#176 Rust VS Go VS TypeScript which back end language is for you with Tai Groot
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2025
⏱️ 118 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tai Groot. He's a back end software engineer and maintains an open source project used by companies like Google.
For the first half of the interview we talk about back end programming languages. Then he shares tips for running learning back end development and running your own developer consultancy.
We talk about:
- The Performance VS Developer Experience trade-offs of Rust, Go, and TypeScript
- How to run a free open source project profitably
- How to mentor junior devs and ramp them up to work at your consultancy
- Why he recommends devs learn Arch Linux
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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:
- Tai's website: https://taigrr.com/
- Why Tai doesn't use Salt Stack anymore and how it inspired grlk: https://taigrr.github.io/blog/so-long-salt-project/
- The promise-breaking app: https://bridgetime.net/
- freeCodeCamp's Arch Linux handbook: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-install-arch-linux/
- The Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCoke Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. |
| 0:06.5 | Today, we're talking with Tai Groot. |
| 0:08.7 | He's a backend software engineer and he runs an open source project used by companies like Google. |
| 0:14.6 | For the first half of the interview, we talk about backend programming languages like Go, Rust, and TypeScript. |
| 0:20.8 | Then Ty shares tips for learning |
| 0:23.1 | back-end development and running your own developer consultancy. Ty Groot, welcome to the free CodeCamp |
| 0:27.9 | podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and it's a sunny day there in Northern California where you're |
| 0:34.2 | based near the software development mecca somewhere between San Jose |
| 0:38.9 | and San Francisco. And we're thrilled to have you here on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. |
| 0:44.9 | It's exciting. Yeah. Well, I want to start with a question. You're a back-end engineer primarily. |
| 0:50.8 | I mean, you can do everything, but like that's where you've chosen to specialize for the past few years. And a lot of people, when they're doing back-end development, |
| 0:58.2 | they may be thinking, oh, I'll just use Python. I mean, you can use Python for everything, right? |
| 1:02.4 | Why not just use Python for everything? Yeah, it's a great question. So I did just publish a course |
| 1:09.7 | that talks about the relative |
| 1:11.5 | strengths of go and type script versus rust um at python's a another another one of those options right |
| 1:17.9 | um python was actually one of my first back-end languages um and it was it was a it was a it was a good time |
| 1:25.8 | um i like python better now than i did back when i used it um |
| 1:30.4 | but uh yeah i mean there's there's plenty of reasons let's let's get into it so um python is |
| 1:37.7 | is fine as like a glue language i think um i would recommend it to a lot of people, depending on the situation, tends to struggle with loops. |
| 1:48.9 | So people that are learning Python for the first time or people that are evaluating Python is like a main language, |
| 1:59.9 | may not realize just how much slower Python is compared to |
| 2:04.7 | a compiled language. And sometimes that tradeoff is fine, right? Sometimes getting the ability |
... |
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