thank you
do you want me to do some testings oh
we're live
all right hey everybody
welcome to the free code camp
2018 top contributors party in dublin
yeah
here
we have
amazing people
from all around europe and africa
thank you everybody for coming out
it's great uh and we're thrilled
to
welcome you all and to celebrate your
many contributions to the freco camp
open source community and to your own
city's local developer communities so
many of you are
so critical
in helping people in your communities
realize that they can become
developers
and giving them actionable advice as to
how they can do that
so
i just want to give a big round of
applause for everybody here yeah
[Applause]
all right well uh we're going to be
streaming for the next three hours or so
uh
two hours and 45 minutes
we started a little late thanks for your
patience everybody who's tuning in
um and
it should be really exciting we'll talk
about a lot of exciting things before we
get started i have some very quick
announcements
uh things that are coming up very soon
that i think everybody who's interested
in free code camp should know first of
all
just like last year when free co camp
participated in hacktoberfest
and hacktoberfest is the month of
october it's a big push to get people to
contribute to open source
last year free code camps guide
was the
number one most contributed to open
source repo
as part of hacktoberfest
[Applause]
and
since then the the repo's gotten
700 7 000
7 000 pull requests
yeah so
i'll be completely candid it was a lot
more than we were ready for
and we're still closing all the way like
we're back to like october 25th
we've been working backward but if you
made pull requests back in october don't
worry we're gonna get to those soon
and
we are going to get that all the way
down we're working very hard to do that
and we're going to make it much easier
to contribute to free code camp in
october 2018 for the hacktoberfest so
the way we're doing that is we're taking
a lot of the existing repositories we've
got learn we've got curriculum we've got
the free codecamp slash recoding at the
main repository
and then we've got the guide we're
working to
unify
these repos into a single repository
that will make it easier
for everybody to get the local freeco
camp running and to put him on the spot
i'd like for stuart to come up and say a
few quick words about that
let's give it up for stuart
stewart taylor he's he's from right
just uh
three hours away from here near belfast
oh yeah so um
the idea that the current situation of
contributing free code camp is uh if you
wanted to have the curricular map up and
running
and uh that's really
sorry yeah so the curricular map if you
wanted the curriculum and you want to
interact with the server um locally you
have to have at least two command
prompts open
so the idea is we're gonna have
just one command that will run the
curriculum app which is learn.3.com.org
we're going to have the api server
running as well
and
you'll be able to once again edit the
curriculum
and see the changes live in your browser
locally so
[Applause]
so hopefully that'll make it a lot
easier for everybody to contribute to
and we are looking forward to your pull
requests
thank you
so yes
it will be much easier and
our efforts will be focused on a single
repository this oktoberfest the core
freecodecamp repository which should
simplify like we'll have a single
contributing.md file that has
instructions ideally we'll have a single
script that bootstraps your local
environment so that you've got your
database running
and you've got your npm install taken
care of and
so you're not having to click back and
forth and input a whole bunch of
commands yourself
so
that way it will just be much easier to
to do the first step to contributing to
open source which is cloning the repo
and getting it running locally
so we're very excited about that effort
a couple other announcements since you
are watching this on the youtube channel
according to like the youtube analytics
we looked at free code camp
is now the fastest growing programming
youtube channel
yeah and
we're getting about 50 000 new
subscribers a month so if if you see
like a little subscribe button and it's
like red and it doesn't it's not it
should be gray and it should say
subscribed
so just click it and it should do that
and you can turn on the little bell
thing too and that'll notify you when
when we publish new videos which is
almost every day
we've been publishing
comprehensive in-depth tutorials on java
c plus plus
we recently published uh kind of an
anthology video by brianna who's here
who who flew in uh from berlin today and
it it covers
basically how computers work how
networks work how how the internet works
it covers all that in a nice 25 minute
very concise video but we also have
videos that are you know eight nine
hours long that go into depth and show
you how to build full
projects and bootstrap developer
environments for
you know everything from c-sharp to java
to node.js
and
ruby on rails and things like that so
we're going to continue to publish
incredible
comprehensive substantial tutorials
all of which will be completely free
we're not showing any commercials if you
create compelling videos about
programming and you're interested
we would love to help
more people see your instagram content
your videos so just reach out to us and
we can make that happen but for us
we want to put as many amazing
videos on youtube as we can
so
we're here in dublin we're at i've got a
cool sign for it
the huckle tree
which is a really cool hipster name
and uh
it has a hashtag
i just noticed that so
this is a very cool venue
um and they've been really cool
and cooperative when you have to wire
money from america and coordinate
catering and all that stuff through
email it can be challenging but i just
want to do a shout out to the huckle
tree for being very uh
helpful and and
uh having this beautiful
venue that has lots of irish tea which
is like super caffeinated kind of
english breakfast tea that i've been
drinking all night
to counter the jet lag
um so
we're gonna go in a big circle we've got
a lot of people here and everyone can
take a moment to introduce themselves
and where they're from
and what they do
for the free coke camp community and the
first person we're gonna hear from
is teemo
aka systematic
he
has contributed
so much to the free code camp guide
anyway i'll let you introduce yourself
thank you yeah my name is stevo i
am from the netherlands from veda
and and i've contributed a lot to the
free code chem guides and the free
curriculum repository as well
um
i haven't been contributing that much
for the past year but i hope to get back
into it more now
i got an internship and then i got a job
and i had to get used to it
i'm stuart and i am a developer for free
code camp everything i do every day is
for freak out
it's good i like it
i'm ben i'm from just down the road ish
in dublin um i am one of the old hats
who can choose a free code camp i think
i'm still number six in the repo so i
need to uh get that pushed up again um
again another person who's got life in
the bit in the way but i'm hoping to get
back on it this year
see ya
[Applause]
hi everyone i'm sam um i started by
writing a couple of articles and sent
one of them to quincy who i was just
asking for some advice he said that's
brilliant and i actually stuck it on the
free code camp medium publication since
then i've written more and more articles
