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The freeCodeCamp Podcast

#165 From hating coding to programming satellites at age 37 with Francesco Ciulla

The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson

Education, Technology

5.0549 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 87 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Francesco Ciulla. He's a software engineer who has worked with the European Space Agency on code that powers the Copernicus satellite program. More recently he's published courses on learning Docker and the Rust programming language.

We talk about:
- How Francesco worked as a volleyball coach until we was 32, before getting serious about coding
- Francesco's work on coding satellites
- How he's given dozens of talks about emerging tools at major tech conferences
- How he creates tech tutorials even though he's a proud introvert who has to put himself out there

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. You can join these chill human beings and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

Links we talk about during our conversation:

- Francesco's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@francescociulla
- Francesco's upcoming book on Rust: https://mybook.to/YJI6DI 
- Francesco's personal website and all his links: https://www.francescociulla.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The best approach that you can have if you are an introvert who wants to share something on social media is not to feel introversion like a disease, like something that is stopping you. Oh my God. No, it's you can just do stuff while you are an introvert. And introverts I have great skills. It's just that they are inside.

0:21.5

When you accept your nature, you can do whatever you want.

0:25.3

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers.

0:31.0

This week, we're talking with Francesco Chiola.

0:34.8

He's a software engineer who worked at the European Space Agency on the code that powers the Copernicus satellite program.

0:43.3

He's also published courses on Docker and the Rust programming language.

0:47.6

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio.

0:51.5

Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box,

0:56.1

then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code.

0:59.5

Learn more at Wixstudio.com.

1:03.0

Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support free code camp through a monthly donation.

1:10.0

You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to

1:14.9

donate.freakocamp.org.

1:18.0

For this week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keys,

1:22.0

we're going back to 1986 with the Nintendo game Life Force.

1:47.0

This is Power of anger. The The Thank you. Welcome to the Free Coke Camp podcast.

2:33.2

Thank you so much, Quincy, for inviting me.

2:35.4

I'm super excited and let's get started and let's talk about Rust and many more things.

2:39.8

Yeah, and my first question for you is about Rust.

2:43.1

So Rust, of course, is a high-performance programming language that a lot of people love.

2:48.8

I think it's been voted the most loved programming language by the Stack Overflow

2:53.7

annual developer survey for many years in a row.

...

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