#158 From Gas Station to Google with Self-Taught Cloud Engineer Rishab Kumar

The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson

Education, Technology

5.0 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Rishab Kumar, cloud engineer and developer advocate at Twillio.

Rishab grew up in India and moved to Canada for school. But he couldn't afford to finish. He resorted to delivering pizzas and working at a gas station. But he worked hard to teach himself how to code and how to build cloud infrastructure, and eventually got a job Google.

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:
- How to teach yourself cloud engineering
- Getting repeatedly rejected from FAANG jobs but persisting
- Filling up the Infinity Gauntlet with cloud certifications
- How DevOps and Cloud Engineering are changing

Links we talk about during our conversation:

- Rishab's Terraform course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-terraform-to-deploy-a-site-on-google-cloud-platform/

- Rishab's LangChain LLM deployment course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-langchain-for-llm-development/

- Learn to Cloud guide by Rishab and his friend at Microsoft, Gwyn: https://learntocloud.guide/

- Rishab's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@rishabincloud/videos

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If I was going to start from zero, where I have zero context,
0:04.6	so I was going to learn some of the IT fundamentals on how networking works.
0:12.5	So, like, how Internet works, first of all, DNS, how, you know, packets transfer,
0:19.1	how computers communicate to each other.
0:21.7	Because at the end of the day, all these servers within the cloud, you know, they use
0:26.2	networking to talk to each other.
0:28.7	The second skill I would really spend my time is on how Linux works.
0:33.6	Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers.
0:40.0	This week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, bass, guitar, and keys.
0:47.1	We're going back to 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Duck Tales theme from the moon. Thank you. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakocamp.org. Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast.
2:01.7	I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreecodeCamp.org.
2:05.2	Each week we'll bring you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech.
2:09.7	This week, we're talking with Rishab Kumar.
2:12.8	He's a cloud engineer and developer advocate at Twilio.
2:17.0	Rishab grew up in India and moved to Canada for school, but he couldn't afford to finish.
2:22.4	He resorted to delivering pizzas and working at a gas station, but he worked hard to teach himself how to code using websites like freecocamp.org and how to build cloud infrastructure.
2:32.5	And eventually he got a job at Google.
2:35.5	Before we talk to Rishab, support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio.
2:40.8	Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box,
2:45.2	then extend, replace, and break boundaries with the code.
2:48.3	Learn more at Wixstudio.com.
2:51.3	Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks
	...

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