and trying to give tutorials to the kind
of people that want to get into
writing code and possibly taking up as a
career
hey guys i'm jonathan i'm from belfast
northern ireland and uh i haven't been
too active the last year but
um mostly contributing to the code base
and some of the guide as well so
[Applause]
hello my name is pete i'm a data
scientist based in london and i write
and help edit the medium publication for
free code camp
hi i'm matt i'm a software developer
also in london and i organise the london
freako camp meetups
hi i'm gergai from hungary and i wrote
articles to the fico medium publications
[Applause]
hi i'm david kopal from czech republic i
live in pardubitsa and i write articles
to free code cam publications mainly
about javascript and now in re about
reason mls so definitely check out
reason ml
hi i'm alefteria i'm from greece i know
it's difficult name to be pronunciated
and i'm making uh youtube videos so i'm
honored that free concum has published
some of my videos
hi i'm evides from portugal i was a
civil engineering and in six months i've
rebooted my career and nowadays i'm a
remote developer working from portugal
to the netherlands in react and redux
[Applause]
hi i'm richard sitolo i'm from south
africa johannesburg
i
and with others
organize meetups
from johannesburg
and i'm a software developer and thanks
to free code cam's curriculum i i've
managed to you know break into the
industry which i
um you know at the beginning i thought
was impossible to do
um but yeah i'm very grateful to quincy
and the team and meeting all of you guys
it's just been fantastic i'm learning a
lot and i continue to learn in my
day-to-day job
and
yeah i'm looking forward to the rest of
the evening yay
hi i'm brianna um i have made some
videos for free codecam's youtube
channel i'm from kansas city originally
but now live in berlin
as much as i'm grateful to be able to
contribute to free code camp i feel like
as many people in this room free code
camp has really contributed to me into
my life and i'm really grateful for that
[Applause]
hi
i'm andrea i'm a student and my
contributions to freecod camp were
mainly writing articles on the medium
publication and
flooding the guides repository of pull
requests
hi i'm juan for from portugal
i started free code camp i changed my
career and we decided with eduardo to
create a study group in portugal to help
other students get there on the way
hi good evening i'm johnny from leeds i
spend a lot of time helping out
beginners on the forum plus i help with
a coffee and code that we regularly host
here in leeds uh well not here in lee's
but back in leeds in england okay thank
you
hi my name is robert
i'm from norway live in austria i
started a local fico cam vienna group
in austria three years ago there was
nothing so i was like okay i'll start it
um people started turning up when we
started meetup groups i've had monthly
meetups for about three years
um
long story short i've written an article
for the publication
the talks are
recorded since last two years and some
of the talks have made it to the youtube
channel which is awesome
including which is the best part
i did a talk with my other co-organizer
daniel deutch who couldn't be here
tonight but he's saying hi to everyone
um we did a talk on going from um
learning to code to get your first job
as a self-taught developer and it's also
on the youtube channel
uh so yeah that's the most amazing part
like i started free code camp and
studying it because i wanted to get my
first developer job and i did which is
awesome so yeah thanks
hi everyone i'm richard from also from
leeds where johnny johnny bizzles from
the icon that is johnny vissel
and i now live in oslo actually i've
come from your neck of the woods so
i'm one of the local leaders still in
leeds uh i'm one of the local leaders
in oslo
i also won the free code freecodecamp
instagram so if you're on instagram
that's me who's posting uh
and wrote some articles for the medium
post and there's a youtube video on the
freecodecamp youtube of mine as well um
and yeah that's about it that's that's a
lot
[Applause]
awesome well thank you everybody for
coming out here uh
you all have given up your time you get
up your energy you know free code camp's
a small non-profit we don't have the
resources to fly everybody out and put
them up in a nice hotel so you all have
figured out ways to come out here and
stay and that means an incredible amount
to me and to the rest of the free
cooking community as well so
it's wonderful to be
here together in dublin
and to be able to mingle and to learn
more about one another so i think at
this point what i'm going to do is i'm
going to get some more english tea
all right i'm sorry irish tea
i dodged the bullet there right that was
that's particularly hazardous um
so i'm going to get some more irisd and
then we can sit down here on this
beautiful couch overlooking this
beautiful evening
um
and
i'm going to try to talk to as many of
you all as possible and just interview
you and learn more about you so anybody
who wants to be interviewed uh just kind
of when you see that an interview is
ending come over and jump on the couch
i'll talk to you
be assertive
[Laughter]
don't be shy this is this is gonna be so
much fun
and uh
i see tons of people in chat
all of it's super supportive thanks
everybody for tuning in and uh yeah
we'll we'll make a highlight video like
we did with the new york city event and
then we'll share that with the community
too which should be able to so
all of you are able to
help
give people some context into what they
can expect striking out on their own
uh
trying to learn software development and
trying to get their first developer job
and i think pretty much
pretty much everybody here
has
their career has directly benefited from
taking that jump
from saying i can learn software
development
i can do it i can go out i can get a job
i can i can freelance uh i can
have a career as a software developer
and it's just that that faith in
yourself
and that willingness to reach out to
other people in the community and ask
for help
and
then turn around and help other people
in the community do the same and that's
precisely the spirit we want to capture
and convey to the rest of the free
cocaine community which at this point is
millions of people around the world
um
many of whom have never
coded before and are eager to get
started so we can provide a lot of
guidance for them
so i'll be right over here in just a
minute i'm just going to grab some tea
i want to
have a special thank you
for this gentleman
whom
i'm going to rotate the camera here
he's like in shock that i'm thinking him
directly there he is look he's got a
stylish blazer
yeah
so
i'm worried that might fall over
so
this is
matthew potter
uh come over here just stand up here
with me
matthew
uh braved
the
airlines
and the airports coming over and he
arrived this morning with me on separate
flights in dublin and matthew's going to
be doing our av
he is a seasoned
uh av guy and streamer and he streams
regularly on twitch he has a
he has a saturday morning cartoon
check it out if you ever wake up super
early just google you know saturday
morning cartoon switch and you'll
probably pull up his his stream you can
eat some breakfast cereal and watch 90s
cartoons like x-men and
uh
gem
and he-man and stuff like that right
thundercats yeah thundercats is on there
it's a lot of stuff so uh
