The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Today Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Rose. She's a dev and teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla and lots of open source projects.
We talk about:
- How the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better thinker
- The Bad Website club, a free online bootcamp where people learn front end development together that starts this April
- Why building "silly little things" is one of the best things you can do as a learner
Links from our discussion:
- Bad Website Club announcement: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/bad-website-club-bootcamp-based-on-freecodecamp-rwd-cert/
- Study Jess mentions about AI and worker productivity: https://www.raconteur.net/technology/ai-meaningful-work 
Community news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published a new Python course that will teach you how to program your own aerial drone. You don't need to own a drone. You'll use the PySimverse simulator to practice autonomous flight. First you'll learn the basics of drone components, 3D movement, and common computer vision tasks. Then you'll learn about navigation, image capture, hand gesture control, autonomous following, and more. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/master-ai-drone-programming/
2. freeCodeCamp also published a massive course that will teach you how to program NVIDIA's H100 GPUs using CUDA. You'll learn about CUTLASS optimizations, multi-GPU scaling, and the primitives developers use to train large models. (24 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cuda-programming-for-nvidia-h100s
3. If you've ever wanted to build a video editor or live streaming tool that runs entirely in a browser, this handbook is worth bookmarking. You'll see how the WebCodecs API can give you low-level, hardware-accelerated control over video processing. You'll learn key concepts like video frames, codecs, containers, and muxing. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-webcodecs-handbook-native-video-processing-in-the-browser/
4. Kubernetes doesn't have a built-in user database. Instead it relies on a chain of authenticators. This course will teach you how x509 client certificates work, why they're not ideal for human users in production, and how to instead deploy your own self-hosted browser-based OpenID Connect login. (29 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-authenticate-users-in-kubernetes-x509-certificates-oidc-and-cloud-identity/
5. The song of the week is 1983's "Oblivious" by Scottish New Wave band Aztec Camera. I love the song's Django Reinhart-style Flamenco guitars, mischevous bass line, and stereo percussion. Believe it or not, front man Roddy Frame was only 18 years old when he wrote the song, sang it, and played it's iconic guitar solo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdVb4Iuq0e8

Today Quincy Larson interviews Mark Mahoney. He worked as a dev before becoming a computer science professor. He's taught computer science for 23 years at Carthage College, a 180-year-old US university. He's also taught thousands of developers through his free programming courses built on top of his own open source course platform, Playback Press.
We talk about:
- Why learning programming the hard way is still the right way
- How to not deskill yourself when programming with LLM tools
- And why now is a great time to study computer science
Support for this podcast comes from the 10,113 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Get a freeCodeCamp tshirt for $20 with free shipping anywhere in the US: https://shop.freecodecamp.org
Links from our discussion:
- Playback Press, Mark's free interactive courses: https://playbackpress.com/books
- Mark's personal website: https://markm208.github.io/
- One of the many vibe-coded projects Mark mentions: https://markm208.github.io/vibeCodingInClassTools/git-workflow-simulator.html
- Mark's tutorials on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/markm208/
Community news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published a new course on AI-assisted software development. You'll learn common terminal workflows and tips for "pair programming" alongside LLM tools. You'll also get exposure to  tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and OpenClaw. At the end of the day, the entire goal of using these tools is to build more features without compromising the maintainability of your codebase. (90 minute YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ai-tools-for-developers/
2. freeCodeCamp also published a beginner level course on AI literacy for everybody that you can also share with your family. First you'll learn about the two traits that definte artificial intelligence: autonomy and adaptivity. Then you'll build your own image classifier right on your own phone or laptop. This course also delves into considerations like algorithmic bias the environmental costs of training and running LLM systems. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ai-literacy-for-everybody/
3. Learn how to build your own QR code generator using JavaScript. This tutorial will walk you through generating QR codes entirely in a browser without the need for a backend. You'll learn how to validate input, clear previous output, and use a JavaScript library to render the code instantly on the client side. Then you'll see how to extend the project with downloads, custom styling, WiFi support, and more. (7 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-a-qr-code-generator-using-javascript/
4. I'm thrilled to announce that the Bad Website Club is back for another Responsive Web Design bootcamp based on freeCodeCamp's curriculum. It starts April 24 and runs for 10 weeks. You can  join their Discord community and tune in for live streams. It's lead by volunteer devs who are passionate about helping folks learn CSS and JavaScript fundamentals. (5 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/bad-website-club-bootcamp-based-on-freecodecamp-rwd-cert/
5. Today's song of the week is 2008's Strange Overtones. The Talking Heads singer David Byrne blends his voice with Brian Enos, who handles organs and synths. The entire affair plays over an infectious palm-muted guitar line, and driving bass. This is a perfect mid-week jam. Put it on during during your commute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvZhpCYWFzs

Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prolific streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a "snowboard bum" doing odd jobs at ski resorts to facilitate him spending as much time on the mountain as possible.
At age 28 he taught himself PHP programming and started building websites for friends. In 2018 he started streaming himself programming on Twitch, which blew up during the pandemic and has lead to more opportunities as a dev and developer advocate.
We talk about:
- How he learned programming at age 28 and built projects for friends before going pro 
- How learning Go made him a better Rust Developer and why you should be a polyglot programmer
- How Chris uses LLM tools but still builds most codebases manually
- Tips for building projects in public for anyone interested in also stream coding
Support for this podcast comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Get a freeCodeCamp tshirt for $20 with free shipping anywhere in the US: https://shop.freecodecamp.org
Links from our discussion:
- Chris's Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/cmgriffing
- Chris's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@cmgriffing
Community news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published a comprehensive course that will walk you through using the popular AI-assisted development tool Claude Code. You'll learn about Code Harnesses, Agentic Loops, Sandboxing, and other key concepts. By the end of the course you'll be able to spin up an entire fleet of agents to help you fix bugs and build out new features. (12 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/claude-code-essentials-exampro/
2. We also published a course on the Hugging Face tool ecosystem. You'll learn how to connect your models, datasets, and deployment tools into a single unified build pipeline. (7 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/deploying-ai-models-with-hugging-face/
3. Learn how to secure your Kubernetes Cluster. This in-depth tutorial starts by exploring real-world security breaches at big companies like Tesla, Shopify, and Capital One. Then it walks you through how to prevent each of these types of attacks by hardening your setup. (1 hour read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-secure-a-kubernetes-cluster-handbook/
4. Tell your Spanish-speaking friends: freeCodeCamp just published a new Spanish-language course on SQL and relational databases. It covers tables, foreign keys, queries, data manipulation, and more. (4 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-sql-course-for-beginners-in-spanish/
5. Today's song of the week is the 1988 song by Genesis sideproject Mike + the Mechanics: "Nobody's Perfect". If you like synths and guitar solos, you'll love this song. Paul Young has an incredible voice. And I love the edifying message behind the song. The video is as 80s as they get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7mQ26YCsho

Today Quincy Larson interviews Landon Gray. He's a software engineer who worked at agencies for years. Then he taught himself AI assisted software development. And now he's helping other devs do the same. 
Landon's famous for proving that RAG pipelines can be written in Ruby and popularizing Ruby as a language for building machine learning projects.
He works as an AI Engineer at a enterprise software company and runs a popular newsletter.
We talk about:
- How Large Language Models are just the raw fuel, and harnesses are the real engine to get things done
- Why building your professional network is so helpful for finding clients and landing job interviews
- Why Landon helped port Python machine learning libraries to Ruby, and why he thinks that – now that AI is just an API call away – the Ruby ecosystem is better-positioned than ever.
Support for this podcast comes from the 10,113 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Get a freeCodeCamp tshirt for $20 with free shipping anywhere in the US: https://shop.freecodecamp.org
Links from our discussion:
- Landon's Substack newsletter: https://landongray.substack.com

