously. And there's this Abe Lincoln quote, which I always love. It's one of my favorite quotes, but Abe Lincoln says, whatever it is, you want to be a good one. Yeah, that's so good, right?

that and that can resonate with everyone and should resonate with everyone.

Yeah. So let's talk about your progression from working as a barista. You're in recovery. You're kind of like tooling up your skills as a barista. You are finishing your education out and learning about the physics of business accounting and other business administration topics that you're studying. How do you go from merely working as a barista to actually running the entire chain? What was that progression like?

Yeah, it was a progression. So here's what I thought was going to happen. My last semester of school, and this would have been in 2012, so like the spring 2012 semester, I had combined one of my finance classes or an entrepreneurial class or something was giving me credit to basically go to our accounting office

for our company that I was working with and like shadow an accountant and like learn some of the ins and outs of Real junior level stuff out there But what I thought was going to happen was okay I'm gonna now go get a real job right because it's a coffee shop I'm gonna go get a real job and like a bank or a big company or I don't know what

uh, because that's the thing that you now do when you have a business degree. And I think I had a finance concentration or something like that. Yeah. So what I was doing was I was still working some, some hours, you know, that my whole career at school, I was, I had to work, I had to pay for, you know, rent and everything. So I was working and then going here and then I was starting to apply for jobs, very half a half asked and unenthusiastically because

Now that it came to the end of it, I really couldn't imagine myself in like a corporate stiff type of role. It's just, and I still can't. What ended up happening though was during the course of that semester, two really important and pivotal things. One with my career was my boss approached me and said, hey, would you consider staying on? And I forget what the role was, but she made a role that was basically like,

corporate vice vice president or or operations officer, we called it something, you know, you, in a small business, you can call anything, whatever you want. Yeah. But she basically offered me a role in upper management to help her run at the time we had, I think we had five corporate stores and five franchise stores, depends on the year as to whether the number is right. But we had several corporate, which we owned and then several franchises, which we were their franchise or.

So she offered me that and we'll come back to this second point, but the second pivotal thing was I took Calculus 1 because I'd put off taking any higher level math until the very last time that I had to take it to graduate. Because I was scared of math and I was scared of science for reasons really unbeknownst to me.

Because what happened during that Cal I class was I realized I was screwed because I'd forgotten all the trigonometry. So I relearned trig and took Cal I at the same time, relearned on my own and took Cal I at the university and freaking loved it. So I was like, man, what have I been doing like taking finance classes? This is where it's at.

We'll come back to that in a minute, because I went back to school the next year, and it really went into the deep end. But with work, I said, yeah, sure, I'll do this job. And so I stopped being a barista one week. And then the next week, I was suiting up and showing up at our warehouse, you know, to the office that we had out there.

But I just became a floater, sort of. So I was shadowing my boss, who was the co-owner at the time, her and her husband, who has since passed, were the only two owners. I was shadowing her. We had a little team, a small upper management team, and I was really just going from shop to shop.

sort of think of it as a district manager role with a little bit of work in the accounting office to see how the nuts and bolts, the beans, counting the beans at the coffee bean shop. Yeah, like a literal bean, shop bean counter. That's right. That's right. And from there, so that was year one in 2012.

from there until today in 2024. And really it's been the same the last several years since COVID. Until about 2019, I just gradually had more responsibility put on my plate to where my title today is COO.

chief operating officer, but I mean, all that means is that I'm ultimately responsible to make sure all the gears are greased and turning and operations are smooth. There's a fair bit of strategic planning for, you know, menu planning and pricing and a little bit of everything, right? So it's my general business degree part of schooling has really paid dividends on running a small business operation rather than just being pigeonholed into one specific thing.

Yeah, which I've enjoyed that. I think I might get bored if I was too narrowly focused. Yeah. And that's one of the great things about being in like an organization that is smaller and not a giant Fortune 500 company is there are so many different types of work that you're doing. Like as the executive director of freecokecamp.org, which is like the executive director is basically the charity equivalent of CEO. I get to do all kinds of stuff, right? And like no day is the same.

I get to, you know, compose like this week. I compose like an article about our free code games, 10 year anniversary. And we crunch the numbers and we figured out our top contributors in terms of volunteer contributions both to code, both to, you know, writing tutorials. And of course, and then you are on that list. Thank you very much.

for everything you've been doing through your thoughtful tutorials. And then like, you know, just add meetings about like platform development, looking into how we can keep our infrastructure costs down or lower than we spent like more than $100,000 last year on servers. After all the credits, I was able to like track down and grants and stuff like that. It's, you know, there's a lot to be done.

And the great thing about being kind of like higher up in an organization is you get to do a lot of things and you get to put your finger in all the different pies, so to speak. So there's a lot of learning. And I imagine you're still learning a lot within that role, just how you can be a better operator.

