Welcome back to the FreeCode Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of Freakocamp.org.

Today we're talking with Emmett Notton.

He worked as a hospital janitor for years while teaching himself programming using FreeCodeCamp.

He's the founder of Coder Dads, a chat community where dads encouraged one another.

We're going to talk about how to make ends meet while raising a family, recovering from

getting laid off twice in the same year, Emmett's journey into the Ph.P. Larvale ecosystem

and how to use social media effectively when you don't like using social media. I think a lot of

us can relate to that. And finally, Emmett's sleep apnea and how fixing his sleep dramatically

improved his thinking and his coding. Emmett, welcome to the Free Coat Camp podcast. Hey, great to be here.

Yeah, man. It's always great to talk with somebody who successfully made like a serious

career transition like you have. I wanted to start by talking about Larvalh PHP,

which is like an entire different ecosystem

from full stack JavaScript that you initially learned

when you were getting into software development.

And I understand for like one of your more recent projects,

you picked up Larovel and you've been building with that.

Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to, one, a new challenge, right? We love, love a good challenge. And also from what I've seen online with the Larval community, seems like really awesome people to be hanging out with. So really great to be in that sort of ecosystem and then trying something new and seeing how it works on the web.

Yeah.

So you've built projects with like Node.js and, you know, React. And, you know, the typical like Mernstack, I guess is more conventionally called, which is, you know, MongoDB, Express, Node, and React,

or variations that, like I understand you've also used, like VJS and libraries like that.

But what is different about the PHP community?

They seem very excited about everything PHP and web-based, and also just like seems super encouraging

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