#174 How to Survive in Tech When Everything's Changing w/ 21-year Veteran Dev Joe Attardi
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Attardi. He's a software engineer and prolific author of programming books.
We talk about:
How software development has changed over the past 21 years
Tips for suriving AI's sweeping changes to the field
The evolving role of Computer Science degrees
Why people should still read O'Reilly style programming books on dead trees
Links we talk about during our conversation:
Joe's freeCodeCamp books and tutorials: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/joeattardi/
Joe's website: https://joeattardi.com/
Joe's Web API Cookbook: https://www.webapis.info/
Joe's open source projects on GitHub: https://github.com/joeattardi
What Joe's desk looks like: https://x.com/JoeAttardi/status/1849819837360480658
Some games Joe's recently played: https://backloggd.com/u/jattardi/games?page=1
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCodeCamp podcast. |
| 0:02.4 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakococamp.org. |
| 0:05.8 | Today, we are talking with Joe Atardi. |
| 0:09.1 | He is a software engineer and a prolific author of programming books. |
| 0:14.5 | Joe, how's the summer over there in Boston? |
| 0:17.4 | I haven't really gotten started yet. |
| 0:18.7 | We're dealing with the Norrisa right now. |
| 0:20.2 | It's in the 40s and |
| 0:21.0 | rainy all right that's 40 degrees Fahrenheit which is pretty darn cold it's like practically |
| 0:25.9 | zero degrees in Celsius um and for our international audience um Joe I'm so stoked to talk with you |
| 0:34.6 | because you've been in the industry for a long time. You've been here |
| 0:37.9 | 21 years. Yep. And you've done a lot of stuff. We're going to delve into that. You've risen |
| 0:43.9 | through the ranks and you have just built a really broad skill set. So we're going to talk about |
| 0:51.1 | how software development has changed over the past 21 years. We're going to talk about how software development has changed over the past 21 years. |
| 0:54.6 | We're going to talk about tips for surviving AI sweeping changes to the field. |
| 0:59.1 | I know you're in on like what's going on with AI and you've talked a little bit about it on social media. |
| 1:04.9 | We're going to talk about the evolving role of computer science degrees. |
| 1:08.0 | You yourself are a computer science degree holder. |
| 1:10.1 | You've kind of seen kind of like how they've waxed and waned in popularity among hiring managers. We're going to talk |
| 1:15.9 | about why people should still read O'Reilly-style programming books printed on dead trees. Again, |
| 1:22.2 | you're working on your fourth O'Reilly-style book, and I'm hyped to hear about all that. |
| 1:28.7 | All right. |
... |
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