The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Ten years of freeCodeCamp (Friends)
Fri, 25 Oct 2024
At the tail end of 2019, we got together with Quincy Larson to celebrate ten years of Changelog & five years of freeCodeCamp by recording back-to-back episodes on each other's pods. Can you believe it's now five years later and we're all still here doing our thing?! Let's learn what Quincy and the amazing community at freeCodeCamp have been up to!
Finally it's time for changelogging friends With Adam and Jared and some other rando We hope that you love it and stay until the end We're not offended if you can't go We know you're probably busy coding And your deadline is pretty foreboding Your caffeine intake is an actual problem, so why don't we walk outside? And we can listen to Change Logging Friends with Adam and Jared in Silicon Valley.
We know one day the gag will come to an end, but honestly, that will probably be our finale. We bet you sling A1s and 0s
And that makes you one of our heroes Your list of to-do's will be waiting for you So why don't we walk outside And we can listen to Change Logging Friends With Adam and Jerry and people you know Change Logging Friends Let's get back into the flow Change Logging Friends Change Logging Friends It's your favorite ever show Favorite ever show
Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show all about that bass. Special thanks to our partners at Fly.io, the public cloud built for devs who ship. Deploy your app in five minutes or less at Fly.io. Okay, let's talk.
What's up, nerds? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. You know we love Fly. So, Kurt, I want to talk to you about the magic of the cloud. You have thoughts on this, right?
Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind a cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff. But you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.
So when you say clouds aren't magic because you're building a public cloud for developers and you go on to explain exactly how it works, what does that mean to you?
In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere. and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.
They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Lambda is really black boxy. You can't pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside. You have to sort of
just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time. The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it.
And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of. And what machines are is just these VMs.
that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitive is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.
Specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.
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10 years, Quincy. 10 years. Free code camp. We got together on your fifth birthday slash anniversary. I'm not sure which one you refer to. Is it a birthday, Adam? Or is it an anniversary when a thing turns an age? Seems like a birthday.
birthday it's age right it's a celebration either way yeah but now it's 10 years quincy so it's that was five years ago that we interviewed you about five years of free code camp here you are on your 10th year right yeah we just uh we're hitting 10 years like this month like i think it's like uh toward the end of the month i'll have a big announcement article that'll come out so if this may come out before or after that but uh yeah it's late october
2014 is when i sat down in my closet and i bashed out the first commits uh and put them on the internet and then started you know tweeting about them and posting stuff on hacker news and stuff yeah how much does free code camp today look like what you thought it was going to look like in october 2014 when you first started hacking on it does it look like what you expected
Well, you have to consider that Free Code Camp is the product of thousands of contributors at this point. And I'm just like a single dev. And I had like this much more narrow kind of like, I guess, like general image of what I was hoping to achieve. And what that was, was free developer education, extremely generically. We wanted to make sure that
Everybody had an option that was completely free where they could go and they could learn the skills that they needed to go out and get jobs and provide for themselves, provide for their families and have an interesting actualized career as opposed to working at Taco Bell, which I did when I was a teenager. And I just remember how... Bad. It was to work at Taco Bell. It wasn't a great job.
It barely paid anything.
It's a starter job.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a starter job, but a lot of people find themselves after college in quote unquote starter jobs, working at Starbucks and places like that. Right. And so we wanted to make sure that like, regardless of what, where people were,
In life, in terms of age, where people were socioeconomically, in terms of their ability to have time where they can put the kids to sleep and actually study and stuff. We wanted to make sure that busy adults had a learning resource that would get them from wherever they were to wherever they needed to be to be able to work as devs. So that was the vision.
so vision realized right i mean you could say yes uh so here's how here's how i get here's how i view it okay so there are certain people who are so motivated and so just galvanized to make their dreams a reality that they will just do whatever right like you can drop them parachute them into the jungle with nothing but a machete and they'll figure out how to way to like
invent nuclear fusion or fission maybe and stuff like that right like right like the the the gilligan's owl the professor right like you have those people that are incredibly resourceful and incredibly driven and it's almost kind of like a spectrum right and then like a little ways over there's probably like the three of us and then a little bit further over would be like you know
18 19 year old me working at taco bell not really sure what to do with life and uh not even sure if college was worth it and all those things right and then um you know perhaps even further along you would have the person who's completely encumbered uh with you know maybe uh aging adult parents and they've got this day job and they have no energy and they're stressed all the time maybe they have more than one job and maybe they have disabilities they have like all these additional things
That, you know, keep them from achieving. And so it's not just motivational. It's also like circumstantial. But essentially, from the beginning of time, there have been like the goodwill huntings that can just go to the library and like get a college education for the price of like $3 in late fees or whatever. And that's great. Like Freeco Camp has been a great resource to those people early on.
I think even from the early days, we were a great resource for those people. What we're trying to do is gradually allow more and more people to get involved and to chart a course for their learning. And so that is one of the big things we've been doing. And a big part of that is just offering like an inclusive, welcoming community that will help you when you need help.
And that will give you feedback on your code that you submit, help you get unstuck when you can't figure out like some, you know, environment thing.
issue when you're trying to set up a local development environment or help point you toward a useful library for accomplishing xyz you know so i would say like the story of free code camp has just been making it a little bit more accessible each day through incremental pull requests of which i just checked the github repo and uh we've had let's see we we've had uh more than 56 000
GitHub issues and pull requests. Wow. And the total number of commits is 36,472 commits. 36,472. Commits and that like a lot of the commits I made really early on were squashed because I was like very verbose with my commits. And like Murgash came in and he's like, oh, man.
So I went from like the number one contributor to like the number 100 contributor because so many of my commits were squashed. But and overwritten and stuff like that over the years. But yeah, like it's just been a slow incremental process of building up that core curriculum to make it more accessible and more comprehensive. And then just the work of keeping it contemporary.
Making sure we're teaching React and Next.js. We're teaching Postgres and contemporary tools that people use.
I'm reminded of that quote that says people overestimate what they can do in 10 days and they underestimate what they can do in 10 years. And I think that Free Code Camp at 10 years might be a great example of that quote being true because the accomplishment at this point seems massive and epic.
And I'm sure, maybe not wilder than your imaginations, but if you look back to Quincy in 2014 and you told him where it is today, he would probably be a pretty happy camper, wouldn't he?
Oh yeah. Yeah. I would be like through like over the moon. I would be like through the roof. I would just be like super duper hyped that I could be a part of something like this. And, uh, I wake up every day and I thank God that I am able to be a part of this and do something that is helping people. And, uh,
Yeah, so I hope that doesn't come across as overly immodest, but I do feel like I have been a small part of something monumental so far, and I also feel that we're just getting started.
It's kind of funny whenever you look back at something, whenever you just sort of steadily chiseled away at this block of... You're not a sculptor. You have an idea. You've got, obviously, a chisel. You've got time, potentially patience, and you've got some sort of direction. They always say, instead of creating goals, create systems. And I kind of think you created a system.
You're a systematizer, so you've systematized the things that... Generally the things that make other people quit or don't allow other people to join. You said that you're one part of many to make this possible. I'm paraphrasing because I didn't see your exact words, but how big is the team? How has the team grown over the years? What size is the team today compared to five years ago even?
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So the actual staff is pretty small when you compare it to like all the open source contributors. But we do have kind of like a core team, if you will, of people who we brought on that were open source contributors that we were able to budget bringing them on to work full time. So generally the way this works is I'll hop on a call with them.
They'll be like a prolific long term contributor and I'll learn more about them. And if they seem like they're like a good fit and like they seem like the person who's would responsibly be able to manage themselves because I don't manage people. We don't have any sort of management hierarchy.
I definitely admire what militaries and giant corporations can do in terms of creating hierarchies that get things done and stuff like that. But That's not for us. Like we're a remote distributed team. And so I get on a call basically. And I talked to people and I'm like, Hey, if you could continue to contribute, like right now you're contributing like five hours a week, six hours a week, right?
Like you're getting so much done with this limited amount of time. What if you could contribute like 40 hours a week? And if they're like, oh, well, then I'd focus on this and I do this and, you know, this area really needs improvement or I'd like to go deeper into this and potentially incorporate that into the curriculum. Then I'm like, awesome. Well, let's bring you on and you can do that.
And so over time, we've I think we have like 35 people on the team in 21 different countries. So we're an extremely international like we've never had an office. I have never even gotten like a we work type thing. Like I've always just worked out of my, my home, uh, first my closet.
And now, uh, we moved from San Francisco to Texas and I have like a, a proper like house that has a yard that I mow every week and things like that. Right. Uh, so, so I just work out of like one of the rooms in the house. So we fly these 35 people from around the world to Texas. You're in Plano, Texas, which is like a good school district. That's why we moved here.
It's like really good public school. And we just hang out and we go to different public libraries. Like I, I call it the library tour. Um, And we go to several different, like the Plano Library, the Coppell Library, the Louisville Library. And we go into all these different libraries for about two or three hours. And we just have these sessions.
And then we go and hang out at the National Video Game Museum. which is this amazing video game museum. If you're ever in Plano, we go play like they have like a perfectly restored, like 1980 style video arcade and stuff inside it among other things.
And so these are like, if you look at the people on the team, it very much mirrors the kind of people that are contributing to the open source effort. And it's not just the open source effort on GitHub. People who are writing books and articles that we're publishing through free cocaine, press free cocaine.org slash news, people who are publishing podcasts,
video courses on the free code camp YouTube channel. Yeah. Like just chill human beings that feel like they can contribute to the global, you know, knowledge base essentially like, like the, the way that people acquire skills. So that's, that's a very long winded answer, but like almost everybody on the team is a developer who has also had some classroom teaching experience usually.
And everybody's a jack of all trades and, I can give you a lot of insight over the years in how the team has changed in terms of priorities and configuration, but it's basically been the same people that we brought on Maybe like four or five years ago, we had the budget to start bringing more people on because we got our charity tax-exempt status.
