#163 Learn fewer skills but go deeper - the Caleb Curry interview

The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson

Education, Technology

5.0 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Caleb Curry. He's a software engineer and prolific computer science educator. He recently started mentoring dozens of developers directly and helping them with their skills and careers. We'll talk about his experience getting laid off as a dev and how we prepared for his mid-career job search.

We talk about:
- How Caleb got laid off and went about landing his next developer job
- How most people sleep on networking and recruiters, but shouldn't
- Why Caleb is so serious about teaching system design concepts
- How Caleb pairs his deep focus with broad extracurricular learning through podcasts and white papers

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 11,343 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:

- Caleb's course on Database Design: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/database-design-full-course-43233664125b/

- Caleb's system design lecture playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e7yQ43bUtg&list=PL_c9BZzLwBRLSs6x50D5WIH76VCUxJs9E

- Caleb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebcurry/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I believe you will get the most return on your time by going deeper on a fewer set of skills and technologies,
0:11.4	and then spending a certain percentage of your time in the exploratory discovery of new things.
0:19.7	Welcome back to the Free Coke Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers.
0:26.8	This week, we're talking with Caleb Curry.
0:29.4	He's a software engineer and prolific computer science educator, and he recently started mentoring
0:34.9	dozens of developers directly and helping them with their skills and their careers.
0:40.3	We'll talk with Caleb about his experience getting laid off as a developer and how he went about landing a new developer job.
0:47.6	Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio.
0:52.0	Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box,
0:57.0	then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code.
1:00.4	Learn more at WixStudio.com.
1:03.1	Support also comes from the 11,348 kind folks who support free code camp through a monthly donation. Join these folks and help our mission by going to FreeCodeCamp through a monthly donation.
1:11.4	Join these folks and help our mission by going to freecotecamp.org slash donate.
1:16.6	For this week's musical intro, with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keys,
1:21.6	we're going back to 1981 with the Arcade Smash Gallagas end theme. The
1:47.0	The Hello, Welcome to the show.
2:13.3	Happy to be here.
2:14.9	Yeah, man.
2:15.6	We have been longtime admirers of yours.
2:18.8	And, of course, all the way back since, what is it, 2018, you published this database design
2:24.2	course that set the world on fire like a lot of people from utility in that course.
2:28.9	How much has changed in database design since that course was published?
	...

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