Yeah, totally. And that's that's the appealing part. Another appealing part of it, too, is I hope I will always be a lifelong learner. And we throw that term around very loosely, but I really sincerely mean it because I've freaking love learning how to improve my professional self and how to go in into coding and different skills and level up technically, and then how to just do things smarter by nature of how I can stitch things together in my business and in my personal life.

Yeah and doing things smarter that is like you can only work so hard like the smartest greatest physician in the world can only go see so many patients a day and help them help diagnose their you know their problems or help treat their problems but as somebody like you and I who commands machines an array of machines

that are at our disposal, we can essentially greatly scale what we can accomplish, right? We don't need to physically be doing anything. We can automate stuff. And then like right now, as you and I speak, there are probably around 10,000 people using freecokecamp.org. And I can be on this conversation, learning from you. And I don't have to be like making sure like every packet gets rooted exactly where it needs to go because of the beauty of software and leveraging abstraction.

You have really been out there like beating the drum of like automate, automate, automate, like figure out ways to work smarter because you can only work so hard, right? And I want to talk about how you were able to, like obviously you learned the ropes, running coffee shops,

But there was also this desire to continue to learn and it took you almost down the inevitable path of being able to scale your effort laterally and just have a lot of things, a lot of path boiling at the same time that were maybe watched by robot versions of you.

Even if it's a very simple kind of automaton version of you, your intention has been expressed through code or through some sort of script that you've written for like an Excel spreadsheet or something like that. And as a result, you have kind of these autonomous agents, these drones that are going around and doing your bidding. 100%.

And I'll give you the earliest example that I can think of. And it's something that's still in production for us at cups today.

2013, 2014, it was right after I started my upper management roles. I was first dabbling into coding and how do I get more technical? What can I level up? And we were still at our cafes, and hopefully this is not the case for anybody anymore. But we were still faxing orders on physical paper in a fax machine to our warehouse where they would take it and physically fulfill the orders.

We had a lot of like real ancient systems going on. And I remember the first thing I did, I was like, man, I think we can, I know we can do better than this. Can I just build something in a spreadsheet? And so I hooked up a bunch of Google spreadsheets and each store had their own sheet and you can connect them together. So you have different permissions on different pages and different columns. And ultimately I made our own interest or inventory management and ordering system.

straight up home brewed and spreadsheets or area in Google sheets as the case was that I added scripting because you can script stuff with it's basically a JavaScript language and an app script that Google uses where you can script it to do certain operations at the end of the month and whatnot.

And built this thing that on the front end, maybe we should have been doing that all along, but it was the first real world project where I saw that with not very much skill, like minimum skill level.

And just knowing what solution I needed from this problem, I can make this work. And it can be a real big time saver and error reducer. Because you do stuff on paper, you're going to make errors. I mean, it's guaranteed. You can still make them in spreadsheets. But the calculations and stuff, you can at least hard code in there so that the calculations aren't messing up.

Yeah, there's always humans, always humans in our business. That's where the errors come from. But I've been doing stuff like that in the years since. And Quincy, this is not like I kind of jokingly say like low skill level, this is low skill level stuff.

They can make huge differences and does in small business operations where the owner, the founder, the operator, just maybe they know what a spreadsheet is, but I take for granted the fact that I know a lot about spreadsheets and the very basic stuff. A lot of people still don't know how to use or utilize in their business to the fullest potential.

Yeah. And I think that this is precisely why I'm bullish on software continuing to be like a major industry and why there being tons of developer jobs for a long time to come. Maybe those jobs will be hybrid, you know, operating officer slash developer who maintains like all the various scripts within the small business. But there are millions of small businesses just in the United States.

And there are millions of charities here in the United States. There's more than a million charities. So if you think about it, that's a lot of small organizations that don't necessarily want to buy some big oracle package. Maybe they can't afford it, but if it's not what they need for their very specific needs,

What they need is the skills so that they can go and implement solutions and maintain those solutions and expand those solutions. And there's always new work to be done. It's not like magically like, okay, the entire operation, it's not like the Jetsons where you just push the button. George Jetson's job is literally to show up at his plant, well, press the button and then he just kicks back, takes a nice nap, right? And that's kind of the joke is like in the future, everybody's got flying cars and like,

Work is just pushing a button and you don't have to you can be completely dim-witted and still do your job, right? You know, but the reality is there we're so far from that. It's not even funny like a vast majority of small businesses are probably overpaying for crappy enterprise solutions and they have no idea how those are working and They do need like developers even if that's like a contractor to come in and like audit their process or something like that because both you and I kind of like learn

By doing, I learned a lot of my early developer skills just trying to update and maintain our school's different systems. And of course, spreadsheets were a huge part of that because spreadsheets are probably the greatest productivity saving software invention of the past 70 or 80 years. Like if you think LLMs are saving people time, wait until you look at how much time spreadsheets have saved people.

unfathomable how much time people used to spend like manually doing calculations before Visicoc in like, I think the late 70s or something like that, right? And now we, of course, we've got Excel and we've got Google Sheets, but we had like Lotus, we had like all these different tools that progress toward what we use today. And most people still have absolutely no idea how to leverage the power that spreadsheets have. And that's one of the reasons I applaud you for continuing to create these amazing tutorials.