matthews thanks so much i'm going to
give you the mic while i get the t
awesome
uh
yeah so essentially um what i do with
free code camp is um i help out doing
uh having a computer that's sitting in a
closet that's running headless and
stride drives the music channel so i can
officially say i have the most content
on youtube for free code camp even
though nobody's seen my face except for
new york in here damn it i'm sorry for
your loss i'm also canadian so that's
why the story is there
um but yeah so we're going to be
setting up here momentarily for the
interviews uh the camera i'm going to
cut it for a quick second because i want
to make a minor modification anybody on
the stream is probably seeing a bit of a
stutter i'm going to fix that i swear
i'll do my best um and we're going to
make sure that quincy's all teed up
because of his flights and
if you knew how long it was for him to
get here you'd be like oh here's more
tea send them tea
but yeah we'll be uh we'll be right back
and
as i did used to say on saturday
mornings
after these messages we'll be right back
hey
i'm here with brianna swift
let me pop her information up on the
screen for you
so brianna
welcome
you flew in uh today from berlin
yeah yeah thank you
yes thank you
we only have one mike
so brianna
you have been involved with free code
camp since basically the beginning maybe
you can just give us a high level
overview
of your involvement with free code camp
and and your transition into being a
developer
yeah so i found free code camp uh while
i was an elementary school music teacher
i was trying to learn how to code um i
love kids i love teaching music but i
knew it wasn't a career that i wanted to
do forever so i was like what can i
learn how to do
without having to quit my job and go
back to school because i couldn't afford
to do that and i thought the people that
make the internet are probably the first
ones to put all of that information for
free on the internet um so i did code
academy mostly javascript type stuff and
found my way on to free code camp
i was really involved on twitter that
was my only community because i was
really kind of alone while i was
learning
and went through the free code camp
challenges and
as soon as i started doing that i
started to get involved more in the chat
room which there was no forum at that
point and started doing some pair
programming and streaming that
um
so free code camp really not only taught
me the fundamentals that i needed for
you know for development and for
software but also gave me a community
and a place to
you know commiserate almost with how
hard it is to learn how to code
yeah and so you said you were a teacher
can you talk a little bit more about
like where you were teaching what you
were teaching
yeah so i taught elementary school music
which was kindergarten through fifth
grade
um so like you think recorders or like
xylophones that kind of thing and it was
in central illinois so pretty rural
illinois
um
which i love there's so many things
about it i loved um but the thing as i
reflect back on it
teaching from my perspective in an
elementary school music setting was
generally going to be the same thing
with of course you know some changes
over the years but what really drew me
to tech is that i can work from home
sometimes you can't work from home when
you're teaching kindergartners you kind
of have to be in the room
and um and then it's always changing you
know i always am going to be challenged
to learn something new in a hurry and i
think that's really exciting
yeah and so you said early on you were
communicating with other developers on
twitter and kind of
working to build your own community and
your own support network there that you
could commiserate with and uh how did
you discover free code camp because i
think it launched
right when you found it you're one of
the first few people to find it
if i remember right i feel like you
tweeted at me i think i was tweeting i
was like hashtag like women who code
women and tech i was just putting
anything out there and i could be
misremembering but i feel like you
tweeted it and you're like hey you
should try free code camp and i was like
okay and i did and then i stuck with it
i got lucky
awesome yeah i saw your energy and
i don't remember exactly the the tweet i
sent but you know at the time i was
reaching out to people who i thought
would be good um
citizens within the community and who
seemed really passionate and energetic
so yeah so you joined the free code camp
community
and i remember
early on we were doing like these live
coding sessions every tuesday
and you quickly took
kind of charge on those and you would
regularly stream yourself coding can you
share a little bit about that
yeah yeah so i think my first one was
with tarakilabyte with nathan
um shout out terry kilbyte um and i was
super intimidated at first i was like oh
everybody's gonna see how dumb i am
everybody's gonna see that i don't know
what i'm doing i'm gonna you know talk
weird which i'm sure i did
but it was really addictive not only
because
it was really motivating so
once you're showing up and people are
watching you you have to kind of finish
what you're doing
but also it's so energizing to see that
other people
can relate
and i found out i'll tell people now if
you're ever working on something and you
can't
you're stuck
i think the best thing you can do is
live stream because and then there's
people here like ben and jonathan
specifically and nathan tara kilobyte i
would be streaming i don't know why
people would be watching me
because i was a mess i didn't know what
i was doing and they would get so
frustrated watching me stream that i
wasn't doing it right that they would be
like just let me can i can i call with
you like can i help you do this and i
learned so much in those times like the
community of developers is so generous
with their knowledge everybody wants to
help you so instead of feeling
intimidated about streaming like oh
they're going to think i'm dumb
instead it was like they want to help me
learn and get better and they really did
it was it was really inspiring and
helpful
and you took a lot of this inspiration
and a lot of your early insights as a
new developer and you were able to turn
around and teach a lot of other people
and the main medium we used for that was
video you talk about some of your early
videos that we put on
uh freako camp's youtube channel
yeah yeah so those those are fun i think
it's a really fun challenge to take
something that is thought of as complex
and make it sound really simple uh one
of my favorite professors dr robinson at
umkc when i was studying music said that
you should say anything in seven words
or less you can't say it in seven words
or less
you're not
saying it well enough and i know my
videos are more than seven seven words
but applying that concept to things like
what is the internet you know like how
do
how do all these things work
i think it's an exciting challenge for
me just intellectually but it also makes
these really important tech concept
concepts so much more approachable and
it's like hey you actually can do this
these aren't so complex you don't have
to go take you know take a four-year
degree to understand this it's a pro you
can do this it's okay
yeah and
based on
your videos on youtube and the skills
that you were able to build up just
learning to code on your own and through
different communities
you were able to eventually get a job