And then we started getting donations from the community. And those donations have gradually grown. We've also gotten some ad revenue from YouTube and display ads. If you go to the Free Code Camp publication, you might see ads for upcoming conferences or books and things like that. And that has helped us. kind of expand and sustain ourselves as a charity. So the team has not grown a lot.
The team was, it basically kind of stabilized at around 35 people.
It's a good size team for a nonprofit.
I think so.
I mean, 21 countries, that's, that's astounding. So there's so many different things going on, you know, in and around the free code camp. How do you Quincy decide what to work on? Like what's the, what's important today? How do you make those kinds of calls?
Yeah, so I listen to the community and what people in the community seem to think is important. And then I also talk to employers. I talk to professors. I talk to just as many different people as I can to understand where things are going. And I spend a great deal of time immersed in listening to the ChangeLog podcast and other podcasts about math, programming, technology, computer science.
I spend a lot of time studying history. I spend a lot of time talking to people in India, China, Brazil, countries where we're there are huge numbers of developers that dwarf even like what's in the United States in a lot of cases. And I'm, I'm trying to figure out what are they doing? What is important to them? Where, you know, you want to skate where the puck is going as Wayne Gretzky says.
And then like, we very much want to be out ahead of things. And that doesn't necessarily mean like, Oh, AI is a big thing. We're going to implement like, an AI chat bot that you can talk to when like, you know, I mean that, that might be useful, but it's just a wrapper around a big foundation model, right?
Like I don't know that the world needs another wrapper around a foundation model, but what we can do is we can take AI and we can use it to speed up our localization process, right? Before we hand translated and then we use machine translation to translate the free cocaine core curriculum.
And now what we're doing is we're feeding, you know, as much into the context window as we can into GPT four Oh, and we're saying, Hey, Translate this to the best of your ability into accessible Brazilian Portuguese, right? Sixth grade reading level. And then we're having native Portuguese speakers review and correct that.
And that is much faster to correct machine translation than it is to translate yourself.
Sure.
So it dramatically speeds up the rate at which we can
get localization done and we're not going to be one of those pages where you just go and there's like some google you know plug-in thing that like basically auto translates everything and there's like 70 languages immediately available one click no these are all translated by native speakers there's always a native speaker in the loop because we value clear communication.
We want to make sure the curriculum is clear. Uh, and there are like, I think 10, 12 novels worth of content in the core curriculum in terms of text. I mean, it's like hundreds of thousands of words that need to be translated and we want to make sure those are translated correctly. So we use, we use LLMs for that.
So we're always adopting new tools, but we're not just following the leader because we don't have to follow the leader because we're a charity and we don't have investors and we don't have owners and we can just basically kind of follow the will of the community.
that's pretty intense that last part was really you know the hook really yeah in that you don't have this grand corporation that drives the direction of free code camp that you can you can bend to the will of the people you can go literally in the world where it's necessary from a language perspective from a a need perspective and Such an admirable thing, honestly.
It's just impressive, very impressive. That's all I wanted to say, Jared.
That was it. I was keen on the exact same thing. I was thinking how liberating it must be to not have that thing that so many of us have, which is this need to capitalize, basically, to produce profit when you have. I mean, obviously, you still have a need for donations, an epic need for donations. And you've been working on that as an entrepreneur will be working on their revenue, right?
Uh, I think that's my just watching you like, and you've gotten that flywheel going to the point where, you know, sustainability seems to be there. Of course, that all also relies on future donors. So I'm not saying if you're interested in donating a free cone cap, I'm not saying they don't need your money anymore.
I'm just saying that you've gotten into a point where it seems like you're stabilized and you don't have a hook anymore.
to make more money for these people because they're just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and their appreciation probably because they went through free code camp and got a sweet job at the end of it and now they're making way more money and so why wouldn't they just support that cause yeah and like it it's great it is liberating that's an excellent word to use when you are basically beholden to the community the grassroots support that is supporting you right this is not some political campaign where we lose and all the money was kind of like oh bye-bye
You know, this is like an endeavor that will continue hopefully for hundreds of years. And that may sound hyperbolic, but there are plenty of charities that have been around for hundreds of years. The YMCA, which I just came back from, if I look sweaty, I just came back from walking to my local YMCA where I exercise regularly. Right.
That's been a charity for like 170 years or something like that. The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and so many educational charities and NGOs. And they can last for hundreds of years because you can listen to Jeff Bezos himself talk about Amazon. And he says basically like, you know, corporations have like a shelf life. Right.
Unless you're like some hotel in Europe or, you know, a pub in Europe or hotel in Japan or something where you can have like a thousand years of history. That is extremely rare. in business because investors need growth. They necessarily are investing money because they want the future value of total cash flows, right? The discounted value of that.
They need that to continue to grow so that the market cap will grow. Otherwise, why would they invest with you when they can invest with somebody else? Everybody's chasing growth, right? And you can only grow so much once you're Amazon size. You can only grow so much. And Jeff Bezos has said in an interview that he thinks like Amazon is just not going to make it.
And like nobody ever makes it because that's just how things work. Rise and fall. That's how companies work.
The market changes. It's very difficult to keep up once you're established, right?
Well, it's just difficult to keep growing. Yeah. I mean, at some point, how is NVIDIA going to keep growing? What is the total addressable market of GPUs, right? They're already a $3 trillion company. Is suddenly the world going to need 10 times, 100 times? Maybe, but at some point, it won't need any more GPUs. There will be enough, and the market will be sated, right?
And then all the investors are going to turn on them and just ditch them. And that's the rational thing to do. If you're a rational actor in, you know, the economy is to take your money out of the company that's declining and put it into a company that's rising. Right. Sure. And that's how like venture capital works.
They're trying to like ramp up your valuation so they can, you know, exit when there's a liquidity event, whether that's an acquisition or whether that's going public or something. And each round has to be bigger. Otherwise, you've got a down round and you've got a company that's in decline and people start leaving the ship.
So because growth is so intrinsic to for-profit enterprises, it's not built for sustainability. Charities are, by definition, just built to sustain themselves. So if you want to go long, if you want to exist, multi-generational starships getting to Kepler or wherever, you need to have a charity-type structure.
Or you need to have a family business that's passed down generation to generation where no single generation screws up. or sells it to private equity or something like that, right?
So I know this is about open source, this podcast, but I will talk about sustainability because I genuinely believe that if you are listening to this and you want to create an organization that is going to sustain itself long-term, you should probably do like a family type business or you should probably do a charity where there's no ownership.
And everybody's just invested in the mission and sustaining it. Like a charity can't, like I can't sell Free Code Camp to some giant education corporation, right? Like only a charity can acquire a charity. And there's no incentive for me. I don't own any stock in Free Code Camp. I could just give it to better owners.
But when would I trust somebody to run it better than I trust myself or somebody else on my team, right?
I don't know, Quincy. You can go ask Sam Altman for the workarounds. I think he's got some stuff figured out over there.
That stuff is technically legal, but any charity will look down on it. What they're doing is kind of a shame. And what edX did, where they sold to, I think, Chegg or one of the big capital... I can't remember. edX was an open source platform that was technically a charity that was founded by Harvard and MIT. They both put in... Both universities put in $60 million to found it.
And they paid the CEO millions of dollars and stuff like that. That was technically a charity. So yes, it is certainly possible that you can convert a charity to a for-profit entity. But if you're optimizing around going long, you would never do that.
No, I was not being serious.
No, no, no. It's worth noting that there have been historic instances of charities flipping.
Well, actually, if this thing goes through as it seems like it's going to, this open AI reshuffle, I don't know how it's all shaken out. It's very much like smoke and mirrors. It's kind of a bad precedent for other entrepreneurs to like, well, why don't we just have a nonprofit and then somehow convert it when it's economically smart to do that?
I don't want to go down that rabbit hole necessarily, but it could be a bad precedent. Such a public and valuable organization doing that.
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Let's talk about demand because, you know, we've had a market correction, you know, hashtag learn to code had its moment and it's kind of gone now in terms of it being like a cultural thing where like everybody must learn to code. And there was a time where you could go through free code camp and do the very strenuous work. I mean, how many hours that is 90 hour courses.
I mean, that was the original thing, right?
I mean, the core curriculum is thousands of hours long.
Nobody ever finishes it. So it's a lot of effort, but you could put it, you could do it in six months, maybe nine months. How long would it take?
I mean, probably like 18 months. If you're studying like 20, 20 hours a week, part-time year and a half, you could get through that.
And at the other side of that tunnel, maybe three or four years ago was almost a guaranteed opportunity and a little bit harder today in today's market. Is that fair to say Quincy?
Absolutely. And, uh, I've been pretty like, we don't really
care one way or the other like we're here we're thinking over longer time horizons and i i think it'll correct over time like the the number of developer openings is back to where it was around like 2000 uh 2020 like pre-pandemic during the pandemic and like everything like there was tons of money and interest rates were really low and there was like stimulus and all this stuff and uh interest spiked
Free Code Camp, there were days where we were getting more than 2 million visits a day or something like that. We had a single article that was just blowing up and getting 10 plus million views or something like that. It was just a collection of free online university courses. But that...
had its moment and we were going viral, so to speak, as the pandemic was going viral and trapping everybody in their homes and stuff. And so, yeah, absolutely. That was like a huge year for us. And now we're kind of like having this regression to a mean. But the difference now is the attitude, like the vibe is different now in 2024 than it was in 2022.
And I think a lot of that is because employers are they overhired because they just wanted to like grab a whole bunch of talent and hoard it. And that was like, like, we've got all this talent. If we need it, we can we can use it. We have plenty of cash like Apple, Google, like all these giant corporations have tons of cash. They don't know what to spend it on. So they were spending it on talent.
bringing a bunch of people on that they didn't necessarily need and just doing lots of speculative projects. But what happened was when the going got a little bit tougher, they're like, Hey, let's, let's cut some of these people loose. And so the market was flooded with, you know, mid-level engineers and it became extremely difficult as an entry-level engineer to find really anything.
