#157 Getting a developer job in 2025 with Lane Wagner
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2025
⏱️ 147 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Lane Wagner. He's a software engineer, prolific contributor to freeCodeCamp, and founder of the Boot.dev online learning platform.
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
We talk about:
- Lane's thoughts on college and computer science degrees
- Back end development and why it resonnates with him
- Why he's so enthusiastic about the Go Programming Language
- What Lane's learned about how people learn
Quincy mentions the number of engineers graduating every year from Indian and Chinese universities (including computer science majors, which is usually the most popular engineering degree). It's hard to find exact numbers but...
- India: more than 1 million engineering graduates / year
- China: more than 1 million engineering graduates / year
- US: only about 200,000 engineering graduates / year
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Lane's 4-hour course on how to get a job as a developer: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-get-a-developer-job/
- Lane's 5-hour HTTP Networking course: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/http-networking-protocol-course/
- Lane's SQL for Web Developers course: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/sql-for-web-devs/
- Lane's freely available books published through freeCodeCamp Press: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/wagslane/
- Khan Academy founder's talk on mastery learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTRxRO5SRA
- The Zone of Proxmial Development education concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | But most people listening to this are underestimating how good you really probably should be to really succeed as a developer. |
| 0:13.8 | Like if you really, in my mind, it's like if you want to be a developer, why not shoot for being a top 10% developer? |
| 0:18.9 | There's nothing stopping you. |
| 0:20.7 | But then that also are way |
| 0:23.9 | underestimating how much actual free time they have in their day to do stuff if you start cutting |
| 0:29.2 | out. A lot of the crap that we become addicted to. I'm addicted to my phone. I need to like |
| 0:33.2 | start uninstalling a lot of apps. It's become a huge problem. But like, I think a lot of us underestimate. |
| 0:38.9 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. |
| 0:45.4 | This week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keyboard. |
| 0:51.6 | We're going all the way back to 1990. |
| 1:13.6 | Ninja Guideon 2 Overdrive. The The The |
| 1:30.3 | The Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of Freecodecamp.org. |
| 2:01.6 | Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. |
| 2:06.9 | This week, we're talking with Lane Wagner. |
| 2:09.5 | He's a software engineer and prolific contributor to Freecode Camp. |
| 2:14.1 | And he's the founder of boot.dev, an online learning platform. |
| 2:18.3 | Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. |
| 2:22.3 | Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, |
| 2:27.1 | then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. |
| 2:30.8 | Learn more at Wix Studio.com. |
| 2:39.7 | Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support FreeCoke Camp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going |
| 2:45.4 | to Freecodecamp.org slash donate. Lane, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Quincy. |
... |
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