can you talk a little bit about your job
and how you got it
yeah yes i work at github which is not
where i thought i would be working when
i started learning to code
i'm a trainer so most of the time i'm
talking to developers about how to use
git and github so regardless of what
language they're programming in
regardless of what type of projects how
big their team is everybody should
probably be using version control and
git is not the simplest thing to wrap
your head around so it's a similar
challenge to these computer science
concepts like how can we make this
simple and approachable
um
this you know that transition was weird
because going from elementary school
music teacher to working at github is
kind of a jump
but
but i think working with those videos
specifically and saying how can we take
these difficult concepts and make them
approachable to anybody is something
that
really primed me for working at github
so i think even if somebody's going
through free code camp and if you're
going through free code camp and you're
like i don't know if i necessarily see
myself as a full-time developer
that's okay like there are so many
places for you that are perfect for you
that you might just not know exist like
i didn't know that this job existed but
i love it
right and as a trainer it's a
combination of doing development and
also figuring out ways to teach
different mechanics of git and github
and and coding best practices
things like that
can you
what would a typical day for you be like
it could go a couple different ways um
usually it's so if we break it into one
or one of two either i'm on site you
know with a customer so somebody that
their company uses github their company
says our developers need to know how to
use git and github so i show up
let's talk about getting github for the
next couple days and we go through some
projects and get everybody as up to
speed as possible
but on the other days um
it's resting from travel or what i
really love is working on projects of
scaling that kind of knowledge um so a
really exciting project that we're
working on now is called github learning
lab that's
itslab.github.com and it's free
tutorials on how to use github but it's
a probot app so it's a github app that
will walk you through the process on
github so you don't have to go through
like all the different rabbit holes
which i know i experienced when i was
learning to code you go on one tutorial
it links you to another tutorial and
that links to this other thing before
you know it you're reading about
something completely different right we
try to keep it native to github so you
can stay focused on what you're actually
trying to learn
so we're working a lot on developing new
courses for that and i think it's really
exciting
awesome and one big change
going from
an elementary school teacher in illinois
is now you work for github and github is
primarily a remote
focused organization can you describe
what that means
yeah yeah so most of our the majority of
github's employees work remotely so we
don't have to show up to any specific
office the professional services team
that i'm on is 100 remote i actually
work from berlin now from my home which
is amazing
working from home is awesome but also a
challenge you have to be really
organized and keep your own schedule you
have to know what you want to accomplish
in a given day
you know make sure that things are
prioritized but it also gives you so
much freedom i can work pretty much
distraction free in the hours that work
for me
of course i still have to work with my
team it's i'm the only one well there's
two of us now on the training team in
europe and the rest of them are in the
united states so there's a lot of things
to work around
but
i think free code camp in many ways
prepared me for that because we were
working really asynchronously we weren't
in the same office
i think things are moving that way in
general and technology
yeah and i'm a huge proponent of
remote working and asynchronous
especially i think
the ability to to sleep in and if you if
you don't feel like getting up and and
then just working later
or uh you know really drilling in and
using your best judgment about when to
to say this is a priority i need to
finish this even if it means working
through the weekend just having that
agency and being able to make those
decisions for yourself
i think that's
a really powerful thing for a 21st
century knowledge worker
and it really empowers them to manage
themselves
much more than in a traditional office
setting where
you have a manager and they have a
manager and i mean github has embraced
managers i know initially they didn't
even really have that much in the way of
managers but
what are some things that uh so i guess
what are some things that excite you
most about github in the direction that
the organization is going
that's an exciting question cause i
think there's so many things that i'm
excited about um
anyone i talk to whether they work at
github or they work with github is
developing something awesome there are
so many amazing projects being built on
github so many amazing minds using
github as a tool you know as a product
as a platform really about where they
can
share ideas and collaborate
i think
even someone that you know works at
github what i envision for the tool
is probably only a small percentage of
what it's actually capable of once it's
in the hands of the brilliant developers
that are going to be using it um so i i
don't even know if i can imagine it you
know even in my wildest dreams i don't
think i could really see what's going to
happen um things like
you know detroit water project you know
things that people are building with
open source taking it beyond our
traditional understanding of open source
software open source education open
source you know
social you know social growth and how
can we work better as a global community
it's it's so exciting i hope i hope to
see that leveraged soon
what are your near-term goals
for both your time at uh
your career github and of course just
general
projects that are of interest to you
so learning lab that i mentioned earlier
is a big one um i think there's a
there's a lot of potential there to just
help
help people learn how people teach how
people understand same as free code camp
right open sourcing education making
things more accessible
to people that i think if somebody wants
to learn something they should be able
to learn
and it's hard it's not that easy and it
should be so i think whether it's at
github or
something greater than that
that's all that's where my goals are at
awesome well brianna thank you so much
for flying in from berlin and uh
you recently got married so i hope your
husband is
thanks to him for
letting us borrow you for a weekend
and
i am excited to see what you do and
certainly we would welcome additional
videos on getting github and and other
concepts
as time permits for you to create them
because uh i just sent out a video
anthology of it's about 25 minutes and
it's a we put together
uh i think maybe 20 different videos
that you've created
over the past few years about how
computers work how the internet works so
everybody be sure to check that out i
think that's pretty prominent on the
youtube channel
and uh be sure to follow brianna on
twitter because she she shares a lot of
exciting stuff i'm just gonna pop up her
twitter information again real quick
it's just briannamarie
132.