Can you talk about some of the most impactful things you did using spreadsheets early on? Well, I mentioned one of them just then, and I'll take another one just from my personal life because that's why I was an early user and continue to use Google Sheets for a lot of things over Excel in certain circumstances. But when my wife and I got married,

We, you know, you see a zillion templates out there to make your own personal budget, finance trackers, all this stuff. And I home brewed another finance tracker out of Google sheets that we've been iterating on and using for the 12 years we've been married now. I just make a new one and make it better every year.

that requires, by design, not as a bug, but it requires us to be conscientious about our purchases. So it doesn't just scrape our bank account, we could do that, like there's tools for that too. It requires us to manually do some things so that we are manually seeing, you know, we don't use cash anymore, who does, but we're manually seeing, we're spending this money, here's our balance, here's our categories, I got a data analytics tab that

you know, it gives charts and year-to-date stuff like that. But for our personal finances, for our personal just financial conscientiousness, it's been very impactful. And we both came into it kind of on the same page, so it wasn't a hard shift in our marriage to get on that same page. But I would say it's been a key factor in

and getting us out of debt, which we did early on, and we've got our house now, so that's the only debt we have. But then keeping us that way. We could spend up to our ears and credit cards and stuff, and we'd choose to pay it off and get the Amazon points instead.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm also very proud to say that the only that I have is the mortgage on our house and also trying to be very conscientious about that sort of stuff. I think that like set it and forget it like the credit card companies want to make it super easy for you to just go out and spend money and

They forget how much money you spent. It's so frictionless. They're out of business if you don't. Exactly. And credit card companies are able to offer Amazon points or other kind of rewards because there are a whole lot of people that are indebted to them. And so like the people that are organized that make heavy use. I mean, you know, don't hate the player. Hate the game, right? It's not your fault as a user of a credit card that all bunch of people are irresponsible with their credit cards.

But like obviously people being bad with managing this is subsidizing the people who are being good with this and are getting awards. So that's just the way it is. And you want to be on one side of that equation rather than the other.

And the way you get there, I think, is just being conscientious as you and your wife are doing. And of course, there are going to be situations where people are in dire straits. And credit card debt is probably the most dangerous type of debt, other than getting money from a loan shark or something like that. But obviously, I speak from a position of relative privilege, but just planning. Planning things out and saving as much as you can.

So again, I'm going off on another soapbox sermon, but like just making sure that you're saving as much as possible because you never know what's going to happen. And don't like I like to joke that like the only thing like, you know, about somebody who drives a hundred thousand dollar car, you don't know whether they're rich. All you know is that they had a hundred thousand dollars more than they have now before they bought that car. Yeah. So true.

Yeah, okay, so it sounds like you were using it and I like the idea of just like destroying the spreadsheet every or not destroying it But like creating a brand new spreadsheet for every year and then just keeping your budget going on that also because I personally use Google Sheets a lot and I've hit the like 10 million cell limit before nice

Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah. Well, free coke camp has a lot of transactions, a lot of chill human beings donating each month. And if you multiply that out, that's a lot of metadata from like PayPal and places like that. But maybe you can talk about some of your articles that you've been writing because you've written so many tutorials to help people make

better use of these spreadsheets and how you come up with ideas for writing about Google Apps Script and things like that. Are these just things that occur to you when you're working? You're like, oh yeah, I use that a whole lot. I should teach other people how to use it.

Yes, so far most of my tutorial writing and my YouTube channel that really they do a lot of the same things in parallel. It's come from either something I've previously made like a budget or a search bar or something. Something I've seen already on YouTube that I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I'd kind of like to remix that and do it in this way. You're using these functions or using Apps Script or not using Apps Script.

or just something that pops into my head. I mean, I'm sure you can relate to having a Google Doc or 50 somewhere with ideas. And I've just got over the years so many ideas that I'll just jot them down. Like, I think you're supposed to do, although I question that sometimes, because I have so many. And I'll pull from those.

But usually it's something I've made or something that at this point somebody has requested from a previous video. So I have a lot of, I'm grateful to have the, not a ton, I have 10 million like you guys, Bravo. But I've got a few thousand subscribers now and I'm getting people actually asking, hey, how do I do XYZ? Hey, can you help me build this and I can share this sheet with you? So my favorite thing to do is

is to break off a bite-sized project that's maybe even a piece of a bigger picture, how to do this one functional thing, and then do a five minute, ten minute. I wish I had time to do longer things honestly, but to do these bite-sized tutorials right up a little bit,

And then the beauty of the internet, man, it just lives in perpetuity until I decide to take it down, update it, or whatever. And it continues, you know, some of my best performing things were some of my earlier work going on two years ago now. Yeah. So I've really gone head over heels into the

I wish another word was out there for content creator, but I've always been a writer. I love the craft of putting something into the world. I love the combination of the coding stuff and the real world productivity with spreadsheets and kind of combining all those together so that somebody else benefits from it. Like I benefited from when I figured out how to do it. It's been so much fun. That's why I keep doing it.