And so that sentiment spread. And I think it's definitely harder to get a job now than it was in 2022 as a And people I think are blaming AI and like the jobs being automated, but what's really at fault, like the real cause and AI may be a contributor, at least in diluted managers minds, they may think like, Oh, he's just late. Right.
A lot of people just looked at Elon Musk and said, Oh, he fired everybody. And like,
we're still up yeah like twitter's still up but i can tell you as a frequent user of twitter that it is a shadow of his former self and that i see a lot of nastiness on twitter that i didn't see before and you know the features have not been like super i don't think it's a super company frankly uh not that it was ever a world yeah company mark zuckerberg used to joke that twitter was a bunch of like a clown car that accidentally crashed into a gold mine
And if you read the book, Hatching Twitter, it's like what not to do as a leader, basically. But my point is, a lot of people look to people like Elon Musk, who's just like, fire everybody. And so you see this hurting. You see all these managers laying people off. And even Apple, which historically never laid people off, not since the 1990s had they done a layoff. And they laid people off.
You know something's bad when Apple, which has, I don't know, more than $100 billion in cash that it's just holding, And it's not because it's like it's because they overhired, in my opinion, and because now the cost of capital is much higher and interest rates have changed. And there's a lot more uncertainty with AI.
I think they I think the uncertainty is much more significant than the actual, you know, net improvement in productivity as an individual developer. So you have managers who think like, oh, I can just like have one developer do the job of 10 developers if they're using AI. I don't believe that to be the case. I use AI all the time.
Like I probably talk to LLMs more than I talk to any single human being other than my wife and my kids.
Right. I would say right now, my product, my personal productivity increase has probably been like 20%, like from one to 1.2, something like that. Yeah. Like it's nice. It's helped me. I continue to use it. I will. I, I appreciate every time it gets better, but yeah, 20% improvements, not going to dramatically change your engineering team structure. Right.
Yeah. So you could like lay off one of every five developers, maybe one of every six or something. Exactly. I'm not sure exactly how the math shakes out, but, but yeah. And, and that's basing it on, you know, the productivity increase, but like we haven't laid anybody off. Like we don't, we don't believe that, uh, and we're using this stuff extensively internally, uh,
there's just been so much work to be done. We just shift people around. So I can talk about how we're shifting the team around, but, but let me talk about just a little bit about people who are on the job market. If you're listening to this, if you're on the job market, trying to get a job as a developer. The jobs are going to come back. Hang in there. There's a very slow correction.
It takes forever for these hiring cycles to happen. It takes forever for the Gartner hype cycle to ride the wave from the peak of inflated expectations to the trout of disillusionment to the plateau of productivity. If you're familiar with the Gartner hype cycle, it's this phenomenon that pretty much every technology has gone through. And LLMs are going through that.
And when people say AI, they're talking about LLMs mainly. That's been like the major breakthrough. So I think that if you're in a situation where you are trying to learn to code and you're hoping to get a developer job, my advice would be, you know, don't quit your day job.
The same thing I've always been saying, like if you're working at a Starbucks or if you've got a job at like some, you know, accounting consultancy, like I worked as an accountant for a while, like doing like temp work, essentially moving from company to company, doing that sort of stuff. It sucked.
um but keep doing that work whatever's paying the bills whatever's keeping food on the table and and like keeping you like keep paying down your debt and doing all that stuff right but um just plan long term expect it to take a couple years the days when you know like if you look at the pre-2000 bubble if you had like basic html css skills if you knew like how to run a web server or like ftp some files or something like that you could get a job as a web designer
And then in 2012-ish, I would say the tools became so good that a lot of people could get jobs as WordPress developers or doing basic Ruby on Rails work. That's what my first job was, doing Rails dev on a small team, just maintaining a Rails code base. And over time, it's gotten a little bit harder. But the jobs were increasing, so we didn't really think too much about it.
It's just like, oh, now we got to learn React. Now we got to learn about a whole lot of security considerations. We've got to think about accessibility. There's always been this layering of additional things you need to learn, and that's not going to go away. It's just going to get harder and harder in terms of the actual skills that you need to know to work as a software engineer.
But at the same time, the number of openings started to fall. So now there's this bigger gap between what needs to be learned and the rewards or the likeliness of being able to find a job. And I do think that if you just continue applying for jobs patiently as you continue to build your skills, your network, your reputation, then you will eventually get a developer job.
But it may take a little bit longer now than it took in 2022. That is kind of my thinking on that. So my advice to people who are on the job market is just be patient and keep learning and don't give up because if you give up, you're never going to get a developer job, right? But if you keep at it, you will eventually be able to build out the, you know,
through your community, through people you know, through different social groups you're a part of. Hopefully, you're going out and putting yourself out there and trying to meet people through building projects and publishing stuff on Twitter, Reddit, wherever you share your stuff. Eventually, you're going to have a decent portfolio.
Maybe you're going to build a big, impressive app that ties a bunch of stuff together and is impressive from an engineering standpoint, and you're going to be able to get a job. It's just going to be a grind.
On that note of applying yourself to this job, I wonder how much opportunity there is for somebody who has a skill, let's say, in a domain. I'm being vague because I don't know how to be clear. There's a lot of opportunity where, at least I see a lot of opportunity where you can apply a technological solution to a non-technological problem.
Whereas you can go and spend a lot of time on Free Code Camp and learn a lot of different skill sets. And then here's a domain that doesn't have a lot of people leveraging web tech software or anything that's even just remotely non-backwards from like the way it used to be to, let's just say, involving software.
You know, is there any opportunity like that where you're not just looking for a job, but looking for like, you're not just...
creating future software developers but future software entrepreneurs or people who could be entrepreneurial in their pursuit because they can come alongside an entrepreneur and level up their ideas so much because they just never applied technology to the sales process or to the marketing processes or any of these things where it's not just simply engineering it's simply a plan what would be considered like just software skills
Yeah. So I think like I'm reluctant to push people toward entrepreneurship because everybody pushes people toward entrepreneurship and that often means financial ruin.
But I do think that if you can work as a consultant and essentially like you meet somebody at the library or at the gym or something and they're telling you what they do and they're like discussing like one question I always ask people is like, what's the most frustrating part of your day to day? And that like helps identify like, oh yeah, I have to deal with these TPS reports or whatever, right?
And then it's like, okay, well, what if I like wrote a script that just like did that for you and you just, you know, go to a website and click a button and it did those for you. And then they're like, oh, that's possible.
Yeah. I guess it's kind of where I'm leaning towards like this automation idea. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of people who just don't get to a level where they can even leverage Zapier or if this than that, like just these platforms alone are so powerful. And there's a lot of things you can even do self-hosted in your own home that is kind of interesting in your own domain.
But I'm just thinking like your demeanor seems to push people towards or guide people towards becoming a software engineer and going to work for someone else. When the liberating idea might be, Being liberated from having to have a typical nine to five. I work for somebody else's job that software development to me. And you can concur with this, Jerry, because you've done this, too.
It's liberated us to make our own choices, to do our own thing and to work on our own thing, not just somebody else's thing.
Yeah. Well, I've talked to tons of people. So Free Code Game has a podcast and I've interviewed, I've done like more than a hundred interviews there, including like Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and David Malin, the Harvard professor and people like that.
And a lot of the people that I've interviewed have been entrepreneurial in the sense that they didn't necessarily work for very many people or they didn't even necessarily work as a developer for people. Maybe they had lots of other jobs, but they were able to like
build a consultancy or they were able to build a product focused company and potentially raise money or get enough grassroots support to like bootstrap it into a sustainable organization. I think that my general advice would be that is a little riskier than just going out and getting paid to learn by getting a job somewhere.
So I always push people in the direction of like, if you want to de-risk your future, go just work for somebody else. And they've already figured out like the money part of it. And they figured out how to offer you this salary. And then you can take that salary or that contractor compensation per month or whatever. And then you can just take that money and you can get paid to learn.
And so I always encourage people to go work for somebody else first, just to de-risk it a little bit. And you'll learn a ton on somebody else's dime. But I would say absolutely, if you've already worked as a developer, you should consider entrepreneurial opportunities.
But everybody and their dog is selling some book about entrepreneurship or they've got some podcast talking about entrepreneurship. And I just want to make it abundantly clear, like, I think that entrepreneurship is great, but I think it's great to work for somebody else first. You know, like Jeff Bezos worked for many years for other people before he founded Amazon. Right?
And that's true of most. And by the way, I think this is the second time I mentioned Jeff Bezos. I don't even think I'm like a Jeff Bezos stan or anything like that.
Total fanboy over there. I can tell. Mm-hmm.
But I think it's hard to argue that he's been extremely effective at accomplishing his goal, which maybe was just to make a ton of money, right? And I think there's something to learn there, regardless of your opinion of him as a human being. Like, you know, don't judge the teacher, but judge the teaching, I guess. So you can take a look at a lot of successful people.
And usually at the beginning of their successful journey, they were working for somebody else and learning, making a ton of mistakes on their dime and then taking the lessons from that experience, then applying it so that they had sufficiently de-risked their own endeavor.
And the other thing I'll point out is most people who are successful entrepreneurs, at least in the United States, are not 20 somethings that dropped out of college and stuff like that. They're, they're
people in their 40s that have already lived through some experience and have a much more high-resolution model of how the world works and how business gets done and how things get done and rules and regulations and how financial reporting works. All these different things that you will learn just working in a giant corporation for a while. The dynamic of managers.
It's hard to be a good manager if you've never been managed. Those kinds of things. Obviously, you know, Adam, you served in the military, right? Like you learned probably a tremendous amount about how the world works by flying around, you know, Bosnia and places like that and seeing it on the ground and being part of a hierarchy, right? That is invaluable.
