#161 How to go full-on Renaissance Man mode in 2025 with Vaughn Gene
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2025
⏱️ 132 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Vaughn Gene. He's a self-taught software engineer who works with lots of freelance clients. Vaughn lived in Japan for 10 years, and speaks Japanese, speaks Spanish, plays guitar, plays piano, and is skilled at MMA. He's obsessed with learning new skills.
We talk about:
- How Vaughn struggled with high school and joined the Navy
- How he learned Japanese so he could work as a personal trainer in Japan
- How he learned coding using freeCodeCamp as a way to make more time and more money
- His pragmatic approach for teaching himself new skills for free
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
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Vaughn's YouTube channel and his approach to pursuing multiple skills in tandem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTnsjmsgJS8
- Vaughn on Instagram where he posts guitar: https://www.instagram.com/vaughngene/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Just make as many mistakes as possible and don't be afraid. |
| 0:02.8 | Because I think that's one huge limiting factor in growth in just about anything. |
| 0:07.6 | You've got to be willing to make a lot of mistakes and don't care about how you look externally, your ego or how people are going to judge you because it doesn't matter. |
| 0:15.8 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, Your Source for Raw. |
| 0:22.6 | Unedited interviews with developers. |
| 0:25.5 | This week we're talking with Vaughn Gene. |
| 0:29.7 | He's a software engineer who works with lots of freelance clients. |
| 0:36.8 | Vaughn lived in Japan for 10 years, speaks Japanese, Spanish, plays guitar, plays piano, and is skilled at MMA. He is obsessed with learning new skills |
| 0:41.1 | and he's going to share his learning methodologies with you. Support for this podcast comes |
| 0:46.9 | from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites |
| 0:51.8 | with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, |
| 0:54.9 | and break boundaries with code. |
| 0:56.3 | Learn more at wickstudio.com. |
| 0:58.6 | Support also comes from the 11,243 kind folks who support free code camp through a monthly |
| 1:05.3 | donation. |
| 1:06.2 | Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to freecotecamp.org slash donate. |
| 1:11.2 | For this week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keys, |
| 1:15.9 | we're going back to 1984. |
| 1:19.2 | Balloon Fight! |
| 1:30.3 | Yeah. The The The |
| 1:47.0 | The Bon, welcome to the show. |
| 2:11.3 | Thank you. |
... |
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