And again, I applaud your, you're kind of like learning a public, you're learning how to do things, things that you're figuring around and teaching other people how to do it, which is how knowledge has historically always been passed down, usually through like, you know, apprenticeships and things like that, like going all the way back to the ancient times. But now it's passed on by somebody like, man, I've got this weird problem that is probably, maybe I'm the first person that ever encountered it, they start googling around, they find an article

by Ammon, and they're like, oh wow, I didn't know you could build games in Excel. You can build minesweeper, you can do lots of things. I think you have some tutorials on doing that sort of stuff, or that you can write functions and the degree of automation, the degree of using Excel as essentially kind of like a makeshift database between all your different coffee shops and the roastery.

Those kinds of clever applications of relatively ubiquitous, easily understood technology. You don't have to create a custom web UI and all this stuff. You could create a back-office tool to do that, or you could just have an Excel sheet that is immediately useful that you can quickly iterate on, and you've taken the root of just going to where people already know how to use Excel. Everybody has used Excel in their career at some point if they even touch the computer. It's like inescapable.

And so they understand the concepts of cells, and you can create a very simple user interface, if you will, in Excel, or in Google Sheets. So yeah, these are extremely powerful tools, and I applaud you teaching them. One question that I have for you is, you're somebody who's, as you said, you love to write, you play piano. I don't know if you want to play something real quick. You've got that piano hooked up, I think, and it's pretty audible.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe take like 20 seconds to play something for us. Let's do 20 seconds of... What about some rock mononoff? You know rock mononoff? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. This was like the... This is a prelude that my mom played, like in her college days or something, and I knew what it was growing up, and it was like my goal. I coveted learning how to play this. I can't play the whole thing right now, but I'll play the start, and you might recognize it. It's one of these big, bold pieces.

it goes on and on and on and then it gets crazy fast and like oh it's it's like a blizzard at the end of it yeah but yeah I've been playing playing on and off since childhood super rusty these days yeah I think Rock Mountain Office generally considered one of the hardest composers I would like in recent time like

I'm sure they're like contemporary composers who intentionally make their music really hard to play or really like Yeah, I mean you can see like some black MIDI type like if you're familiar with like the Japanese black MIDI thing where they're basically kind of like playing things that are impossible to play on a piano by programming them with MIDI but

Wow, that sounded great. And so you are playing piano. You've written novels through National Write a Novel Month, Nanorimo, I think. You've written a Nanorimo. So you're very much in touch with the creative aspect of the human experience, but at the same time,

You can set a lot of that aside and just focus on the work that needs to be done. And I think that's the hallmark of like a good strong creative person is to be able to adapt to reality. Like Van Gogh, arguably one of the greatest visual artists of all time. So a single painting is in his entire life, right? His existence was subsidized by some wealthy, you know, brother-in-law or something like that, right?

And his entire life was failure and he had a miserable life. He shot himself in the chest after sending his ear in a letter. It just doesn't sound like a very fun life. I think he also had substance abuse issues. And imagine if somebody like Mango could also say, I'm going to do this. And maybe people would argue the true artists can't.

adapt themselves to reality. But like you can argue that there is some adaptability. Maybe he could have figured out a way to potentially meet the market where it was a little bit and not had such a miserable life where he's dependent on his brother-in-law.

right and maybe gotten some easy wins by for example doing some murals at like the local coffee shop at the time or something I don't know like again pardon me like I don't know a lot about his life and I think he was in the Netherlands at that time because there's a Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam but I

What I would encourage to a lot of people listening to this is you can be a very creative artistic person and you can also figure out a way to channel some of that into getting things done. And one of the best ways you can do that is through code and through like figuring out innovative ways of using Google Sheets.

You can create music, you can create art, and you can use technology as a tool to do that. Not just talking about the AI-generated dribble mostly that you hear these days. And I guess for some people, they're like, oh, this AI music is good enough to be b-roll audio from my YouTube video, but musicians know.

And we don't like it. It sucks. Yeah. Maybe it'll get better. But my point is, you are a great example of somebody who's clearly a very creative kind of person who really enjoys expressing themselves. But you figured out kind of productive real world, suited up, type of ways that you can apply that creativity to affect just a local business. And so for me,

I really see you as a great role model for me as somebody who also considers somewhat artistic and creative. And it's great to see people like that succeeding too and not just like the, because we all know that there are lots of people that don't have a creative bone in their body and they don't have an ounce of intellectual curiosity and yet they're millionaires because they're like slum lords.

stuff like that, right? Like there are lots of those kinds of people out there too. And the creative thinking, those who think and feel as Neil Peiritz is, those kinds of people need to step in and like make a splash in industry as well.

