What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from EndiHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today. How do they make decisions, both in their personal lives and at their companies? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet companies. Today I'm talking to Quincy Larson, the creator of Free Code Camp. Quincy was once a school director who turned into a self-taught software engineer and decided

he wanted to teach people how to code in a way that's much more effective than the way that he learned himself. Today is platform free code camp, a certain to a community of millions of people from all over the world who are learning to code together. So Quincy, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Gordland. So we've got a lot of people listening who are eager to start their own internet business, but who don't know how to code. And they're not sure if they should learn, they're not sure where to get started, they're not sure if it's even possible for them to learn successfully and the amount of time that they have. So let me just ask you right out of the gate here, what should these people be aware of and what are some of the secrets behind successfully learning how to code?

Well, I tell everybody who's learning Let me just ask you right out of the gate here, Quincy. What should these people be aware of? And what are some of the secrets behind successfully learning how to code?

Well, I tell everybody who's learning the code, there are two things that you should start doing immediately.

One, you should try to carve out at least 30 minutes a day to just sit down in code.

And that's every day trying not to take any days off.

The reason for that is the speed of

forgetting is quite rapid and you definitely don't want to backslide by taking a day off so even

30 minutes a day can make a huge difference the second thing is to hang out with other people who

code you can go to hackathons, hang out

at hackerspaces, go to tech talks in your city after work. Anything you can do to meet other people.

There are free code camp communities in most major cities around the world. You can go and hang out

with them in code. That'll give you the positive social peer pressure

to keep moving forward and also help you build your network so that when you go out to try to get

a job, you'll already know a whole lot of people and they may be able to say, hey, my company's

looking to hire somebody. Why don't you come interview here? I love that advice about creating

positive social pressure.

And I think the same applies to entrepreneurs, actually. It's so tough to build a business

completely on your own. So ideally you can meet and surround yourself with other founders and

like-minded entrepreneurs. You can help you stay motivated and accountable and create some sort

of positive feedback loop that you can get from your environment.

Let's talk about FreeCodeCamp because you're teaching people to code at a scale that I've never seen before.

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