#111 How the Insane Pressure of Working in Classical Music Prepared Jessica Wilkins for Tech
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2024
⏱️ 152 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview orchestral musician-turned software engineer Jessica Wilkins.
Jessica found success in the extremely competitive field of classical music, playing the Oboe in orchestras, recording sessions, and even at major events such as the NFL awards on national television.
She started her own business – a sheet music e-commerce website. This not only helped her survive in the high cost of living city of Los Angeles – it also helped her learn web development.
During the pandemic, many of her performance and recording gigs were cancelled. This inspired her to dive much deeper into coding. She now works as a software engineer at freeCodeCamp, and has contributed substantially to freeCodeCamp's core curriculum. Also, her many freeCodeCamp tutorial articles have more than 400,000 readers each month.
During our conversation, Jessica talks about the insane pressure she faced as a musician, where standards are incredibly high. So many people want to be professional musicians, and there is so little money in the industry. Jessica was a rare case of finding success. But even that success could not dissuade her from diving into software development.
This is a long, intimate conversation with one of the sharpest minds behind freeCodeCamp.org. It was a blast talking with Jessica for more than two hours. I think you'll dig it.
Some timestamps in case you want to skip some our lengthy discussion about music education and the music industry:
- 0:00:00 My bass intro. See if you can guess this 1970 classic bassline.
- 0:01:00 Our discussion of Jessica's upbringing by a school teacher and single mom, and her journey into classical music
- 1:07:00 Jessica Learns to code and builds a profitable sheet music e-commerce business
- 1:35:00 Jessica's decision to go all in on software development
- 1:44:00 Contract work and thoughts on what caused recent tech layoffs
Links we talk about during the interview:
One of Jessica's articles - 40 JavaScript Projects for Beginners – Easy Ideas to Get Started Coding JS: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/javascript-projects-for-beginners/
The Black Excellence Music Project, Jessica's first React project: https://blackexcellencemusicproject.com/
Danny Thompson freeCodeCamp Podcast interview: https://freecodecamp.libsyn.com/site/were-back-danny-thompsons-journey-from-chicken-fryer-to-software-engineer
Danny's LinkedIn course that Quincy mentions: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/linkedin-profiles-for-technical-professionals/main-visuals-on-your-profile
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 0:22.7 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakococamp.org. |
| 0:26.5 | Each week, I'm bringing you insight from developers, entrepreneurs, and ambitious people who are getting into tech. |
| 0:32.3 | This week we're talking with Jessica Wilkins. |
| 0:35.4 | She's an orchestral musician turned small business owner turned software developer. |
| 0:41.2 | Jessica, welcome to the show. |
| 0:43.5 | Well, hello, good morning, afternoon or evening, everyone. |
| 0:46.5 | It's good to be here. |
| 0:48.4 | Yeah, it's such a thrill to have you here because you're one of the people that makes Free Code Camp possible. |
| 0:53.9 | You've been doing curriculum development, and before that, you've been doing're one of the people that makes free code camp possible you've been doing |
| 0:54.6 | curriculum development and before that you've been doing a lot of tutorials that you've created |
| 0:59.5 | around programming and database technology like all these different tools that developers use |
| 1:06.6 | maybe you could start by just talking a little bit about what you do at Free Code Camp and |
| 1:11.8 | what excite you about it. |
| 1:13.9 | Yeah, my journey with Free CoCamp started back in 2020 as a learner just going through |
| 1:19.1 | the certifications. |
| 1:20.6 | And then I started writing articles mainly about my journey and about beginner like |
| 1:25.9 | HTML and CSS and JavaScript concepts. And then I |
| 1:29.2 | started writing a little bit more. And I've written tons of articles on like Python and SQL. |
| 1:34.6 | And then recently I've been working on the JavaScript curriculum. We just released a major update. |
| 1:40.4 | And so now it's a whole project-based curriculum over 21 projects that you can go through |
| 1:46.1 | and learn JavaScript. And so we're really happy about that because that's been a long time in |
... |
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