So I don't want you all to think like I'm just like some puppet for the man or something like that, but like really go out and work for other people first and you're going to learn so much and you're going to just de-risk. I know I'm being extremely redundant and I've said that like three times, but I genuinely think it. It's an important lesson that you may not be hearing from enough people.
You may be hearing, Oh, just go for it. I think you just don't want to be a entrepreneurial guru is the thing. You're just really against being the entrepreneur guru.
I mean, I don't disagree. I think that unless you grew up and you're like 12 years old selling something on the corner, like you were like, some people are just sales people from the start, you know, like they're making money. They're hustling at 12, 13, 14. Like, yeah, go ahead. They start their first business at the age of 18.
Most of us do well to learn on somebody else's dime and just work for them, let them make the mistakes, let them make the profits, right? You get your wage and you get your education along the way. And then after a little while, then yeah, maybe it's your turn to strike out and take a shot at it. But you can sure avoid a lot of easy errors by working for somebody else for a little while.
So I don't disagree.
Yeah, and I'll just tell you my own personal experience, which I've written about at length in my book, which is freely available. You got a book? Yeah, just Google Learn to Code Book, and it should be one of the first results. Yeah, I published that, and there's an audio book that's on my podcast feed if you want to hear me read it.
If you want to listen to four hours, there's some kids banging on pianos in the background and stuff. But basically, my journey has very much been like I worked as a teacher and a school director for like 10 years, and I built up domain expertise in...
adult education before i learned how to code and before i learned how to apply it and build something that people would actually use and found useful so that that is my journey but you may absolutely if you're listening to this you may just be one of those people that never had to work for somebody else and was always so resourceful that you could conjure money out of you know the wealthy people around you or something like that and then sustain yourself off of them or or you know maybe you did go progress from lemonade stand to like
you know, selling cell phones to like whatever the entrepreneurial journey was that, that took you to where you are. But I will say that, that I do think that that is for every person who succeeded at that, there are lots of people who have a lot of debt and are probably, you know, their family won't talk to them because they borrowed money from their family and like all this other stuff. Right.
Like I, I saved up about $150,000 working as a teacher, working as a school director, just putting money into index funds and waiting. Right. And, and I had that money. to call upon when I needed to sustain myself and provide for my family while we were going through the first few years of free cocaine. Like we had basically zero revenue for the first three years.
We got tax exempt status from the IRS. And that, at that point we started accepting tax deductible donations from the community and that, and we just gradually built that up. And, uh, you know, now we have more than 11,000 people around the world who donate to free cocaine each month, like recurring monthly donations. Right. And that's how we sustain ourselves.
And it took a lot of time and it took a lot of patient work. But now we have that freedom. We don't have like VCs calling us, asking us when we're going to raise another round or exit or trying to like sit, you know, we don't have like some board of directors that's like telling us what to do.
We've got a couple of people that I knew before Free Code Camp started who were business people and like accountants and stuff like that who are on our board. And I just meet with them every three months and tell them what's going on. And they're like, cool. And we just keep doing it, right? But we've worked very hard to navigate into this position of independence.
And I've worked very hard to learn what I needed to learn to where I could be the person, I guess, at the top who's not accountable to a whole bunch of other people, but is rather accountable to a community around a community of peers rather than being accountable to some person above you. And I think that's what people... If you ask people why they go into entrepreneurship...
Some people might be like, I want to be rich. You know, Rick James, right? But I think a lot of people just want to be free from all the nonsense that comes with having, you know, this big hierarchy above you. right? Like when I talk to people in the military, like that's the biggest complaint about people.
Not that the mission is flawed or anything like that, but it's usually just like, yeah, I just had this one, you know, uh, officer above me who was like, made my life miserable or something like that. Right. Like, or, or like, I just, uh, you know, I didn't have any agency. They were just telling me where to go and I had to go and I had no recourse or I get court-martialed or something like that.
Right. Like people don't want to live their lives where they're just being bossed around. They want to just be free. They want to have that proverbial house where they can mow their lawn and they can mind their own damn business and nobody bothers them except during tax time.
Well, a lot of us would like to avoid that particular annoyance as well, but that's a different podcast. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the law of diminishing returns applies to almost everything, including how much money You have and can make at a certain point. We've talked to many people who've made it and the money stops driving them because it's just like, well, that's just not a thing.
And you think satisfaction is at the end of that particular like high watermark. And it turns out, no, it's way, way, way lower. in terms of now that this money has taken care of my base needs, I don't have that stress of anxiety of if my car has a, you know, if I have a $400 bill, emergency bill, I can't pay that.
Like when you get past that point, when you're like, yeah, I can pay my bills, I can pay my mortgage, put food on the table, maybe have a little bit of spending money, you know, to do a vacation or to scratch an itch or a hobby, at a certain point, The liberty and the freedom is way more valuable than that next million or whatever that number happens to be in your head. So I'm with you on that.
What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more.
So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at assembly to even train large scale speech AI models.
It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model.
We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products.
Very cool. So Dylan, one thing I love is this playground you have. You can go there, assemblyai.com slash playground, and you can just play around with all the things that is assembly. Is this the recommended path? Is this the try before you buy experience? people do?
Yeah, so our Playground is a GUI experience over the API that's free. You can just go to it on our website, assemblyai.com slash Playground. You drop in an audio file, you can talk to the Playground. And it's a way to, in a no-code environment, interact with our models, interact with our API to see what our models and what our API can do without having to write any code.
Then once you see what the models can do and you're ready to start building with the API, you can quickly transition to the API docs. Start writing code, start integrating our SDKs into your code to start leveraging our models and all our tech via our SDKs instead.
Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. And also by our friends over at Wix.
I've got just 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less on Studio. Number one. Integrate, extend, and write custom scripts in a VS Code-based IDE. Two, leverage zero setup dev, test, and production environments. Three, ship faster with an AI code assistant.
And four, work with Wix headless APIs on any tech stack. Wix Studio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Well, my time is up, but the list keeps going on. Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com slash studio. Once again, wix.com slash studio.
Can we talk curriculum?
That's what I really want to talk about. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Let's do it.
Let's talk curriculum. So you have the core curriculum, of course, it's expanded and changed and you have a legacy curriculum because you've probably rewritten things, you know, over the years. And it's probably like the main thing that you think about as a, uh, is curriculum reaching more people. I don't know. It's probably like your core two things that I would guess. Um,
A lot of the curriculum is web development oriented. Of course, it doesn't stop there. I'm sure you'll tell me the plethora of things. But if somebody was going to start today, I'm just thinking about web as a platform for success and how it's changed and we have these silos now and there's a lot of aggregation of profits to a few small organizations.
And I'm wondering how viable the web is as a platform for future endeavors. Like, is that a place where we as developers or wannabe developers should be still investing and honing on web development as a starting place? Or should I be looking into data science? Should I be looking into robotics? Like,
What is smart for somebody who's trying to get into the game or invest in themselves, maybe switch their focus in the game?
Yeah. So I would still encourage people to start with web. And the reason why is about half of all developer jobs are web focused. You know, you hear about like mobile app development and really that is just like a mobile app skin on top of a bunch of APIs that are running on the web and stuff like that. Or you hear about like a lot of machine learning and things like that.
And it's true that machine learning is distinct from web development. I can talk about like the big changes we're making to the curriculum, but I would say that like the skills that you learn, like, you know, data structures, algorithms, like everything you learn while you're learning to be a full stack web developer, virtually all of that is transferable.
Like almost everybody's going to need to create like some sort of website or some sort of mobile app or some sort of integration with an existing platform through an API. that serves whatever it is that they're creating, whether they're like creating data science insights, right? Like most data scientists have to deal with data visualization.
They have to figure out how to get what's in their Jupyter notebook or wherever it is they're crunching the numbers. They need to figure out how to get that in a place where people who are making decisions based on those data can consume them and understand them, right? So their web does touch pretty much everything. And that's why I recommend starting with that.
A lot of people would say, start with, you know, systems engineering, software systems engineering, right. And learning how C works because everything's built on top of C and, you know, doing the classic computer science degree program work of.
building your own compiler, building your own operating system, building maybe your own search engine, maybe building your own LLM, doing all those things, right? And then a lot of people would say, you should just focus on machine learning because that's the future. Like everybody's going to be telling the machine in English what to do. And I've written a lot about this in my book.
And I do believe that in the future, programming will consist of talking in natural language, highly structured natural language to a computer the way that people on Star Trek talk to the computer and the computer builds things on the holodeck and does things like that. But that still requires knowledge of the different layers of abstraction below.
And in order to effectively get things done with technology, to some extent, you do want to understand how that technology works. And I think a lot of people do have like a decent understanding of how RAM works, how motherboards work.
how hard drives work how buses work um like like a lot of the actual computer engineering stuff that like you know the software is operating on top of and we could certainly get much more higher resolution understanding of that by looking at the underlying operating system you know kernel and things like that i will tell you what the free code curriculum is doing but but like in general i do recommend if you're not sure where to start starting web and then work work out from there
And don't feel like, oh, websites are like, you know, nobody uses websites anymore. Like that's just the tip of the iceberg of what web development is. Like gaming, any sort of field where you're essentially writing software, there's going to be some component that travels over the internet, right? And so a lot of those principles.
So without belaboring that point any further, I will tell you where the free cocaine curriculum is headed.
Okay. Okay.
Please do. So about six months ago, the CEO of CompTIA reached out to me. really chill dude named Todd Thibodeau.
Okay.
And he said, he said, I love free code camp. I use it every day. Where can I send a donation? I was like, okay, cool. And I sent him like our, our bank details, a wire of a quarter million dollars.
Wow.
Yeah. So, so like, I'm like, awesome. This is great. Like I need to learn more about CompTIA. And I made it like a tweet, you know, thanking CompTIA for their gift. And then it was just amazing. The feedback on that tweet, like everybody was jumping in and saying amazing things about CompTIA.
