freeCodeCamp Podcast

freeCodeCamp Podcast

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Elliot Arledge. He's a 20-year old computer science student who's created several popular freeCodeCamp courses on LLMs, the Mojo programming language, and GPU programming with CUDA. He joins us from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We talk about: - Building AI systems from scratch - How Elliot has learned so much so quickly and his methods - How he approaches reading academic papers - His CS degree coursework VS his self-directed learning In the intro I play the 1988 Double Dragon II game soundtrack song "Into the Turf" 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 https://wixstudio.com. Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Elliot's Mojo course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/new-mojo-programming-language-for-ai-developers/ - Elliot's Cuda GPU programming course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-cuda-programming/ - Elliot's Python course on building an LLM from scratch: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-a-large-language-model-from-scratch-using-python/ - Elliot's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@elliotarledge - Elliot's many projects on GitHub: https://github.com/Infatoshi

January 10, 2025

freeCodeCamp Podcast

freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kevin Powell, a CSS expert with nearly a million YouTube subscribers, discussing the importance of learning CSS in 2025, teaching concepts to deepen understanding, and how learning skateboarding helped Kevin escape Tutorial Hell. The podcast also mentions improvements coming to CSS.

December 20, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Interview with developer, speaker, and teacher James Q Quick. Grew up as an athlete-violinist in Memphis, chose computer science major, worked at Microsoft, FedEx, and tech startups, given 100+ conference talks. Discusses his Harry Potter Trivia app launching career, getting back on track after layoff, first developer job, self-promotion strategies.

December 13, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Scott Tolinski, creator of LevelUpTuts YouTube channel and co-host of Syntax podcast. They discuss Scott's transition from video editing to web dev, insights from 2000 tutorials, 800 podcasts, productivity tips, and his journey without burnout.

December 06, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Interview of Eamonn Cottrell, software engineer and coffee shop owner in Knoxville, who self-taught coding using freeCodeCamp and published 37 tutorials on productivity. He balances running coffee shops, ultra-marathoning, music, writing, and family life. Discusses automating logistics of coffee shop with spreadsheets. Find his articles at freecodecamp.org/news/author/sieis.

November 22, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Tim Ruscica, a software engineer and prolific programming teacher, who shares his journey from hacking his way into a Microsoft internship at 19 to lessons learned from a failed tech startup. He emphasizes Python as an accessible first language due to its minimal overwhelm.

November 15, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

FreeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Yifan Mai, lead maintainer of the open source HELM project at Stanford, discussing Open Source vs Open Weights in LLMs, AI's impact on jobs, and potential future use cases.

November 08, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Adam Stachoviac and Jerod Santo from The Changelog (world's longest-running software podcast) about open source changes, open data & LLM models, self-reliance & self-hosted infrastructure, and the business of running a developer community.

November 01, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Software engineer and YouTuber Dorian Develops shares his journey from a challenging childhood to becoming a successful web developer; discusses self-teaching codes, attending local meetups, remote work for travel, and 1-year recovery from addiction.

October 25, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

FreeCodeCamp's Quincy Larson interviews Tadas Petra, a Senior Developer Advocate at Agora.io who built dozens of mobile apps and tutorials, transitioning from Senior Dev to YouTube creator to Developer Advocacy. Topics include his immigration from Lithuania, Computer Engineering studied in school vs building consumer mobile apps, and the overlap between mobile dev & web dev.

October 18, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Interview with Kamran Ahmed, founder of Roadmap.sh and Google Developer Expert, discussing tips for contributing to open source projects, the origin of Roadmap.sh, his Design Patterns for Humans GitHub book, and freeCodeCamp's guide on how to contribute to open source.

October 11, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Dennis Ivy, a software engineer who dropped out of school at 18 and learned to build websites through self-teaching before starting his agency. He discusses growing up in a large immigrant family, gaining clients for web development projects, selling his codebase, and teaching Python.

October 04, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews YK Sugi, a YouTuber and software developer who has worked at Google and Microsoft. They discuss AI tools, interest rates in hiring, Japan's vs US developer culture, and avoiding burnout. Topics include YK's articles on getting a job at Google and leaving Google for entrepreneurship.

September 27, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Meg Risdal, Data Scientist & Product Manager at Kaggle, Google's Data Science platform. The discussion covers Kaggle, differences between academia and tech communities, StackOverflow vs Kaggle, the role of linguistics in AI, and her work on Gemma open models project.

September 20, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Eddie Jaoude, a software engineer and open source creator with experience ranging from Germany's banking sector to London's tech startup scene. Discussions include Eddie's journey into open source, building reputation through hackathons, finding freelance clients, and his tutorial filming setup.

September 13, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Jack Herrington, a self-taught software engineer with a background in overcoming dyslexia, who shares his experiences working at companies like Nike, Adobe, and Walmart, starting a popular YouTube channel (Blue Collar Coder), and publishing programming books. They discuss how Jack started blogging as he learned, early developer job opportunities that took him from Pennsylvania to Melbourne Australia, and his struggles with Dyslexia.

September 06, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Interview with Emma Bostian, a software engineer & manager at Spotify and Prolific coding teacher. Discusses her struggles early in her career, thoughts on Computer Science degrees, how she hires software engineers, and intentional procrastinating to solve problems.

August 30, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Hiroko Nishimura, a technical instructor who moved to the US as a child, recovered from a brain tumor, and went on to author technical books, become an AWS hero, and create the popular AWS Newbies community. They discuss her life, career move to NYC as a system administrator, and transition to teaching.

August 23, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Interview with Rahul Pandey, software engineer who left a lucrative FAANG job to start his own business. The discussion covers post-layoff developer job landscape and strategies for differentiating oneself in interviews. Also discussed: importance of salary negotiation and the belief that there exist 10x engineers. Links provided to Rahul's freeCodeCamp tutorial, videos, company, and blog article.

August 16, 2024

freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson interviews Angie Jones, a developer with 27 patents, discussing her career at IBM and Twitter, her unique approach to test engineering, and the difference between feature development and test development. She also talks about her interest in virtual worlds and AI for debugging.

August 09, 2024