I really think it's cool what you're doing. None of this was planned or anything, but I'm just reflecting on the life you've laid out so far. For me, I think there are tons of people in the free co-camp community who represent this. They want to spend their time running.

They want to spend their time reading to their kids. They want to spend their time listening to podcasts and audiobooks and performing amazing musical pieces like you just performed there with the rock mon enough. They want to have that kind of life of mind but they also want to be able to provide for their families and they don't want to be like for lack of a better word like kind of like a deadbeat starving artist type van Gogh type.

And again, I hope that that doesn't offend anybody because some of the greatest art and music and culture of all time has been created by people who experienced zero, you know, fanfare during their lifetimes and were probably just a charge of the state or of some wealthy relative who saw them as like, oh, there's your crazy brother, like doing his paintings again, or, you know, your crazy husband, or I can't remember exactly who was subsidizing Finco.

Anyway, sorry if I'm completely butchering Van Gogh's personal history, but I do know that, like, for most of the art that we've seen over the years has been subsidized by some wealthy patron, whether that's the king who brings, you know, most art into his court, or, you know, the Duke, I can't remember the relationship, there's a great movie called Amadeus. And everybody should watch. If you haven't seen it, it's an incredible movie.

But anyway, I'm going like way off of the topic, but I just wanted to emphasize my passion for creative thinking people also building up clap for like a better world and power in the real world. So we're not just a society run by anti-intellectual people that just read Zig Ziglar books all day and are just trying to like kind of like mindlessly amass resources so they can be alpha or whatever.

And it's such an easy thing relatively to do today because you can start with zero resources and just the internet. You probably don't remember. You mentioned to me or suggested, I think, on a Twitter DM or something when we first met a couple years ago, two, three years ago,

about starting a hash node blog and just starting to document, you know, and that's still something that people recommend, just document your journey. Like, this is a good starting point of just typing up what you're doing and getting it out into the world.

Now, people listening may not equate that with drawing a beautiful landscape or something, but I do. I think that there's a creative component in just the act of documenting and writing and doing it well that can open that door to whatever else you can create down the road.

And that's what I did. I was like, OK, well, Quincy said it's a good idea. I'll go. I don't know what this hash note is. But I went and got a hash note blog. I think six months later is when I started writing for you guys. Now I've got a couple newsletters where I'm contributing, not just technical stuff, but personal passion projects and really finding a way

that it can live again in perpetuity on the internet and be helpful in whatever manner for others and be an expression because I, you know, I'm not going to be comfortable in a suits job somewhere just in a cubicle.

But I gotta pay my fam, you know, I gotta get money to feed my family. So it's a both and rather than an either or where I can find productive, creative ways in the business I'm at and whatever is to come after it. And then I can also, if I need to do more creative stuff,

You know, the only person stopping you is you. And that's what I kind of looked at myself in the mirror when I really started going harder into the creation. Okay, what bandwidth do I have and let's be realistic? But what can I do with what I have and what can I generate and put out there for good in the world?

And the world doesn't need a lot of AI generated crap, restating what's already there, but it does need well thought out solutions to people's problems and will continue as long as we're around, I think.

Yeah, 100%. Well, I want to make sure that we capture the various facets of your ambitions and what you've been working on. Obviously, you've got a family. You're probably pretty settled there, running that coffee chain. You've got four young kids, and it's probably going to be another 15 years or so before they graduate. I often think that,

I have to joke that, like, having kids really did solidify with the next 10 or 15 years of my life is going to look like I'm going to be supporting my kids, right? And like walking up into school and making sure that they, you know, have like reasonable upbringings and don't get into too much trouble, right?

And that also means I'll probably be here in Texas for like the next, you know, 10, 12 years until they've graduated high school and then I'm hopefully going to move to New York City or Tokyo or some cool place and like live out my silver years doing exciting stuff like that. But for now, like this is like home base and

It strikes me that that might be the case for you. I did talk with somebody named Dorian on an episode that just dropped that I encourage everybody to listen to. Also, someone who's overcome or is in the process of overcoming a lot of addiction issues. But he takes his kids and he just travels the world and goes like Thailand or Europe and places like that.

And I think that's another cool approach. Where do you see the next view, really, if you can map out the next decade? What kind of skills do you want to continue to expand? What do you want to do with your family? What does an amen in his 50s look like?

Well, I am parallel to you in a lot of ways. We moved here and we kind of skipped over a few years to not really dive into the weeds there, but we moved here to Knoxville, which is where I grew up after me being in Mississippi, where I got shipped down for treatment for 15 years. So we've been here for eight years. I guess we're going on our eighth year right after we had my first child.

And so we had 2nd, 3rd, and 4th here. We got back around. My parents live here still around family. And this, the foreseeable future, same as you and Dallas, we're going to be here for the kids, unless something crazy changes. We moved here purposefully for that. And we love the area. We're an hour away from the Smoky Mountains. And it's a beautiful place to live. And I got roots here. So we're pretty well established with that.