Like, oh yeah, CompTIA, you know, I've been A plus certified or I have had the security plus and it's been like, Everybody at my company has to get Security Plus as part of their continuing education. All these people talking about it, people are getting CompTIA certification as part of their degree program, all this stuff.
And I was like, whoa, there's so much interest in these rigorous CompTIA type certifications. We've always had rigorous certifications, but they've never been like... Industry style certification has always been like proof of learning is how we look at them, right? Like you complete a free code game certification, you build all the projects, you've got tons of proof of learning.
And people ask me, oh, can I get a job with my free code game certification? And I always said, it's a proof of learning. It's one of many, like a basket of things that are on your resume that make you a compelling candidate for a job. But I've never said like, oh, you know, it's like a guaranteed job. And I don't think any certifications guarantee jobs or anything like that.
Some of them may have like employer placement programs. PMI is another organization, the Project Management Institute. And there's ICS2, ICS squared. They're like all these other organizations that have these professional certifications. And I was like, wow. Maybe Free Code Camp could move more in that direction. We could create professional certifications.
We can make them free and we can make them on topics that other certification programs aren't covering. So we are working on four programs. professional certifications that are going to like somewhat replace our existing curriculum. Like the, the coursework will always be there. We'll always have the legacy certifications, right?
But what we're doing is we're building a single, much more comprehensive linear web development curriculum called certified full stack developer. You earn this through completing here. I've actually got a list of all the coursework that is currently in this certification. So it's about 3,000 hours of coursework.
You learn semantic HTML, accessibility, CSS fundamentals, Flexbox, design concepts, typography. You learn how to work in a code editor, get your code environment set up. JavaScript fundamentals, high order functions and callbacks, DOM manipulation, algorithmic thinking, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data structures,
Dynamic programming, web standards, React fundamentals, TypeScript fundamentals, testing concepts, bash scripting, SQL, and relational databases, Git, security and privacy, Node, Express, security for web developers, specifically like OWASP, working with APIs, AI engineering fundamentals, and how to get a developer job.
And you're going to learn a ton of Python as part of that too, because we use Python as kind of our backend language. So that is a very comprehensive web development.
curriculum that not only is it going to involve the traditional Free Code Camp core gameplay loop of building a bunch of projects, because Free Code Camp has always been all about building projects, but we are adding a whole lot of additional stuff. One of the biggest piece of feedback we've had over the years is we've leaned way too much into learning by doing.
And a lot of people want more conceptual stuff. And we've always said, Oh, just go to free code camp, just keep doing it. And it's like wax on wax off, right? And like Mr. Miyagi teaching you how to do all the basic karate movements without actually having to like do the karate itself, or maybe you're doing the karate, but you don't actually know why you're doing what you're doing.
So it's been very, you know, learned by doing and we've minimized kind of the theory that we've given people. And we've just told people, Oh, go over to the YouTube channel, read the books that we publish every week and you'll get plenty of theory. But what we're actually doing is we're working to incorporate that.
So not only are we going to have the interactive step-by-step project building, we're going to have 64 of those, but we're also going to have 513 lectures, which are just like three to five minute videos talking about different concepts, everything from like different, you know, design patterns and things like that to, you know, how a system on a chip works, stuff like that. Right.
And then we're going to have 83 labs, which are basically just, you have a test suite and you have a blank canvas and you have to write the code to get that entire test suite to pass. And then we're also adding a lot more spaced repetition. So we're adding 66 quizzes and six preparation exams. Then we're adding a big capstone project. And then we're adding a final exam.
And that'll be conducted through an audited testing environment that we're building. It's open source. So yeah, we're building our own Flutter app where you can go and you can take exams and stuff like that. And then... If you pass the, you know, the human curated capstone, if you pass, if you build all those different projects, it's like more than a hundred projects.
And if you pass the exam, then you become a certified web developer. And then you have that certification for three years and then you have to create, do some continuing education to keep it refreshed every three years. So it's very similar to all the other big industry certifications. All of them expire after three years.
All of them require you to do the additional coursework, continuing education. But, The big distinction with Free Code Camp, we put this word at the beginning of our name, and we're sticking to it. What's that word again? Free.
Free.
This certification is going to be completely free.
Free. Wow.
So all the coursework is free. All the prep work, you can take the exam for free, right? There's no exam fee. We actually built our own environment because we didn't want to pay Prometric or whatever. We didn't want you to have to pay them $100, $200 to take some environment where you're sitting in front of your computer taking an exam and they're watching you and stuff, right? Right.
We wanted to be able to do all that stuff ourselves so we can keep the marginal cost as near zero as possible so that we can offer it completely free.
That sounds amazing. Very amazing. That's my entire commentary. That sounds amazing. That sounds amazing.
Where is it? What's the state of this?
New curriculum.
We're going to launch some of it in time for Christmas. Okay. So this is the first of four planned certifications. The other one, we're doing a machine learning focused certification. All of them are very heavy on Python. We think Python is the future. And you're going to use JavaScript for the web development. Obviously, it's the lingua franca of the web.
But almost everything is like going really deep on Python. We're using relational databases extensively. We're going very low level with especially, okay, so the three other certifications, Certified Machine Learning Engineer, Certified data scientist. Certified software systems engineer. Software systems engineer, a lot of C. A lot of working with compilers.
A lot of building systems that might run on a satellite. Or might run in a self-driving car. Or some sort of mission-critical code. That's extremely high-performance and that can be very deeply... In C, Quincy?
Mission-critical code in C?
That's how they do it. That's how they do it. They'll build some layers of abstraction on top of it. But if you like go, I mean, yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. We're going to go like all the way down the stack.
I know that's how they do it. I'm not sure if that's how they should continue to do it for our, our new, our new people should be learning perhaps a memory safe, low level language, but.
Well, we want people to be able to work with the extensive corpus of legacy code bases out there.
Oh, I get it, man.
I mean, you're probably... Many of which are decades old, the COBOL systems that are running the unemployment office and stuff like that, right? Right, right. So why not teach it? Why not teach people as much as possible? We can teach everything, right? There's no limit. And if you are willing to invest the time to complete a 3,000-hour curriculum that is
500 plus micro lectures and like a whole bunch of projects and stuff like that. Like, like that is a significant commitment. We think like maybe like one or 2% of people who started are going to actually go all the way to the end. And that's why we're able to like offer like everything for free.
Cause like actually going through and like looking at a capstone project and, and providing the exam and all that stuff, like very few people will make it all the way to the end of it. But that's by design. Cause I think a lot of people will get, it's like an inverted pyramid. A lot of people are going to get a tremendous amount of value before they even
complete it sure and they're going to walk away just having a much better understanding of programming and technology and appreciation for how to build software and and some basic know-how for how to build software but they won't necessarily make it all the way to the end where they're like job ready and and that's one of the things we just need to accept like i have always said anyone who is sufficiently motivated can learn to code that does not mean that everybody's going to be able to go out and work as a software engineer like like you need to really care and you need like i
i think gone are the days where you could just learn a little bit like like the three-month boot camp type things uh and we've never been about that we've always been about like rigor right a rigor but accessibility those are the two words that permeate all of our discussions as a team as a community about where we should go we want things to be super rigorous you know how we are developing the university degree program which has been in development for a few years we've got a few of the
The course is done. We're still figuring out like the accreditation process and everything. It's a 2030s thing, but we are still working on it. And what we did was we looked at the top 20 computer science programs in the United States, you know, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Caltech. We looked, what are they teaching? And then we built like a composite curriculum around what they're teaching.
And we made sure that we're teaching all the engineering, math,
all the you know the hardcore engineering and science uh computer science concepts that they're covering and all the applied stuff so we built our curriculum based on that we're like trying to be as rigorous as possible we we think that we can be there's no reason why we can't be much more rigorous than an mit because they only have four years right like if you actually went through and earned all four of these free co-camp certifications it might represent 12 or 15 years of expenditure but like if you're like me and you just insist on learning like that's what the
That's one thing, if I can talk about myself a little bit, like I am obsessed with learning. I want to unlock. I want to die with a fully unlocked skill tree. If I'm not learning about programming and technology, I'm studying foreign languages, I'm learning musical instruments, I'm trying to learn more about other world cultures and traveling to different places and talking with people.
I'm just obsessed with knowing as much as there can be known. Back in Ben Franklin's time, you could, in theory, know everything there was to know. You could read all the books, you could talk to all the important people and correspond with them through letters, and you could have this kind of
Life of mind where you felt that you had a pretty good understanding of this corporeal world that we're walking around. The surface that we're all anchored to, right? This prison in space that we're never escaping unless we figure out wormholes, right? There was a time when you could know all that stuff, but there's just been this combinatorial explosion of stuff to know.
And I feel like it's this great challenge, this endeavor. The universe is taunting me with how much it has for me to learn. And I feel obsessed with learning it.
The universe is taunting me. I love it.
I think that that's what like vast majority of people in the free cooking curriculum, like I suspect that we're all kindred spirits and we all love learning. At the end of the day, yes, we need to put food on the table. We need to get skills that pay the bills, right? But we also love the process of learning and we don't look at it as a labor. We look at it as kind of like a pursuit of joy. Yeah.
So I think that describes a lot of the human condition. I think humans are naturally curious and they naturally, when they reach the top of one peak, they look around, they see a higher peak. They want to get there. You know, I think that's just how human ambition works. And a lot of people feel human ambition in terms of accumulating resources. Right. Making sure that they have like, you know,
I liken wealth to like a water tower. It's good to have a water tower there in case we lose power, in case something really bad happens, the town still has water. But at some point, there's diminishing marginal returns to having a whole lot of water towers, right? How many water towers does the town really need, right? But yet you have billionaires who still want to acquire more and more.
