The freeCodeCamp Podcast

In this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with Madison Kanna, a full-stack developer who works remotely for Mediavine. Madison describes how homeschooling affected her future learning style, how she tackles imposter syndrome and failure, and how she helps others teach themselves to code.

In this episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with developer advocate Alejandra Olvera-Novack about how she broke free from her restrictive cult upbringing, moved to the United States, and taught herself how to code.

Alejandra was raised without technology, without formal schooling, and in an extremely conservative environment. When she was in her late teens, she left her village and moved to Florida. 

After a couple years of googling everything under the sun to catch up on the world's events, and trying to attend college, she ran out of money. Since she was alone - having cut all ties with her family - she took a leap of faith, moved to Seattle, WA, and started looking for work.

She worked odd jobs for a while, but quickly realized she'd need something more to survive and thrive. So she started to learn about HTML and CSS, something she never thought she could do. Fast-forward a couple years later, and she was working her way up to a job at Amazon Web Services.

Today, Alejandra works with robots, helps developers be as happy and productive as possible at AWS, and runs the non-profit she founded that teaches women, minorities, and disabled how to code for free. She manages her anxiety and PTSD with the help of a service dog and some really great mentors and friends, and she still can hardly believe she's living her dream.

Find Alejandra on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/QuetzalliAle

Visit her website here: https://alejandraquetzalli.com/

Check out SheCodesNow, Alejandra's non-profit here: https://twitter.com/shecodesnow

Find Abbey on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/abbeyrenn

In this episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with freelance Ruby on Rails developer Colleen Shnettler about how she switched from electrical engineering to development, how she founded her business, and how she makes time for kids and family - among many other things.

Tim Myers is a developer from Denver. In the 1990s he finished high school and immediately enlisted in the US Army. When he got out, he started coding. He was working as a developer at an accounting firm when he got into a drunken brawl and ended up injuring somebody.

Tim was convicted of 2nd degree assault and got a 12 year prison sentence. He earned his college degree entirely while in prison, and was released after 8 years for good behavior.

He spent the next 3 years working various jobs like fast food while studying to get back into software development. And for the past 4 years, he's worked as software developer at several Denver companies.

In today's episode, Quincy interviews Tim about his journey from convicted felon to developer and family man.

Follow Tim on Twitter: https://twitter.com/denvercoder

Follow Quincy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ossia

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In this episode, Abbey interviews social engineering expert Rachel Tobac and learns how she transitioned from teaching to infosec by way of one exhilarating competition. 

Growing up, Rachel’s family didn’t have normal dinner table conversations. Her father was in medicine, so their chats revolved around strange diseases and scary edge cases. So when Rachel went to college, she aimed to follow in her father’s footsteps.

However, life had other plans, and she ended up becoming a teacher instead. But she wanted to do more than teach a small number of students – she wanted to help more people at scale. So she tried to figure out a way to do that. 

After moving across the country to Silcon Valley and learning more about the world of tech, she stumbled upon her true calling (with a little nudge from her husband and now co-founder): social engineering. She took a trip to Defcon four years ago, won second place in a social engineering capture the flag hacking event, and she was hooked.

She dove in head first, learned all she could about infosec, social engineering, and security, and never looked back. Now, she and her husband run Social Proof Security, the boutique educational security firm they founded two years ago, and boast some of the largest tech companies in the Valley as clients. Rachel is also chair of the board of the non-profit WISP (Women in Security and Privacy), helps get scholarships for women to attend Defcon each year, and travels and speaks at all kinds of conferences and events herself. 

When she isn’t educating companies about making their processes safer, she’s traveling the world, thinking up new ways to hack, or staring at her rescue dog. 

In this episode, you’ll learn all about Rachel’s somewhat meandering path into security, how she discovered her passion for educating teams about social engineering, what it takes to get into the field, and why she loves her job.

Find Rachel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RachelTobac

Check out Rachel's company: https://www.socialproofsecurity.com/

Learn more about DefCon: https://www.defcon.org/

Read up on WISP: https://www.wisporg.com/

Find Abbey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/abbeyrenn

On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy interviews Shawn Wang (@swyx). We talk about "learning in public" and his transition into tech from finance, where he left behind a job that paid him US $350,000 per year.

Shawn grew up in Singapore and came to the US as a college student.

He worked in finance, but at age 30, he burned out. So he decided to learn to code. He used freeCodeCamp and a ton of other resources, and since then he's worked as a freelance developer, and at several companies including Netlify.

Follow Shawn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx

Follow Quincy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ossia

Here are some links we discuss in the interview.

Shawn's Projects:

The official React subreddit that Shawn moderates: https://reddit.com/r/reactjs

Shawn's article on No Zero Days: https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/no-zero-days-my-roadmap-from-javascript-noob-to-full-stack-developer-in-12-months/164514

Job Search / Salary Negotation articles:

Cracking the Coding Interview: https://fcc.im/2UihbNm

Hasseeb Qureshi's story of getting a $250K/y developer job at Airbnb: https://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-i

Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" essay: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html

Patrick McKenzie on Salary Negotiation https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Quincy's recommended article: I spent 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp. Here's what I learned: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/9a07468d2331

Algorithm Expert: https://www.algoexpert.io

Full Stack Academy https://www.fullstackacademy.com

Shawn's Learn In Public movement:

Shawn's Learn In Public essay https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/9720bd4a30606ca3ffb8d407113c0fe5‌‌

Kent C Dodds' Zero to 60 in Software Development: How to Jumpstart Your Career https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qPh6I2hfjw&app=desktop‌‌

Cory House on Becoming an Outlier: https://vimeo.com/97415346‌‌

Brad Frost on Creative Exhaust: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/creative-exhaust/‌‌

Patrick McKenzie on the origin of the word "friendcatcher": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511089‌‌

Chris Coyier on "Working In Public": https://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/

Links to other things we discuss:

Shawn's Software Engineering Daily Interview with Sacha Greif: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/08/09/state-of-javascript-with-sacha-greif/‌‌

The origin of No Zero Days: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/‌‌

John Resig, creator of jQuery, telling his team to rip out jQuery: http://bikeshed.fm/180

‌‌Jeff Bezos' Two Pizza Team rule: https://buffer.com/resources/small-teams-why-startups-often-win-against-google-and-facebook-the-science-behind-why-smaller-teams-get-more-done‌‌

Shawn's "You can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego" quote draws from Paul Graham's Keep Your Identity Small: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html‌‌

Shawn's Impostor Syndrome Bootcamp Podcast: https://player.fm/series/impostor-syndrome‌‌

TypeScript's growth via npm surveys: https://mobile.twitter.com/seldo/status/1088240877107965953