so thank you so much brianna for joining
us awesome thank you quincy thanks
everybody hi frico camp bye
awesome thanks again thank you quincy
hey
come on over man have a seat
yeah good to meet you in person i'm
gonna pull up your name and information
i've got this great app that matthew
potter put together
uh
yeah so just have to scroll through here
these are in alphabetical order by first
name
yeah um
so while i'm doing this
why don't you just tell us a little bit
about yourself pete sure uh so my name
is pete and i'm a data scientist based
in london
and i uh write for and help edit the
medium publication i've been doing that
since about october uh last year so
almost a year now and it's it's really
fun it's really interesting to see what
articles we receive and and you know
sort of curating them and helping them
to you know the high standards we would
like to put up
yeah and you have written some
incredibly exhaustive
articles on different aspects of data
science and math and
machine learning
what got you into the field
uh so that's a good question so i
originally started out as a as a
biologist
um and i learned a lot of statistics and
a lot of uh
you know machine learning concepts but
it was really interesting to when i
began
looking into learning the program it was
really interesting to see how there's a
lot of overlap between some of the
skills i'd learnt and some of the skills
i wanted to you know
start start working with so
yeah it's a field of sort of it's it's
it's very fast moving it's it's always
something new to learn
um it's just thing i find really
interesting i've always
enjoyed statistics
yeah so
how do you keep on top of all the rapid
changes in the field of machine i mean
it's probably one of the most dynamic
and
rapid growing corpus of knowledge how do
you stay on top of that
um
so i think it's constant reading really
um i
i always look for new articles which
come out
um a few of my friends work in research
as well so i talk to them and hear you
know the latest ideas
um but mostly it's it's about reading
the documentation as well there's a
balance between understanding the theory
of machine learning and also seeing how
it works in practice and i find for
example the scikit-learn
documentation is really good when it
tells you how to use the the you know
the techniques but also explains the
background of it as well which i find
really interesting
so scikit-learn i believe is a python
library
do you do a lot of your data science
work in python
uh so
mostly python yes i also use r um and
sql for uh sort of database of data
engineering style work
uh so yeah i really really like python
that's probably my my you know favorite
language
um i also know a little bit of
javascript i started learning that on
the free code curriculum
um i soon decided that web development i
found i found css too tricky that was my
problem so
yeah i chose to specialize in data
science instead
well i would encourage you to um look at
into data visualization i think you
probably
i i haven't read every single one of
your articles recently
but uh i for a long time i was the one
who was
actually proofreading and editing them
before we published and now we've built
up this amazing editorial team
uh which led by abby and you're one of
the major editors there and it's just so
amazing having somebody with so much
domain expertise who can really go in
and
take a good look at these articles
and kind of fact check them and make
sure that they they look good and
representative of the state of the field
what is your editorial workflow like
about how frequently will you check in
and find articles that you're interested
in editing and publishing
i see so we do receive a lot of articles
there's always something to work on
um i i try and check in daily i actually
take my lunch breaks at work as an
opportunity to you know see what there
is and review some of the articles and
if i see one i think i can i can help
you know edit and get to you know the
standard we want then i'll you know i'll
claim that article and in that evening
i'll work on it and
send it to abi for you know final review
and publishing so it's
yeah it's good i think
the main bulk of the work is is is fact
checking just being sure about what what
the author's written is is 100
aok to put out
and a lot of formatting as well it's one
of the things uh i learned from from
yourself actually from when i used to
publish my articles
uh for free when you were running the
publication uh the writing style keeping
things really you know concise and easy
to read there's a lot a lot of our uh
readers are
international they don't necessarily
speak english as a first language so
it's very important to make sure what we
put out is accessible
yeah and what are
your favorite types of articles your
favorite topics
to edit
uh it's a good question i i really like
uh some more general articles like
really sort of
like overviews of like why topics i
think
i think there's a balance as well i mean
i really like in-depth tutorial articles
as well where you can really see you
know at the start what you're going to
build and follow them along and see you
know how something works in practice
so
yeah i mean i guess it's
hard to pick an exact type of article i
really like i think yeah we receive a
lot of very varied and very interesting
articles
aside from contributing to free code
camp and
editing and writing so many great
in-depth articles on statistics and data
science and machine learning what are
your goals for the rest of 2018 and 2019
um so the company i'm working up uh
we're a startup and we've recently
announced and launched some really
exciting products we actually teach kids
how to code
and
we produce computer kits and uh we've
got some really exciting products coming
out so yeah we're looking to ship those
and
that's that's why i'm working on
2018. awesome and tell me just a little
bit more about like do you have like
hardware products
or yeah yeah so uh we produce the
hardware so we have computer kits and a
one kit
and we also have a software ecosystem as
well so people can go in and they can
learn to code and they can share their
creations on this online community we
have
uh and it's it's really interesting
there's a lot of synergy between you
know what i work on for my day job and
you know what free cocam is setting out
to achieve as well so
yeah i really really enjoy
spending all my time doing that
basically
awesome if if people were interested and
i'm not sure how whether the product is
totally ready for people to go and buy
for their schools or for their kids but