Professionally, sort of in the same boat, I thought, you know, in one of the big thrusts for me diving deeper into free code camp specifically, and in my own publications, also during COVID, was I didn't know if I was going to be out of a job back in 2020. I thought our coffee shops might go under, we might close up shop. There was a lot of uncertainty in the air, as was the case with the rest of the world, right?

So I really started skilling up in preparation for and started applying for jobs that I had no business applying for, but I was applying anyway thinking that, you know, the clock was ticking.

Well, fast forward, the four years since our company has gratefully done fine. Some shops closed, some did well, so forth and so on. I see this probably a few more years, maybe. I would very much like to be doing the technical stuff, the creative stuff, the self-employed, or under another company stuff. I'd love to do that full time.

But the nuts and bolts are not there. It's trading insurance in a salary for hundreds of dollars, which is where the current income is, or a few thousand. The nuts and bolts don't work. So long term, yeah, I would like to do some

you know, double down further with this stuff, but I don't know if that's in the cards because having kids growing up, albeit 10 years after I should have, as I mentioned, you know, that just changes reality, which is why I'm a proponent for doing both anyway and seeing what doors open and still providing, but also being able to have that creative outlet to have that outlet where you can help others on the side.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that does describe how kind of like you're, you're almost kind of like hedging without taking any additional risk. Like what you're risking is you're saying that you're doing all this additional order percent, right? But like, I think that's like, there's so much.

I get, like, work-life balance shamed sometimes. Because I'm trying to do a lot of stuff. And people are like, just relax. Like, relax and do what? This is relaxing. It is relaxing working on projects. But there are certainly tense moments.

Like when I really need to get something live, but you know, I've been so distracted doing this other thing. And so there is a trade-off there. It's not free to spend an extra 10 or 15 hours a week or however much you're spending on building your YouTube channel and writing these tutorials and building and maintaining your newsletters and things like that. It doesn't come free. There is a cost to it. But at the same time,

Where are you going to fit that? You can't leave your job that gives you insurance and that also provides helping you pay off your mortgage, helping ensure that in case something happens to one of your kids, you're going to have something to be able to help pay for their recovery or treatment. I think what you're doing is pretty sane and pretty rational, even though it may look like from the outside, this person's like working themselves into an early grave. Yeah.

Well, and it's so funny because I look at the couple years before we started having kids, and I remember very distinctly the sensation of, man, I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do, and just thinking things like that. And people were telling me, you know, those that had gone before, older and wiser, like,

You have all the time in the world like this is the prime time if you want to do stuff and I did you know went back to school did did a number of things but fast forward to today and I think that I Managed to fit more things in in a constructive creative way Into less time by nature of the fact that now I have full family and additional responsibilities But you don't know the one without having the other and then when you have the other it's

You can't go back Yeah, I talked with Phoebe Vung Fidel who has I think she has three kids very young like and She similarly like both her and her husband work and she's working as a dev and she said that like having kids actually

was like a forcing function. It forced her to get organized and to make better use of her time and wake up super early and, you know, learn programming tutorials on free co-camp and other resources that she used so she could build up her skills. And so in a way, like the structure of just knowing that it's, you know, a little kid is going to wake up and start making noise banging on pots and stuff at 7 a.m. forces you to go to sleep early. And you know that like, okay, this is the time.

Like, I can't just sit here. I've only got this finite amount of time to use today before I've got to go to sleep if I need to be able to get the next things done. And so it sounds like you've been able to harness those, there's a saying in design that like one of my design professors told me he said, freedom comes from constraint.

And the constraint of having somebody wake you up every morning, regardless of like how much sleep you get, and you got to fix some breakfast, you got to walk them off the school, make sure they're sunscreened, you know, make sure their homework is in their backpack, like all the various morning routine things. And then.

You've got to come back and you've got this meeting exactly this time, every week is a standing meeting. And you've got this deadline, this deadline. Like those deadlines do force you to get creative and to make more efficient use of your time. And certainly what I've found is I waste a lot less time. Like I have no idea how much I used to play tons of video games.

I beat Dark Souls, I didn't beat Dark Souls without leveling up but I was like a one bro and I got so good at Dark Souls 1 that I could get like almost all the way through it without even leveling up my character. Just like holding the hits and stuff like that.

I mean, that was dozens and dozens of hours of maybe a hundred or more hours that I just spent playing Dark Souls. And that was, you know, now that I've got kids, like, that sort of stuff, it would be unfathomable that I'd just sit down and spend some of the God, a silly vanity thing like that. What have I got to show for it? I could break that I almost beat the game without leveling up. Who cares?