Community news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published a new YouTube course that will teach you beginner Front-end Development skills like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can code along at home and build a variety of projects: your own interactive quiz game, a currency converter app, and even a Trello-style kanban board. Along the way you'll learn how to use APIs and local storage to extend the functionality of these bite-sized apps. (12 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-19-web-dev-projects-using-html-css-javascript/
2. Learn how to properly test your software and ensure it doesn't break when you add new features. Prolific freeCodeCamp instructor Beau Carnes teaches this course. He'll introduce you to the Testing Pyramid and show you how to balance fast unit tests against complex end-to-end user journeys. You'll also learn how to automate some of this testing using an open source library called Playwright and an LLM testing tool. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/software-testing-with-playwright/
3. More and more apps are relying on probabilistic LLM output alongside deterministic API calls. This makes life harder for devs who now need to ensure that hallucinations don't escape to end users. freeCodeCamp just published this advanced observability tutorial that will teach you emerging best practices and architectural patterns for dealing with this. (40 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-end-to-end-llm-observability-in-fastapi-with-opentelemetry/
4. Learn how to containerize your MLOps pipelines. This tutorial is the result of hard-won deployment wisdom. The author spent three weeks debugging a Python library error due to dependency conflicts. His eventual answer: containerize entire project with Docker. This tutorial will show you how to structure your containers with multi-stage builds. You'll also learn how to set up experiment tracking with MLflow, versioning with DVC, GPU passthrough, and other advanced techniques. (40 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/containerize-mlops-pipeline-from-training-to-serving/
6. Today's song of the week is 2006's Everybody by UK producers Basement Jaxx. If you're familiar with their work, you know you're in for a psychedelic yet silly romp. Between the spoons, bongos, and swooning chorus the song feels like it's held together with duct tape but it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrMot81VE8g

Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Coyier. He's a front-end developer and co-founder of CodePen and the CSS Tricks blog. He has also recorded more than 700 podcasts about software engineering.
We talk about:
- How he thinks front-end development tools are 90% of the way to where they need to be
- How developing for the web is "just as good as mobile, and you can reuse it everywhere."
- And why high skilled devs working on novel problems don't need to worry about AI disrupting their careers
Support for this podcast comes from the 10,113 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Get a freeCodeCamp tshirt for $20 with free shipping anywhere in the US: https://shop.freecodecamp.org
Links from our discussion:
- Chris's personal site: https://chriscoyier.net/
- CodePen: https://codepen.io/chriscoyier
- ShopTalk Podcast: https://shoptalkshow.com/
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/chriscoyier.net
- Mastodon: https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier
Community news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published a comprehensive DevOps course that will teach you how to deploy your apps to production safely. You'll build your own CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipeline. Along the way you'll learn about branching strategies, Jenkins Freestyle Jobs, GitFlow, Maven, and more. This is a perfect way to build your skills over spring break. (17 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ci-cd-in-production-with-jenkins/
2. Learn how to fine-tune an LLM to incorporate your own proprietary data. This is super useful if you need off-the-shelf LLMs to do novel tasks that they weren't originally optimized for. This course will teach you all about Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, and how to use techniques like LoRA and QLoRA to train models on consumer-grade hardware. No data center needed. (12 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-how-to-fine-tune-llms-in-12-hours/
3. Learn how to protect your sensitive data by running your LLMs locally. This quick tutorial will show you how to get up and running with Ollama, Python, LangChain, and LangGraph. It will also walk you through the various trade-offs you face when you avoid sharing your data with big tech companies. (15 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/protect-sensitive-data-with-local-llms/
4. Learn how agents are changing the field of software development. This in-depth tutorial will get you hands-on experience with building your own Flutter mobile app using Antigravity and Stitch. You don't even need to know Flutter. You just need to understand the core concepts and make the architectural decisions. You'll quickly see how sophisticated these tools have gotten over the past few months. (40 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-how-ai-agents-are-changing-development-by-building-a-flutter-app/
5. Today's album of the week is 1982 jazz fusion classic Mint Jams by Casiopea. This is the perfect record to put on when you want to get a ton of work done, and feel great in the process. For every song, each of the performers gets a solo. That means every track you're going to hear a spicy bass solo, keyboard solo, drum solo, and guitar solo. Love it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEI3PpXEAo