if they wanted to learn more about the
uh the company and and
what you all are up to what's the name
of the company and where can they find
it
sure uh we're kano um we're at kano.me
and uh we're also in retail in the us
so yeah
k-a-n-o dot m-e
okay great k-a-n-o dot n-e-n-e dot m-e
okay k-n-o me okay great
and thank you again so much for
everything you've done for the community
it's always a pleasure you know you're
you always
take such a detailed nuanced look at
articles and it really shows and
your articles have been so in-depth and
i i often pull them up and and when
people submit articles
and i'm like well take a look at this
this is a good example of on our of what
works on medium and what works with the
developer crowd so
uh thank you again for kind of setting
like really trailblazing and and setting
a really good example for other
technical writers
and
developers
thank you thanks peter
so i'm gonna pop peter's uh information
back up okay thank you
and
we're joined here
richie
how's your last name pronounced
yeah yeah it's easy enough right yeah
richie sitoli have a seat richie
bring my yes
yeah
welcome so you're joining us from
johannesburg
awesome well thank you so much for
flying out man i mean that i think you
may have traveled
i don't know you you may have traveled
even farther than i did
yeah i think it's um well all in all it
was about 14 hours um with about four
hours layover
and um and at his uh ababa
um so yeah but just over 10 hours but it
felt like
12 days
[Laughter]
yeah i was slightly exhausted when i
arrived but it was all good it's so far
it's been
amazing i'm you know i love the
atmosphere i love the
uh four seasons in one morning which is
what we experienced
yesterday when i arrived
um yeah so like i landed around 6 30 in
the morning
and on my way here on my way to where um
the the guesthouse is
um you know it was nice and cloudy it
was a little bit cloudy it was
comfortable and the clouds opened up it
was nice and sunny and then shortly
after that it just started raining out
of nowhere i was like what the hell
what's going on here and then after that
it was like massive winds and and stuff
um yeah so it's yeah and it's it seems
to be like you know people are used to
this stuff so yeah i'm just taking it in
as as i go along
how was your flight
it was arduous uh so i woke up at 6 a.m
friday morning u.s time
then i flew
to newark which is like
new jersey and then i waited there all
day and then i was able to fly to
reykjavik in iceland i hope i'm
pronouncing that quickly and then uh
flew here and i just arrived a few hours
ago so i slept on the plane i took a
little power nap and it was really funny
because matthew potter was joking i was
like i was like yeah wake me up before
you go
and he said oh you want me to wake you
up with wake me up before i go go you
know the the wham song
and he has this super powered laptop i
don't know what it is it's
incredibly loud so i'm sleeping and all
of a sudden i hear jitterbug
jitterbug
and he starts playing the song really
loud and i was like wait i mean it was
the perfect way to wake up because
i swear like there was like a party
outside the room
so i am yeah so i just took a shower and
i was good to go but now i'm drinking my
irish
uh tea and that's helping wake me up
yeah but uh yeah man thanks so much for
flying out so
tell us a little bit about what you do
you do many things within the free code
camp community just give us an overview
of some of the things you do
yeah so i mean
you we met a couple of years back
you know
free call came was still in its early
days and stuff
so um so what i do currently is
basically run meetups um i'm a core
admin um
for free call cam johannesburg
there's a couple of other guys that some
came and went and some are still there
but some are dormant some are active
when needed
when needs be
um but i'm generally like you know
organize stuff and host the the meetups
themselves
and it's quite funny and it's very
interesting like i mean we've got a
community of about 1500 people and we
get at least one
um
someone asking to join like on a daily
basis it's just insane which is amazing
so which means that you know the word is
getting out there and people are
recognizing what we're doing and they
actually see the value in what we're
doing which is fantastic
um yeah so like i mean
the funny thing is this so you you'll
put up like a create an event on
facebook and our facebook group so it's
free called cam john is back on facebook
uh go check it out you know uh we're
having our next meet up at the end of
this month uh 29th of uh august
yeah
um anyway so like you'll have a couple
of people just like rsvp and they all
get all hyped up and excited like yeah
i'm gonna do this and then next thing
you get like five or eight people to
turn up um but it's for me personally
like it's it's those sessions that i
really appreciate and really enjoy
because you sort of like see through
um you know like the
i don't know how to put it but like it's
the people that end up coming eventually
coming it's people that are truly
passionate and really really believe in
you know what free code chem is you know
offering is and it sort of like reminds
me of of myself like pretty much like
two three years ago when i started um i
was that guy pretty much like i would
rock up and i could be like me and a
couple of other people
um but like for me it was just
you know like just getting in a lot of
information getting as much information
as possible about you know software
development um
and as far as i mean you would obviously
know that you know the learning never
stops right so
um so like i really appreciate people
that that make it to the to the meetups
um and i'll grant it i understand some
people cannot you know make it you know
they'll have other plans or something
comes up and so that sort of thing and
so i i get all of that but you know i
just shout out and say thank you to the
people that constantly come to um to our
meetups um and then funny enough i'll
tell you just besides about that
so i was we had a party at um at my
company lost a couple of weeks ago
and i mentioned to one of the top guys
and i said um
i'm going to dublin in a couple of weeks
i'm like okay cool like so what are you
going to do there and then i obviously
had to tell the whole story about free
code camp and whatnot and they were like
mind blown they're like what why didn't
i told you guys but he didn't take me
seriously so they were all ecstatic and
excited about it and i remember one of
the top guys there uh jimmy's like um no
dude like seriously when you come back
