#179 799 rejections... but he got the job! Braydon Coyer developer interview
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Braydon Coyer. He's a software engineer who started building mobile apps in high school – one of which even out-sold Angry Birds for a few days. He dropped out of his computer science degree program once he landed his first web developer job and never went back.
We talk about:
- Mobile app development VS web app development
- Strategies for applying for developer roles
- How useful is a CS degree really?
- Sane ways to integrate AI into your developer workflows
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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:
- Braydon's awesome custom website: https://www.braydoncoyer.dev/
- Fruit Ninja game development documentary:
- Raycast tool Braydon uses to automate prpcesses on his Mac: https://www.raycast.com/
- Tana note taking tool Braydon uses: https://tana.inc/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCode Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakocamp.org. |
| 0:06.3 | Today we're talking with Braden Coir. He's a software engineer who started building mollaps in high school, |
| 0:13.1 | one of which even outsold Angry Birds for a few days. And then he dropped out of his computer |
| 0:19.3 | science degree program once he got his first developer job and he never went back. Braden, welcome to the show. Quincy, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to get to talk to you today. We've met a couple of times, but the one-on-one conversation is going to be great. Awesome, man. Well, I'm hyped. We are going to talk about mobile app development |
| 0:37.9 | versus web app development. You've got experience in both spheres. Strategies for applying for |
| 0:43.0 | developer roles. We're going to talk about the 800 job applications that helped you get your |
| 0:47.5 | first developer job. How useful is a CS degree, really? And some sane ways to integrate |
| 0:53.7 | AI into your developer workflows, balance takes, as always, |
| 0:58.2 | here on the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 1:01.1 | Braden, why don't we start off by talking about this gold rush that happened when you were |
| 1:05.5 | in high school, the app store launches, everybody goes crazy about mobile app development, |
| 1:10.1 | everybody's trying to build mobile apps, everybody's downloading actively mobile apps and like paying money for mobile |
| 1:15.4 | apps and things that are kind of almost unheard of today. I guess that maybe so happens. |
| 1:19.2 | But you were there at like on the ground floor at the start of that mobile app revolution. |
| 1:25.7 | Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was, uh, it was an interesting time because i come from a |
| 1:29.6 | family of of programmers like my dad was a programmer on my brother devon's a programmer and you know |
| 1:36.2 | my dad is always like hey hey brayden you know have you thought about kind of hopping into |
| 1:40.7 | programming you want to you want to try this to that? I was very against it at first. I was |
| 1:45.2 | not interested. I was a very visual person, so I did a lot of like digital art. But when Apple |
| 1:52.9 | announced the iPad, which was right around the time the app store came out, I was like, |
| 1:58.9 | I need to build something for that device. Like, at the time, it was |
| 2:03.4 | like revolutionary, right? This huge touchscreen on this beautiful device with a UI that looked |
... |
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