#120 CTO Andrew Brown Passed Dozens of Cloud Certification Exams
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2024
⏱️ 155 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Andrew Brown, a CTO-turned co-founder of ExamPro.co.
Andrew created this cloud certification exam prep website with another Andrew – also from Canada, who also loves Star Trek.
We talk about Andrew's early career fixing computers in the 90s, and his early freelance web development work. These ultimately lead to jobs and promotions that leveled him up to CTO.
Andrew also shares his advice to devs who want to learn DevOps and Cloud Engineering, and which certs to prioritize.
Andrew suffers from Muscle Tension Dysphonia, a disease that causes voice loss. He shares how he's using AI tools to get around this.
Andrew also talks about his love of Tetris Attack (also known as Panel de Pon or Pokémon Puzzle League). He built a frame-perfect port for competitive online play.
And of course, Andrew's favorite Star Trek episodes of all time.
Can you guess what bass line I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's the theme from a 90s cartoon.
Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.
Also, I want to thank the 8,933 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during the interview:
Just a few of Andrew's many freeCodeCamp cloud cert prep courses. (He has dozens more on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/andrew/
His website, ExamPro.co: https://www.exampro.co/
American Mall simulator browser game by Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/american-mall-game/
The Greatest Generation podcast: https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/greatest-generation/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreakokeCamp.org. And each week, I'm bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious |
| 0:38.8 | people getting into tech. This week, I'm joined by the legendary and prolific Andrew Brown. |
| 0:46.9 | He's a CTO turned co-founder of Exampro.co. He started the exam prep website with another |
| 0:53.6 | guy named Andrew, who's also from Canada, who also loves Star Trek. |
| 0:58.1 | Andrew, welcome to the podcast. |
| 1:00.6 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:01.6 | And, you know, I just want to point out that even though it's dot CO, we have the dotCA. |
| 1:06.6 | It just doesn't sound as nice when you say it. |
| 1:09.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:10.5 | Yeah, well, it's such a cool website. |
| 1:13.4 | You've got so many resources on there. |
| 1:16.4 | And you've shared those resources so abundantly with the global developer community using FreeCode Camp as a conduit for helping people prepare for various cloud certifications, |
| 1:28.9 | your AWS certifications, your Azure Certifications, Google Cloud, |
| 1:32.8 | even like a lot of the, like, I guess, more advanced like Kubernetes, |
| 1:38.6 | certifications, things like that. |
| 1:40.2 | So it's so cool to finally have you on the podcast after knowing you for like six years |
| 1:45.6 | collaborating on all these amazing courses. |
| 1:50.7 | Yeah, and I think I just showed up one day and I said, you have to publish this course. |
| 1:54.7 | I had this big course. |
| 1:56.8 | Like I always wanted to make free content. |
| 2:00.3 | And when we first started out I was I was |
... |
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