like we don't don't you worry about the
next venue you can totally use our
office we'll even organize coffee for
you guys all right yay
so i'm definitely gonna take him out
jimmy i'm gonna take you up on that
offer okay
[Laughter]
so yeah now with the community is
growing um and we see a lot of people
coming in
um i mean just trip coming here i'm i
met a couple of guys um in in oral
timber which is our international
airport in joburg
um the one guy actually he's he was
coming to meet his future colleagues he
got a job offer um here in dublin
as a back-end developer
um but
so he obviously told him the reason why
i was traveling to dublin as well
and he was also like like and it's so
funny like when i explain the story
because i'm so passionate about it but
when it finally hits the chord and you
see people's eyes they just like dilate
for a second then they're like wow that
is just amazing like how come i've never
heard about this thing so obviously
exchange numbers and whatnot and he's
like no no i need to get my uh cousin
into this thing
and that's what i just told you now like
i it happens so often i i love telling
this story because i truly believe in it
i've been in it um i mean it's been like
almost three years now right you're one
of the earliest cameras
yeah and i still feel like looking
looking around you and seeing these guys
i mean just
doing some incredible work and i'm very
passionate about it and
i just want to see the next free call
chem 2.0 or 2.3.0 whatever how far we're
going to take this thing right yeah yeah
well we're building uh we're building an
events platform that'll make it easier
for people in johannesburg when they're
just using freecodecamp to
it'll remind them hey there's an event
in uh you know at the nearby office uh
where you're having your next event so
i i'm optimistic that that will help
even more people who are already in
johannesburg who
uh don't realize
that you're having all these in-person
events that will help get them involved
as well
absolutely
um yeah i mean it's um
so like so it's another aspect of it i
mean it's um we were talking about how
else uh myself in the evidence we were
talking about how else we can contribute
like is is this all we can do
you know is is that like how do we take
it to the next level and i was like
my response to that was like that's a
very good question brother what do you
think
and
he's over there so he gave me his peace
of mind but like for me i think for now
is like we need to continue doing what
we've been doing
because um personally i mean for me the
the reason why i believe in this and why
i'm still doing what i what i'm doing
now
is that i see value in this you know i
truly believe like this is
um
one way that we can
and i know it sounds very
like up in the sky but i really believe
like this is one way of actually
tackling poverty
um and i see people that are frustrated
in their jobs uh people that
they just you know they just
go to work just for the heck of it but
they don't enjoy it you know and for me
i strongly believe in that like you have
to really enjoy what you do and i
absolutely love what i'm doing right now
and thanks to free code camp and i think
the way just back to my original point
was that um how to take it forward is
first of all we need to keep doing what
we're doing you know don't drop the
standard and obviously think of other
ways um of how we can improve it um
whether it's
um i don't know like which just maybe
writing articles if you would say you
were doing like youtube stuff or you
hosting meetups um maybe just you know
think of other ways of um contributing
more or at least getting other people to
feel the same passion that you have so
that they can also continue and and
contribute to the platform in in
different ways
yeah and
if
for those of you who are watching who
are interested in some ways you can
contribute aside from leading local
study groups which i think is probably
the most important and immediate thing
because that way you're able to actively
get people in your community reach out
to your neighbors and your friends and
get them into coding this is a skill
that i i encourage everybody to pick up
even if you don't envision yourself
working as a software engineer at some
point in the future these skills are
going to be incredibly helpful
regardless where your career is so so by
running local study groups like you're
doing in johannesburg you can really
bring a lot of people in just get them
some basic exposure and so they even
realize that this is a skill they can
learn and build up their confidence
so
i would say
some some ways that your community can
absolutely help would be
uh adding captions and subtitles i know
most people uh in south africa speak
english but you also have afrikaans and
there are other other local languages
that some people in your your study
group may know that would that would
help and uh
of course creating more articles and
creating
creating videos those would all be
tremendously helpful no absolutely um
and finally mentioned that that not so
long ago in fact i think in preparation
of the next meetup um a lady commented
on a facebook group and the question was
um are your meetups uh suitable for
um
kids
and like that caught me off of god
because i like you know it's not
something that you know someone asked
just like that and it was like
and i didn't respond immediately i just
thought about it for a second i think i
probably slept on it i don't remember
exactly but my response to her was very
simple i said look um if a person who
wants to you know come to our meetups as
long as they can read and write um
you know i think they're good to go and
i strongly believe in that i mean you
can correct me from if i'm wrong but
like i think
um there's no age limit when when it
comes to learning and
specifically software development as
long as you know you can
look at code and you can read and you
can write i strongly believe that you
can actually
manage to learn and and
you know and code so my advice was
basically like look um you know maybe
just come because she hasn't been to to
the meetup i said look just come to our
next meetup check it out and if you
think it's suitable for your son
or daughter you know then you can invite
them the
for the next meet up and she's like no
well that's that's a good answer so
hopefully we'll see her at the end of
this month um and hopefully we'll see
some kids coming up in the
uh in you know in the next meetups um
but yeah it's um
it's just been incredible i mean the
last the last year we we've i think
we've done more meetups than we have
there was a period where we didn't have