And I feel like they're in this kind of like impoverished doom loop of just maximizing resources when what they could be maximizing is knowledge.
and a human experience so uh yeah anyway i'll get off my soapbox but but like that that is what really fires me up and what drives me is the prospect of being able to have the world's most rigorous curriculum and at the same time the most accessible curriculum that's free that runs right in a browser or in a mobile app we've got these great flutter powered mobile apps where you can learn
And yeah, that's what drives me. And there is another big thing I want to say about the curriculum too. I know like this has mostly been me just ranting. Rant away. Okay. So we're working on this English curriculum. Maybe not.
I'm just kidding.
English.
English, Quincy, we already speak English.
You and I and Adam speak English as native English speakers. I try. That represents about six of the people on earth. There's more than a billion English speakers.
But there are also a lot of people who grew up speaking Arabic, who grew up speaking Chinese, who grew up speaking Russian, Ukrainian, who grew up speaking all these different world languages, Spanish being probably the biggest in the free cocaine community.
and they can improve their english too uh and in fact they probably already learned a tremendous amount of english if they went to school because english is taught in basically every high school program on earth right uh because english is the language of science it's the language of business uh thanks to hollywood it's arguably the language of like pop culture and yet it's a very difficult language to learn it takes years and years of uh
commitment to studying. It takes years and years of practice talking with other people who speak English and not everybody has access to those resources. And we wanted to make sure there was a free English curriculum so anybody can ramp up their English toward that of a native speaker. Now, will they ever actually get to native level? That's arguable.
I've been studying Chinese and Japanese for 20 years and I'd argue I'm like, maybe like a fourth grader, you know, in those languages, but they will eventually get like pretty good at it. And then they're going to have access to so much more opportunity. So we, I've taken the European framework, the CERF, Common European something framework. I can't remember the acronym. And it's like levels.
It's like A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2. And we just started with A2 because everybody has A1 from high school. We're not trying to teach like the cat chased the ball. Everything's in the context of working in software. So it's English for developers. And we're creating these exams that are going to go ahead and like be standard exams.
Like you hear of people taking the TOEFL, the TOEIC, the IELTS, all these like Cambridge exams and stuff like that. We're introducing our own exams and we're just going to have a free alternative to those exams. We're also creating all the coursework and it's fun, interactive, animated, like dialogues and stuff like that. So we've already published all of A1.
I think the certification exam is going to come live soon. It's going to be the same exam environment we're using to issue the certification exams for the full stack developer, certified full stack developer. And people will be able to improve their English on FreeCodeCamp and get certified in that as well.
Very cool. that English stuff wasn't our transcripts going to be used for some of that, or there was an endeavor you all were putting together with our transcripts to be involved somehow.
Um,
And so, of course, like this data set is amazing. And I think you've made it open data. And so, yeah, we're working with a data scientist to analyze that. The practical answer to that is things have been busy and we've obviously been working on a lot of different stuff. But that is still something we're trying to mine for insights as we get to the higher level parts of the curriculum.
Because obviously, like the conversation you and I are having right now, that is probably nearing like native level to be able to rock everything.
For sure. Right. For sure. Yeah. That's exciting. I'll have to work on my English in order to live up to that, you know, Quincy. If people are going to be looking at us, Adam, and saying this is expert level English, we should work on it, don't you think, Adam? I try.
I try, you know. Everyone's wise slur and murmur.
I will say one of the biggest opportunities in like with the advent of LLMs and the steady improvement in their quality is in language learning. Like you can have a conversation partner that's infinitely patient with your bad grammar and with your restrictive vocabulary can even adapt what it's saying in effect to
like when I, as an English teacher, you know, when I talk to somebody who's relatively beginner at English, I can kind of modulate what I say. And like, I know what the highest frequency English words are and what they're likely to have encountered at that point. And I can kind of gauge their level and then talk at that level to make it easier for them to understand.
I mean, Wikipedia has like simple English, which is basically English using just the thousand or so most common English words. And they figure out ways, uh, the guy who does I think it's the guy who does XKCD wrote like a book where it's basically, he explains like how rockets work and like all these other technologies using like very simple words.
It was just kind of a fun little gimmick, but like, I can't remember examples, but they're really silly. Like the way he describes like, you know, the nose cone of like a rocket or something like silly things like that. Right. And you can absolutely change how you communicate when you're communicating to non native English speakers.
I presume a lot of the people listening to this have native level English proficiency grew up speaking it. Probably many of them have like, advanced degrees that they attain sitting in lectures where their professors were rambling in like big highfalutin words. Right. So I'm not modulating my speech at all.
This is just how I talk in, in like kind of like a free environment where I'm not really thinking about what I'm going to say ahead. I just talking, I was just spitballing.
No modulation required.
yeah but uh but like with an llm you know you can like even prompt it you can say i am fourth grade reading level japanese speaker my native language is english so you're probably going to notice a lot of weird things quirks and how i speak japanese based on english being my native language they're like somebody who was like a swahili speaker would you know they might use slightly different grammar they may be making different grammar mistakes than i'm making you know things like that so so you can like really tee up a really good prompt and you can learn
I don't think we need special apps for that, though. I just go in and talk to GPT-4 in Japanese or in Chinese and practice that way.
Yeah, it seems like a system prompt. You can have custom system prompts for different sessions, and you could have one that just has that in there so that you don't have to say it every single time you enter into a chat. I definitely can see.
By the way, here I am, still the English level for your, you know, whatever. Yeah, you're not having to, by the way, the LLM every time you talk. Right, yeah, exactly. I do have an insight, though.
That MIT or Carnegie Mellon or other well-known incumbent educational sources, let's just say, these are schools, maybe not so much in quality, but also not even – I don't even want – don't be degraded by this when I say this, but even in seriousness, I know you're super serious, but – The fact that they have brick-and-mortar walls doesn't make them more or less capable or serious than you are.
But you've clearly been able to cultivate the right people, cultivate curriculum, and not just – create a free resource, which is kind of easy. You create something, you make it free. That's the easy part. It's creating the quality, something that's free. That's also quite usable by the global market to be a differentiator. That is the truly, truly hard part. And MIT has lots of alumni money.
Carnegie Mellon has lots of alumni money. Harvard has this similarity of alumni money. How in the world – one, the similarity to your ability to compete. I'm assuming you're now competing with – because you're free. Not just because you're free, but because you're free and good, at least with this latest curriculum you're going to launch and the ambitions of it.
How in the world have you been able to, I know you have a teacher background, and Jared and I know you well, so the audience, this is not the first time we're talking to Quincy, by the way.
How in the world did you meet the right kind of people, attract the right kind of people, like compress that part, but have the right kind of people give these lectures, develop the curriculum, have the actual knowledge to put it out there,
To structure it in a way to make it curriculum, not just a lesson curriculum, which has a different connotation to it to even do this in the first place like that to me is the is the hard part. It's not the easy part.
Yeah, well, if you compare FricoCamp to an organization like Harvard, like 400 years of history, the oldest university in the United States, an endowment of maybe like $100 billion. At least $60 billion, I think, last time I checked. That's a lot of money that they can draw from to do different initiatives, to invest in research, things like that.
And if you look at what they're trying to accomplish... First of all, they're trying to bring people from all over the world. They have to deal with like immigration offices and all these different countries.
They are also trying to, you know, house those people, feed those people, maintain partnerships with like the vendors on the campus, keep the gym equipment up to date, you know, manage like sports programs, interface with all different kinds of regulatory bodies that they have like this very
structured kind of traditional university system that dates back hundreds of years where professors like go from like adjuncts or postdocs to, you know, associate professors and then full professors and gradually get tenure. And like they have to, they have like for every professor, they usually have like an administrator or two as well. Who's running various programs.
They have a lot they need to comply with. Curriculum is just one of many, many things that they think about. Right. Yeah. Free Code Camp is all we think about. We're a community that has a giant curriculum. And then we have lots of extracurricular resources and stuff like that.
But it's really just like the core gameplay loop of come into the community, learn a whole bunch, then turn around and start contributing as an open source contributor to the code base or start creating courses that we publish on the YouTube channel or start writing articles, writing full-length books that we publish on the Free Code Camp publication.
That's kind of like because all we're focused on is just this one specific thing and we don't have any of that stuff. We don't have an office. We don't have a football team. We don't have any of that stuff, right? We can just focus on this core thing.
But it turns out what a lot of people actually care about when they go to a university is not whether there's going to be like a really nice lazy river around the dormitory facilities or something like that, right? There's not whether like how many climbing walls do they have? You know, it's not those kinds of things. It's what am I going to learn and how am I going to use that to get a job?
Right. So to some extent, we kind of like to still the main thing that we thought was important. And we've just focused on that and eschewed all the other stuff. And we have that luxury because we're not a 400 year old institution with all these existing obligations and all these perceptions and stuff like that. We're a 10-year-old charity that just kind of popped into being and just kind of grew.
And I have a full institutional memory of every single decision that's been made along the way because I've been a part of it. So to some extent, because we don't face all the constraints that a traditional institution faces, we can just go... you know, in lots of parts of the world, they didn't have very good phone infrastructure, right?
They didn't have like lots of ground line and like it was a big deal. Even in, you know, rural America today, like a lot of people don't necessarily have like good phone lines and stuff, but cell phones came out and they kind of like leapfrogged that. And now people just use cell phones, right? And similar things with like fiber optic cables and satellites.
And now you can kind of leapfrog that to an extent, right? So I view FreeCodeCamp as kind of like we leapfrogged 400 years of innovation and stuff. And we were able to look at whatever we was doing and just choose what we thought worked and focus on something very narrow that we thought we could do.
And everything is dictated by budget and everything is dictated by what we likely can actually affect change in. which is developing a really good programming curriculum and teaching some English and creating a bunch of extracurricular resources like free cocaine, YouTube channel. We just published a course on music production using Fruity Loops studio, right?