Right yeah, how many people did that help so so I feel like that forced me to grow up and to and again I don't want to like This video games or anything like spend your free time doing whatever you want to do but also Just know that you're gonna have a lot less free time once you have kids

So true. And that rings especially true for me, the Dark Souls reference. Because I was in on Dark Souls 1 also. And I played 2 and 3, but a soft spot remains for 1. And I couldn't tell you how many hours I spent on them. And that was pre our first kid and then during our first kid. But I can't imagine it now. We even, like I bought a PlayStation 5. I shouldn't have a few years ago and got Elden Ring when it came out last year. And it's like, oh, I'm going to play Elden Ring.

When am I going to play this super hard game that requires a loss of sanity and sleep to actually do anything good in it? And, you know, people say I played about a quarter of it, probably, and it still sits up there.

Yeah, and I never beat it myself because it's just like, you know, there's something to be said for a game that respects you like Elden Ring or like Dark Souls. They respect your intelligence and they're not like trying to like hand hold you and they're like, this is going to be really freaking hard, but you will get better. And I liken it to like free coat camps curriculum. We want to move in the direction of being more like Elden Ring in the sense that it's brutally hard, but if you keep working at it, you are actually going to get better. It's not like, so, so,

People complain about the difficulty level of Elden Ring and end of games like Dark Souls and stuff. Then they're like, there's no easy mode. Like there's no difficulty setting at all. Everybody has the same extremely frustrating difficulty experience when they go fight the first boss and the boss just completely destroys them.

And they're just like, man. And actually, the first time I played Dark Souls, I just couldn't beat the first boss. And I just walked away, because I was accustomed to games that had safe states built in. And they had this nice, smooth, difficulty curve. And they would coddle you, essentially, and give you little accomplishments, like achievement unlocked, and stuff like that. And then you go and you play Dark Souls. And it just does nothing for your confidence. It's like, you're going to suffer.

the entire setting of the game is absolutely miserable and brutal and you just have to keep dying over and over like and the game actually teaches you to persevere through that and like with my daughter like playing chess she got so frustrated the first few times she played chess with me and of course I just destroyed her because there's no random luck

where you can like magically beat somebody who's better than you know. If you are not as good at chess as the other person, they will beat you. It's almost deterministic, right? Yeah. And yet, like just the ability to like, it gives you kind of like that, that grit where you're just like, you're persisting and you're keeping going. And so it's no surprise to me as like an ultra marathoner who plays any games at all that you were drawn to the souls-worn games. Oh yeah.

And it's that grit, you know, I'm attracted to it. The incremental improvement, just slow, trudging forward, barely.

And what I was going to say about the difficulty level, there is no difficulty setting in the game. You just go and you farm low level enemies and get a bunch of XP and then you level your character up and then the game becomes easier because you're kind of like you're buffing your stats. And so people can in theory be really bad at Elden Ring and still win because they've got this giant sword and they've got like all these stats and stuff. And it's a way that you can beat the game without actually getting good.

at the game. That is an option available to you, but so many other games don't even give you the option of getting good at the game. They just kind of like hold your hand. So that is one thing that I profoundly respect about those Souls Wars games and the fact that they don't just add a bunch of microtransactions and stuff like that and it's not a paid-of-win by any measure and you actually pay like the 60 bucks and you get the game and you have the full game and you can go home and play it like

as much as you want, right? But I really appreciate the fact that it, the respect that it has for the player. And I think that your tutorials are excellent in that they have a high degree of respect for the learner. And they're like, you probably weren't born yesterday, but just in case I'm going to describe, you know, I'm going to define this term or I'm going to, you know, so there's a certain amount of respect, but at the same time, you're not deluding people and, you know, coddling them.

and free cocaine very much wants to go in that direction with these big curriculum updates that we're making, which you can read more about. I'll put a link to it in the description. I'm also going to put a link to your tutorials and to some other things you've been working on. But before we adjourn, I just want to make sure, are there any other big topics that you'd like to talk about?

I think we've covered the bulk of what I do. All the links, like he said, will be down below. And the main thrusts of my two energies are into this spreadsheets and coding channels, and then the addiction recovery channels. And so if either of those are interesting to you, you can check out more.

Absolutely, and I'll just tell you like there is I don't think anybody has ever said hi regret spending time getting better at spreadsheets It's always a good it's the same thing like oh man regret getting better at SQL databases or Python or it is just Inarguably a useful skill to have

The world runs on spreadsheets. For a lot of people on Wall Street, their entire job is moving things around in a spreadsheet. I cannot overemphasize what a massive

Burning torch passed down from the heavens the Promethean fire passed to us by through the innovation of spreadsheets, right? It is one of the most labor-saving inventions of all time and So so I strongly encourage you to get better spreadsheets to explore I mean you can use like you know LLMs with spreadsheets You can do a lot of stuff and you have tutorials on how to do a lot of this stuff

And you can build games and spreadsheets. You will be completely blown away with some of the ways that people are using spreadsheets. There's even competitive spreadsheet usage. It's like a cross between esports and Excel. It's pretty phenomenal too. Have you ever watched any of that?

