#176 From Therapist to six figure freelance dev
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kelly Vaughn. She's a self-taught software engineer who ran her own developer agency. She was also the founding CTO at financial technology startup. Kelly runs the popular Ladybug Podcast focused on women in tech.
We talk about:
- How to freelance and ultimately create a developer agency and get clients
- Tips for navigating the current developer job market
- How to move from freelance to working for someone else
- Tips for recognizing burnout so you can know when to take break
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 charity's mission by going to https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Kelly's website: https://kvlly.com
- The Ladybug Podcast talks about tech, career, and code lead by women in tech: https://ladybug.dev
- Kelly's engineering leadership newsletter: https://modernleader.is
- Kelly's new burnout-focused newsletter: https://afterburnout.co
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCote Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakococamp.org. |
| 0:06.0 | Today, we're talking with Kelly Vaughn. She's a self-taught software engineer who ran her own developer agency. |
| 0:12.6 | She was also the founding CTO at a financial technology startup. |
| 0:16.3 | Kelly runs the popular Ladybug podcast focused on women in tech. |
| 0:20.4 | We're going to talk about how to get into freelance and ultimately create a developer |
| 0:24.6 | agency and get clients. |
| 0:26.3 | She's also going to share tips for navigating the current developer job market. |
| 0:30.4 | We're going to learn how to move from freelancing to working for somebody else. |
| 0:34.1 | And we're going to hear about tips for recognizing burnout so you can know when to |
| 0:38.2 | take a break. Hey Kelly, welcome to the Free Co-Camp podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm |
| 0:43.0 | excited to be here. Yeah. Well, you have had such an interesting career. Of course, like learning, |
| 0:49.6 | coding on your own as a 12 year old and then landing your first client at 14. |
| 0:59.6 | But I'm sure along the way you learned something that like it was, it was kind of like a rock in the sea that like maybe you scrubbing upon. |
| 1:05.3 | I'm not sure what the verb is, but you scuffed a rock and you're like, oh, I need to tell |
| 1:09.6 | other people to look out for that rock. |
| 1:10.9 | What was one early thing that you quickly learned? |
| 1:13.7 | Oh, look out. |
| 1:15.7 | There be dragons there. |
| 1:16.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:17.2 | If you focus all of your time and energy on one, building on one particular platform, you will find that you're actually setting yourself back technically. |
| 1:27.2 | For me, that was with Shopify. |
| 1:30.2 | And things have changed a lot since I started. Again, I started building on Shopify over 10 years |
... |
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