Episode 50 – From Educator to Developer to Entrepreneur

Listen in to episode 50 as Arsalan and Quincy discuss how Free Code Camp came to be and how you can benefit from this wonderful resource. Don’t forget to sign up for Arsalan Ahmed’s Five Steps to Success as a Software Developer email series to guide you on your coding journey.

Quincy Larson’s Bio:

Quincy Larson did his grad work in China through an American university and went through an intensive Mandarin program. During his five years in China, he taught at and served as an interpreter for various language training operations. He also recruited MBA students.

Quincy worked as a teacher and tutor throughout college and graduate school and later served as director of several schools in the US and China. He increased their academic rigor while simultaneously growing their student populations. Along the way, he learned to code.

Quincy wrote scripts to automate his school workflows so he could free teachers and administrators to spend more time with students. From this experience was born a new opportunity for aspiring software developers called Free Code Camp. Quincy started Free Code Camp, an open source community of 500,000+ people who learn to code together and build projects for nonprofits in the process.

You can find more information about Quincy and his experience on Free Code Camp, Quora, Medium, or Twitter.

Don’t forget to stop by and say hello to Quincy on Twitter!

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Quincy Larson. Quincy, something very interesting that I learned the about you is that you went to China for grad school. That’s the first time that I’ve heard of somebody going to China, and something interesting happened there. Tell me a little bit about that.

Quincy: Sure. I was 23 years old and I had just finished school and was working as a newspaper editor. Journalism wasn’t exactly a booming industry and I wanted to go back and gain some additional skills and learn specifically about economics and finance. A university in my city happened to have one of the oldest MBA programs in China. So, this university was all Chinese and they had American professors that would fly in and teach. During the first 10 days of the month, you would read the entire textbook of 400 or 500 pages and then you did the pre-work. Then, you had 10 solid days of lectures. Then, you had 10 days more to finish your final project in each class. So, it was like a rapid-fire circuit of classes.

Quincy: I flew over there and audited one class which was basically Mandarin 101. So, there I was in TingChing, China, which is a big city, but it’s not a tier 1 city like Shanghai or Beijing. I was on a campus of about 20,000 people and I was the only westerner. So, literally everyone in the international dormitory was from East Asia, primarily Korea.

Quincy: All of my interactions were in Chinese. So, it wasn’t just the cultural differences between the U.S. and China, but the language jump was pretty terrifying. Every conversation I had I was constantly second-guessing whether I was sufficiently communicating or if people were just being polite because Chinese people are very polite. They will nod and smile and then walk off and it will become clear to you later on that they did not understand you because whatever you asked was not done. Or, you’ll be halfway through a conversation and it’ll become clear that they didn’t understand some early part of the conversation and they were just being polite. Or,