I've watched some of it and like the way that they think it's like competitive programming basically. It's breaking down a problem. It's really cool. I'll try to find a good video about it. Have you created any videos about competitive spreadsheets? I have not. It has been a daunting subject for me because I label myself as not being at that level, but it's

It's constantly on my radar. This year I've actually been doing more Excel work than Google Sheets trying to kind of go into the much, much bigger ecosystem. And that's one of my 52 do lists topics that are sitting there for me.

Well, if you're listening to this in the future and Amen has written an article kind of like or created the video overviewing like what competitive Excel spreadsheet or I think that might be a cool term. Yeah, to focus on with your YouTube creation at some point.

I will be adding that as well in the show notes. So be sure to check out Ayman's amazing tutorials and follow his YouTube channel and just know that you're going to learn a lot and channel your inner Ayman when you want to be creative and you want to be artistic but you also want to get things done and pay the bills because I think that's what it's all about in 2024 is figuring out how to

There's never been a greater time to be a creator in terms of just having access like you can get Logic Pro for 200 bucks. You never had to pay for anything again, or you can use FL Studio, right? It's free. You can Fruity Loop Studio. We've got a tutorial on this digital audio workstation on the FreeCoam YouTube channel. You can learn how to do it.

Yeah, thank you. And we've got tutorials on DaVinci Resolve if you want to get into like filmmaking and video editing and things like that. Like the tools are so much better than they ever been. And there are so many great free tools. It's just a question of prioritizing what you want to learn, how you want to go about learning and how you want to apply what you're learning. And then the eternal question of how can you make money so you can.

Continue to keep calories flowing into your body and the bodies of those you love right and keep You know roof over your head right like you can figure that out of course free coat camp gives you like the shortest path to potentially getting a developer job or using your developer skills as a freelancer or you know creating some sort of software focused business, but

There's so much that you can do with the various creative tools out there and I want to thank you for kind of demonstrating just how you can do that and how you can kind of like have your cake and eat it too. How you can have a healthy balance, not totally crazy and scary family life in terms of not living paycheck to paycheck and actually being able to build equity and

buy a home and and those kinds of things which you know used to be very easy for people you work like a summer job and you can pay your mortgage like and you've got the Mustang from like you know just working at the garage for a few months and stuff like that like it seems like it used to be so easy back in the day and now everything's super different expensive and things like that

You know, again, like I just want to compliment your ability to adapt to the situation and to figure out a way to make it happen. Like a lot of people aren't having kids because they're worried about economics. Like at the end of the day, you want to have, you want people to have kids? Make them economically prosperous. It's not that people don't want to have kids. It's that having kids is really expensive and it's scary. But

You've got four kids and you've figured out a way to make it work. I've got a couple of kids and I've been talking with a lot of other people who are figuring out like a path to stability so that they can have kids and so they can, you know, have that aspect of their lives as well. And it all comes back to skills to pay the bills. And so learn some skills. They pay the bills from aim and learn them from free code camp. And yeah.

For sure, I second all of that. And I mean, it really boils down to getting stuff for me a lot of times when I look at an insurmountable thing in front of me that I just, I don't know how to get around it. Well, I'll just, I'll literally take out a piece of paper and write down the time consuming elements of my day. Okay, which of these can I cross out?

And you know what? Dark Souls and video games was one of those hours long for every week things that I now do much more productive things. I generate a video a week in time that I used to spend playing video games. And that's like low-hanging fruit, right? So it just comes down to a willingness to adapt to what it's going to take.

Absolutely. Things are going to continue to get harder for pretty much everybody. The world is getting more competitive. There are more people out there that are competing to kind of get the same calories that you're trying to get in terms of like finding, like getting some freelance contract or, you know, competing on some, you know, freelance or website, heaven forbid, you're trying to find work on one of those. The world is going to continue to get more competitive and you're going to continue to need to keep climbing if you want to stay above the water line that's rising.

And so I, you know, I applaud you for setting aside a game as fun as Dark Souls. So you can focus on other things. It's not easy to do. I love Dark Souls that I have fantasies that at some point I like take a vacation. I can play back through it. But yeah, I just, I just thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing your lived experience. And thank you for everything you're doing to help people recover as well. I think that is commendable.

Yeah, I'm just we're just so honored to have you creating tutorials within the free code game community and representing just like what a hard working, you know, serious creative person can accomplish.

That's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on here and letting me contribute to a community. And if you haven't already gotten on free code camp, please go do so yourself out there because it really is the fastest way to skill up in these areas. And it's only getting better every year. Quincy wrote, which I think he's going to mention.

and link in the description and article about all the 10-year updates that have hit and are coming in the next three years. And there's some big stuff planned out. So I'm excited for your platform and appreciative for all that you've done for the developer community at large. Yeah. Well, thanks again for your kind words and for coming on the show. Everybody, until next week, happy coding.