So we're going to be teaching lots of cool stuff. We published a DaVinci resolve course and you could argue, Oh, that's not math programming, computer science, that's video production. But the reality is like by being pretty focused on just a few key things and doing a few key things well and not trying to be everything to everybody, the cost involved is, you know, a tiny fraction.
Minuscule.
Yeah. Are they threatened by you at all? Are they, uh, impressed, threatened, scared?
You know, Gandhi, Gandhi said, uh, first, uh, they ignore you, then they laugh at you and then they fight you and then they, then you win. Right. Right. And, and, um, that joke,
Are they ignoring you? We're still at the ignoring part.
Okay, they're ignoring you. You're not even a pest yet. That's a good place to be. I was just thinking with this whole, especially I would say probably really since COVID, it became somewhat clear to some folks this idea that college is a scam. And I suppose you can conflate the idea that university could be a scam.
So if you want to take those two words in college and university, sometimes people will say, I didn't go to college. I went to university. So, okay, whatever. Okay.
Yeah, that is a person I do not want to go to a dinner party with.
Yeah. A little too pedantic for my liking. Well, you can ask Brett Cannon. It's a little bit different in Canada. In Canada, college and university are quite different. So anyways, in some cases, it's culturally normal. But let's just say that there's a hair of credence to the idea that college is a scam. Not saying there is. I'm not trying to be political in this argument.
But if there's been some discredit to the idea of college, there's been some recalibration to the value that going to a school can bring you. And so I suppose in that recalibration, you have, well, what are the alternatives? And if you are a leapfrog bypassing the, you know, hundreds of years of institution, you know, why are you being ignored?
I don't know.
We can't read that face. Give me a real answer here. Okay.
I have no idea. But I think, first of all, I don't think university is a scam. I think it's overpriced. If you were to make university free, then I think a ton of people would go. And when I say university, I mean like just getting a four-year degree. But college, what we call college in the United States, by the way, is just anything. They could even include graduate school.
They could even include medical school if you're a physician. When I was in school, a lot of people just call it school because it's just like this big abstract N years of learning that you have to go through. So I think university education is fine. I don't think everything is perfect. I think it's pretty inefficient.
I think the idea that you have to do two years of general ed before you actually get to the core. of what your subject matter that you're studying. And I think there's plenty of things that you can have fair critique on, but what I think you can't critique is if you were to remove all costs from it, then college would be, I don't think college would be controversial at all.
I think pretty much everybody encouraged.
It's like saying education is a scam, right? Like, The question is, is it worth the price of admission, right? Like if you're being educated for free, like there's no scam there, right? If you're being educated for far too much money, now maybe we can say, okay, this is- That's a scam, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, at the end of the day, it's education.
And so education, if you can make it free, is of immense value, which is what Quincy is doing. And I think they'll continue to ignore you, maybe to their detriment. But I was thinking about the- the Harvard football team and these Ivy league football teams. And I was amusing myself as you talked Quincy, thinking about the free code camp football team and what that might look like.
And then I had an idea, you know, a new institution for a digital age, e-sports. Like it's kind of a joke, but maybe like you have enough people involved that, you could very easily and cheaply put together a free code camp e-sports initiative. And you could just, you know, a little bit of merch, maybe some Mountain Dew, whatever the e-sports people need that they power them.
Get some Mountain Dew and blaze it on my shirt.
And you could have a little free code camp League of Legends, free code camp Rocket League team. Like you could have some teams and be like the first educational institution that truly embraces e-sports. That might be kind of cool.
So the main challenge I would have with that, first of all, that'd be encouraging people to specialize. Like I've watched lots of documentaries and I do, I play video games and stuff.
And the main challenge is, first of all, just like other physical sports, your, uh, acumen does kind of decline with even like, like a lot of pro gamers might peak at like 25 and their reaction time starts to go down.
Sure. Sure. Sure.
And, and that's a problem. Like I like sports like chess and things like that. And you could argue chess is kind of a young man's game or a young woman's game, but sure. You know, I mean like you, you can still play pretty well. Cause it's not like synchronous. Like you're not having to make like hundreds of keyboard and mouse inputs per minute, like with Starcraft or something like that. Right.
So I would say the biggest problem with that is it would be encouraging people to get really good at video games when they should be learning the code. I always joke that like free code game is not competing with universities and We're not competing with, you know, textbooks.
You wouldn't be because universities are not doing esports. I mean, you would be the, talk about reaching the next generation of coders. You know, they're out there playing games, man. They're out there watching the experts stream their games. Just an idea. You don't have to, you don't have to commit to it. He's resistant. Yeah, I know. But he's going to mull on it. He's going to think about it.
Yeah. So I just, I worry that people would think like, oh, I should, instead of coding, I could just be playing games. And really you should be coding. Like competitive programming is something I've considered.
uh for sure like we could have a competitive programming league there are lots of cool websites for sure that people use to to do competitive programming people ask about how about a capture the flag team the free code camp ctf team that might be kind of cool yeah i mean these are great code games jared code games are cool man these are also things that uh you know a very small team surgically focused on a curriculum that i see this is kind of like digressions and there's nothing wrong with that like we built a video game we built learn to code rpg i
I was just going to ask you about that because this was my segue into this merging of the two things, right? Like when we last talked to you, and I'm watching this video game stream behind you as we talk, so I'm also thinking games, is you had this idea of gamifying education and getting this software developer video game, which you eventually released a game, right? Yeah.
Yeah, it's basically like a visual novel type game built in Renpai, which is a great visual novel engine. If you want to build something that people will actually play, you could write a book and good luck getting people to read it. You have to be really compelling and good at telling people to read your book and get them to read your book in 2024.
But if you put it in a visual novel, suddenly people are very interested and they'll just click through it on their lunch break while they're eating. I do think that the future of education could resemble a game. If you've read Ready Player One, it's basically the entire education system has been delegated to being a part of this big MMO game.
The Oasis.
Yeah, the Oasis. I think that, yeah, that is certainly important. But at the same time, I think that if you want to create people who are sufficiently intrinsically motivated, then you do want to kind of like pull back a little bit on the gamification. And we used to use gamification a lot more than we do now.
And what we noticed is it was kind of like incentivizing the wrong, it was incentivizing compulsive completion of things, but it was like, it wasn't done in the spirit of learning. It was done out of like a sense of guilt and obligation, almost like I got to keep my street and stuff like that.
Like candy crush style.
Yeah. And so I think that there are a lot of, uh, there's a lot of danger in leaning too much into games, uh, and learning. but I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud. Like, no, it's gotta be, you know, books and you gotta be sitting in a lecture listening to the old man, you know, squeaky writing on the chalkboard, you know?
I'm not that way at all, but I do think that like, I think a lot of e-sports teams is that's where you draw the line. Well, people swing like in these dramatic directions, like, Oh, we're all doing, you know, AI chatbots now and stuff like that. And then like, I want to kind of be a voice of balance and reason.
Yeah.
No, I'm not asking you to commit right now. I'm just looking for a spot on your Rocket League team. That's all.
Oh, okay, okay.
Just kidding. I'm terrible.
We'll just have to put you through the paces. And we'll have to move you into the barracks where we keep all the other Rocket League players.
That's true. Yeah, I'm going to have to move on campus.
It'll be in South Korea.
Okay, well, this is getting more and more difficult. I see you're raising the stakes. It probably will be. There's a lot of good players over there. Hilarious. Well, what have we not plumbed? Let's talk about the future real quick. Future of education. You know, here we are 10 years in, we've talked to you five years back.
I think we had talked in between as well, but this is our anniversary episode, 10 years of Free Code Camp. Can you look, is it even possible to look 10 years down the road and like, you know, just think of what it might look like then? He knows exactly where it's going to be. He does look at him. He's like, he's got a roadmap. Show us the roadmap. He's got an answer ready for us.
Yeah, so we think like 50 years out, 60 years out. Like I think like in terms of, you know, what is likely to be accomplished. Okay, so if you go all the way back to the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first mass produced book in history, it was more than like, it was like 600 years ago. It was just with the advent of the printing press.
And this book came out and it brought literacy to everyone in the 1450s, 1450s. 600 plus years ago, 670 years ago, and still we have illiteracy. I don't believe that AI is just going to magically change illiteracy. I think that there are a lot of people who just, it's still hard to learn to read. If nobody teaches you how to read, it's very difficult.
Like I hear all these things of like people who have unschooled their kids and like they haven't necessarily put effort into teaching the kids.
There's just this idea that the kids will like naturally learn how to read and some kids might, but a lot of kids won't necessarily learn how to read and they'll end up, you know, not having reading level nearly what their peers and it'll be like a huge kind of like
crushing weight on their shoulders like i'm not good at reading right and they'll carry that with them and i feel like it's the same thing with technology like people people certainly have this with math you know i never learned how to do math and they always feel bad about themselves and they're always intimidated whenever they're like reading a book and there's some math or something like that whenever they look at some equation that even the most simple equations when they're walking around the science museum and they're just
You know, they get this anxiety and people, same thing with software, right? I don't know. I don't really know how a web server works. I don't really know what garbage collection is doing. You know, like, like it's just that in the back of your mind, you're just kind of like unsure of yourself. Right. And so if over the course of 600 years,
There are still people when they have had this relatively abundant thing that they could read mass market, right? 600 years. Like it's going to be a very long time before technology literacy is solved. And before everybody can just feel confident in that, they understand how recursion works and things like that. Right.
And I do think that these are things that people in start, like I always look at a Star Trek. And I realize that it's flawed in the sense that it's, you know, like just kind of this vision from the 70s. And then we got interpolated through the 90s with Next Generation and Voyager and D6ix9, which is the best one.
According to Andrew Brown, big Trekkie and massive contributor to Free Code Camp, he's created like 50 certification preparation courses on our YouTube channel.
but I realized that it's just like kind of a sci-fi vision of the future but it makes practical sense like a lot of the things in that show I can see that's where we're heading we're heading toward computers where you just talk and you can use declarative speech instead of imperative speech And the machine is just gives you a lot more affordance in figuring out what you, what needs to be done.
