#164 How to become a self-taught developer while supporting a family
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2025
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Jesse Hall. He's software engineer and a developer advocate at MongoDB. He taught himself to code while raising kids and working on the Best Buy Geek Squad fixing computers.
Jesse has created tons of tutorials over the years on YouTube and on freeCodeCamp. We talk about his coding journey, how the field has changed over the few years, and how hype has distorted peoples' perception of getting into code.
We talk about:
- Growing up in a one stop light town
- Teaching himself to code for free using freeCodeCamp
- How he created YouTube tutorials to inspire his kids, then got quite good at it
- How Jesse's early interest in Web3 lead him to needing to "dig himself out of the grave" of being "the NFT tutorial guy"
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 11,384 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
Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday.
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Jesse's tutorials on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/codeSTACKr/
- Jesse's course on how to set up and configure the VS Code editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJEbVCrEMSE
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this. |
| 0:03.0 | So you can learn. |
| 0:05.4 | It's going to take you time to get the fundamentals down. |
| 0:08.4 | But just the dedication is what's needed. |
| 0:11.8 | Consistency is what's needed. |
| 0:14.4 | If you have an hour a day to learn something, go to Free Code Camp, |
| 0:18.0 | go to YouTube, go wherever, and learn something for an hour every day um and just just |
| 0:23.1 | just keep learning that that is my advice keep learning welcome back to the free code camp podcast |
| 0:29.1 | your source for raw unedited interviews with developers this week we're talking with jesse |
| 0:34.9 | hall aka code stacker he's a software engineer and a developer advocate at This week we're talking with Jesse Hall, aka Code Stacker. |
| 0:38.6 | He's a software engineer and a developer advocate at MongoDB. |
| 0:43.2 | He taught himself how to code using free code camp while he was raising his kids and working on the best by geek squad fixing people's computers. |
| 0:53.5 | Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. |
| 0:57.9 | Wix Studio provides developers with tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, |
| 1:03.3 | then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. |
| 1:06.5 | Learn more at Wix Studio.com. |
| 1:09.0 | Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support FreecoCamp through a monthly |
| 1:16.4 | donation. |
| 1:17.5 | You can join these chill human beings and help our mission by going to Freakocamp.org |
| 1:22.6 | slash donate. |
| 1:24.2 | For this week's musical intro with yours truly on drums, guitar, bass, and keys. |
| 1:29.4 | We're going back to 1983 with elevator action. |
... |
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