#184 Senior Playstation Engineer's tips for learning new tools and getting things done
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dilip Krishnamoorthi. He's a software engineer working at Sony, building user interfaces for Playstation game consoles where he's been for 10 years.
We talk about:
- How he dropped out of a traditional Indian university and used an inexpensive distance learning program to finish his engineering degree for less than US $100 / semester
- What it's like working in Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of Asia
- His experience launching the Playstation 5
- Tips for continuing to learn new tools even as a senior engineer
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Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Wikipedia article on Flow State, a concept Dilip mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
- An IGN article about major improvements to Playstation 5's UI that Dilip worked on: https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5s-ui-the-five-biggest-gamechangers
- Webcomic about the perils of context switching: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/60wx3z/this_is_why_you_shouldnt_interrupt_a_programmer/#lightbox
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCote Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org. |
| 0:06.4 | Today, we're talking with Dilip Krishnamorti. He's a software engineer working at Sony, building user interfaces for PlayStation game consoles where he's been for the past 10 years. |
| 0:17.7 | Dilip, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Quincy. It's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. We're thrilled to have you here. I had a blast hanging out with you at the San Francisco State University Hackathon, where you and I were both judges. So if anybody's wondering how I met Dilip, that's where. Yeah. Yeah, I had a lot of fun, too. |
| 0:38.2 | It was very cool to see, like, so many amazing projects. |
| 0:41.6 | And I was actually humbled to see, like, all these kids building super cool, like, |
| 0:48.1 | projects that had various levels of complexity, solving real world problems. |
| 0:53.8 | Very impressed. Yeah, super impressive. Well, today we're going to talk about how you drop. had various levels of complexity solving real world problems. |
| 0:54.6 | Very impressed. |
| 0:54.8 | Yeah. Super impressive. |
| 0:56.2 | Well, today we're going to talk about how you dropped out of a traditional Indian |
| 1:00.0 | university and used an inexpensive distance learning program to finish your engineering |
| 1:04.1 | degree for less than $100 a semester. |
| 1:07.2 | What it's like working in Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of Asia. |
| 1:11.8 | Your experience launching PlayStation 5 during the pandemic and all your work on the PlayStation 5. |
| 1:17.8 | And tips for continuing to learn new skills even as a senior engineer. |
| 1:22.9 | So, yeah, I want to ask, just start off right off the bat. |
| 1:27.3 | Everybody's concerned about AI, like everybody's interested in how AI is being used. |
| 1:31.7 | You work for a massive company more than 100,000 people, and you're an L5, like level |
| 1:37.9 | five, the second highest engineering level at Sony. |
| 1:41.4 | And at that level, are you even using AI developer tools? And if so, how are you using them? |
| 1:47.6 | Yeah, absolutely. I'm using AI. Everybody's eyes on it right now. But I personally have a more |
| 1:54.9 | optimistic view about it. I'm not as pessimistic as people are saying that it's going to take over |
... |
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