Right. And you know, if you watch the expanse, like there's lots of AI, but it's not everywhere and they're not like talking to AIs and stuff. It's just like doing the little things like recalibrating the turrets on the ship and stuff like that. Right. And, and I, I think, That 100 years from now, if we want to talk 100 years, let's just choose a big round number. People are still going to exist.
We're probably not going to be all walking around in exosuits. I will be impressed if we've terraformed Mars at all by then. I just genuinely don't think that there's the political will and the budget and all that stuff. And I think that people greatly underestimate how difficult it will be, like colonized space and stuff like that. I think realistically, we're still going to be here.
Hopefully we'll have done some stuff to mitigate climate change and mitigate job loss due to automation and stuff like that. But people are still going to need to learn. People are still probably going to need to work and figure out a way to make money. I don't believe that UBI is coming to save us universal basic income or anything like that.
I think fundamentally people are going to still need to learn and they're going to still need to go out and do things to provide for their families. That has been how it has been throughout civilization.
throughout the history of every civilization, whether that is, you know, the hunter gatherer tribes, like people have needed to go out and figure out how to keep the calories coming to keep the body going. Right.
And I think institutions come in and fall, but we've got these human animals, you know, a hundred thousand years of human tribes interacting with one another and, you know, warring and things like that. But I still think that they're going to need to learn. I don't think there's going to be a magic matrix thing where you just teach me how to fly a helicopter and there's a program. I know Kung Fu.
There's not going to be some magic upload. There might be something that dramatically speeds up education. But people are still going to need to design those systems and figure out how to optimally convey that information. So Free Code Camp is still going to be doing that 100 years from now. We're still going to be teaching. And that I can be confident of.
So now that you know what is unlikely to change, then you can focus on what is likely to change in terms of preferences, in terms of people's ability. We're probably going to have faster and faster internet connections. We're probably going to have more and more photorealistic 3D environments that we're walking around in. We're probably going to have way better data processing.
AI is probably going to continue to improve, whether it'll be just step changes like we've seen throughout AI history or whether it's going to be like a smooth upward gradient. TBD, right? But I think... We can be relatively confident that human decision making is still going to be involved. Human labor is still going to be involved.
We're still going to be doing things and people are going to still need to learn stuff. So that is my worldview. I don't think a nuclear war is going to end human civilization. I think humans will just build back and you're not going to eradicate all 88 billion humans on Earth.
Even if you look at all the extinction level events that have happened throughout human history, I think there have been like six great extinction events. Humans would easily survive all of those. Like we're way better prepared to survive those kinds of things than these giant dinosaurs or these species that can't even communicate with one another. Right. Look at all our technology.
We're not going to die out. People who are thinking the world is going to magically end or that some, you know, technology is just going to come and fundamentally change everything. Like keep waiting. I think what is going to happen is it's just going to be continual incremental progress for probably millions of years. And we're at the very beginning of this.
So that is kind of like my worldview and that informs my decision making. So sustainability, let's focus on not dying as an organization. Let's focus on making sure we have plenty of sustainability and that we don't pull, you know, a Facebook where we hire tons of people and then have to lay tons of people off heartlessly. Right.
We've all seen that video call where Mark Zuckerberg is like laying people off and how incredibly awkward and unflattering that whole experience was and how it was probably completely avoidable if they hadn't been all greedy about trying to hoard the talent. Right. So just trying to optimize for the long run. That's an extremely broad sweeping answer. I hope that's helpful.
But that does inform like I'm not planning on retiring or anything. I don't have a second act. I'm not going to be like just touring as like a jazz bassist or something like that. I'm going to be working and running free coke camp. And I'm hoping to live to be 100.
I'm like working out and eating right and getting plenty of sleep and avoiding dangerous situations so that I can hopefully live like a full natural life.
What are some dangerous situations you've been avoiding recently?
So just like what I teach my kids, like I'm like, like, you know, defensive driving, defensive walking, like always walk far away from the curb. Always assume that person driving is like staring at their phone or the drunk or something.
Yeah. I might do defensive driving. Yeah. How about peeing on electric fence? Yes. Avoid that one.
Don't, don't whiz on the electric fence.
You mentioned your bass. Let's finish. Let's close with you playing us some bass. Now, Quincy has what he calls the Free Code Camp theme song, which I don't know if that's what you're going to play for us. Play whatever you like.
I'll just give you some quick context before I to show my very rudimentary playing that any serious bass player will probably have a good chuckle at. I picked this up during the pandemic and I've started to learn other musical instruments as well. It's just something I really enjoy doing. It's like a completely different area of your brain that gets unlocked and it's so much fun.
As John Paul Basquiat says, art is how you decorate space. Music is how you decorate time. So with that extremely profound quote, I will give you the extremely silly Free Code Camp theme song here. All right. So I'm just going to make sure I've got audio signal.
That makes sense a lot, right? Like if you break that down, like because... Music is how you decorate time. I like that. I haven't heard that before. Music is all about timing, right? It's all about, you know, quarter time, you know, whatever times I forget. I forget my musical talents, but that is so wild to think about that, that it decorates time.
Free Cody Kemp, the Free Cody Kemp podcast with Princey Larson.
Yeah, man. Love it, man.
That is a theme song I made for the Free Code Camp podcast. I wanted to have a cool musical element. You all have Breakmaster Cylinder. We don't have quite the budget for that.
Sure.
But I was like, okay, I'll create a theme song and then I can just play it every episode. But it was just too cheesy. And so what I've been doing is I've just been covering different pop songs and doing the drums and bass and guitar. So if anybody has any requests... Let me know, and I can play like 20 or 30 seconds of a pop song at the beginning of an episode of Free Code Camp.
I have a challenge for you. Okay. I think you might like this, but you might not. We'll see. What if, as part of your betterment to getting better at bass, and then Seinfeld-ing it, one thing that Seinfeld did with the Seinfeld show was that that intro... Was uniquely different every time because it was uniquely played every single time. It was never produced and then just done every time.
It was the same person who produced it and did the work, but they did it fresh every single episode. I wonder if you could do a fresh version of that every single episode and it just gets better and better and better. Or maybe it just gets marginally better as like you progress through your talents and it just gets more polished.
Yeah, I mean, that is an interesting idea. Maybe, like, check in periodically and have a different iteration, because, like, every single week, trying to come up with different variations. Also, fun fact about the Seinfeld.
No, no, no, the same exact one. Just the same one.
Same one.
The same one.
That's what he's doing, aren't you?
Well, no, I'm doing different songs each time, because, frankly, like, you know, some Duran Duran song or some Jamiroquai song is, like, way more interesting than anything I would write.
I think you are. Jamiroquai is pretty good. He is too. Oh, yeah. That was a pretty awesome very first musical video for them too as well. Like Virtual Insanity. Oh, yeah.
Virtual Insanity. There's some good YouTube videos about the making of that video. I've seen those. Yes. Yeah. Very cool. It's crazy time.
They like move the walls. So cool. Anyways. Yeah. I still want to go back to encouraging you. What if you just did this every single episode and you re-recorded the same exact thing every single time? Think how good it would get over the next 10 years.
Well, not so much even bettering that, but like it's always the same, but uniquely different every time because you can't literally play the same thing the same way every single time. It could be very close, but it wouldn't be the exact same. Right. Which is why not a lot of people know that Seinfeld's intro is uniquely done every single time because it sounds the same.
Yeah, I mean, you'd have to listen really carefully. Also, fun fact about that, they're not actually playing that on the bass, they're using the synth.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, so it's a little easier when you're doing the synth to like, you know, on the bass you actually have to learn the new parts and nail the articulation.
Oh, okay. Well, I wasn't comparing literally to you to the bass of the Seinfeld, but... Oh, because it definitely sounds like a bass, doesn't it? It is, yeah.
It sounds very accurate, especially considering it's like 90s technology.
but that it was it was a hallmark of the show obviously it was a signature sound oh yeah and it was the same every time but different so I would encourage you to do the same every time but different for you
Awesome. Thanks for that idea. I'll follow that with the esports team idea.
I can't do a podcast here without giving ideas. That's right.
We got good ideas around here, Quincy. Well, speaking of good ideas and good podcasts, we are going to go now record an episode of the Free Code Camp podcast with Adam and Jared. So to our listener, if you want more of us three talking on a different show, check out Free Code Camp podcast at least this week, but every week and see what Quincy's
doing and you can hear us talk more about ourselves I suppose I'm not sure what we're going to talk about but we'll see we'll see hopefully it's good bye friends bye friends cheers Free Code Camp is such a wild success, bringing immense value to so many people all around the world. Congrats once again, Quincy and team. And here's to the next 10 years of teaching folks how to code for free.
So cool. As I was saying at the end of the conversation, Adam and I hopped out of our Riverside studio and into Quincy's Riverside studio for another, I don't know, 90, maybe 100 minutes on the Free Code Camp podcast. That one isn't out quite yet. I believe it'll ship closer to our actual 15th anniversary, which is in mid-November.
When it does, I'll link it up in Changelog News so you don't miss it. You do subscribe to news, don't you? One reader just this week hit reply and told me it's the best newsletter for developers out there. That felt good. Check it out if you're missing out at changelog.com slash news.
Thanks again to our partners at Fly.io, to our beat freak, the GOAT, Breakmaster Cylinder, and to you for listening. We appreciate you hanging out with us. Next week on The Changelog, news on Monday, David Hennemeyer-Henson talking Rails 8 on Wednesday.
And on Friday, we're in Raleigh for all things open next week, so I don't know what we're shipping on Friday, but I'm willing to bet it'll be good. Maybe even great, but definitely good. Okay, now I'm rambling. Let's wrap this up. Have a great weekend. Please do share our show with your friends who might dig it, and let's talk again real soon.