as many meetups um but then uh i always
take cue from from the community from
the the the members of the group
um so whenever someone says hey when is
the next meet up you know quickly
jumping like are you interested should
we do it and then we just put it
together and and that's how we roll
um
yeah and i i just i'm looking forward to
obviously like
continuing having like a more
uh regular uh credence uh cadence
um
and yeah because and also another
request that came in in one of our last
uh meetups was
one of the members said they would like
to have more technical uh meetup so i
think with um with the offer that i got
from my community to to have
the next meetup in in the offices that
will give us the the space and the
environment for you know for something
like that to happen so i'm looking
forward to that
yeah
awesome well congratulations on getting
your company on board is like a venue
sponsor
and yeah i totally agree i think if kids
are mature enough to come pre-co camp as
a community is really aimed at adults
primarily there are other great
initiatives like code.org khan academy
and especially coder dojo i love what
coder dojo is doing
and hack club is another good one that's
focused at the high school level
but
we aim to make these events
totally
uh
acceptable for kids
and we want to keep them you know
professional and friendly and welcoming
so yeah absolutely if if somebody has a
kid and that they're confident their
cake will have a good time and get a lot
out of it i would encourage them to
bring it
richie it's been such a pleasure man
thank you so much for flying out here
congratulations on all your recent
achievements your job
and how you're leading the community
it's amazing and i think you're really
setting an example for so many people
around the world who want to create
local study groups and and help people
in their communities learn to code
it's it's only a pleasure quincy like
i've i mean we i'm just was thinking the
other day like we we made like just a
couple of years ago and it's
you know our relationship has grown and
the community has grown and i've i love
everything that um uh yourself and the
team have been doing and yeah i'm
looking forward to the future and to
frequent camp
thanks again thank you so much brother
yeah likewise bring it in
hey hey quincy
hey pleasure
absolutely
well david you are a prolific uh writer
among other things
and
i think you have a very interesting
background
can you tell the
audience a little bit about yourself and
how you got into coding and writing
about code
okay
first of all quincy i'm really grateful
to you that you created free code chem
because i think it was really the major
helper for me to switch my careers
because as you mentioned i was working
as a lawyer i have a law degree and then
i was working as a lawyer for two years
but then i got eventually a little bit
frustrated and i was wondering what to
do next so i was checking online courses
and stuff and funny thing first i
checked some harvard course about
cooking about molecular gastronomy and i
spent like three months doing that but i
said to me okay i cannot be cooked
because i'm sweating and in the kitchen
there's a lot of hot in here so i
couldn't cook so i tried to we're
watching for something else and then
i find and first some course on udemy
about uh programming css html and
javascript and i tried that
but then it was just a tutorial you know
building things that other people built
so it was kind of it was great i got
motivated but it was just the first
level and then i discovered free code
camp and those algorithms and it was
basically a different dimension for me
because before i was just creating stuff
according to tutorials but with the with
the algorithms i need to really
understand and at first i got really
frustrated because i think oh my god
it's so difficult i cannot be developer
but then it really just
it was better and better and finally i
got really confident
and really
i started learning to code during the
weekends and on the evenings
and it eventually took me seven months
to switch from a lawyer to
or just coding into on the weekends and
the night so i'm really grateful for
free coach cam because it really
motivated me to see all the people doing
the same thing
that's all though so why i decide for
contributing for recode camp by writing
articles because
you know a free code camp community
helped me to become developer and i also
wanted to contribute to it by
by showing people concepts that were
difficult for me so i try to like
describe them in a way that are more
understandable for me and in a way that
i want them to be to see them when i
learned them because there were no
resources before
yeah and that's i think the part of my
story and maybe just
the
the main thing what i
decided to change switch the careers was
that as a lawyer i didn't see the
results of my work
and as a as a programmer i mean you
write console.log and you see the result
it's it's so motivating you just write
code and you see the result i love this
and this is why i love programming
yeah with programming there's a very
tight feedback loop
you can at any point you can see what
the effect is you can push an
application live and look at your
analytics and see people are using it
how people are using it it's
it's unlike any other field
really i mean you could argue that in
teaching you can see you know the
students faces and and whether they're
comprehending things and see them turn
around and apply but there are very few
fields where you can immediately get so
much
feedback on your work
i just want to underscore the magnitude
of your accomplishment david because you
said in seven months
just studying nights and weekends while
working as a lawyer
time
you were able to transition into tech
and tell us a little bit about what
you're doing now
okay now i work as a javascript
developer
for the for the uh digital agency in
prague or blueberry and i'm doing
typical performance stuff i'm working
with react most of the time and now i
will basically maybe start with a view
as well so i'm really looking forward to
it because i never do it and i'm also
pretty excited about reason ml yeah and
i'm pretty excited that uh in my company
we have internal projects where you can
try different technologies and we were
also able to do it in a company and
build our recent application called
uh called planning poker about scrum
where you do planning poker and about
application for that so it was really
interesting and um and another thing i
love about programming is that
is the the way how it progresses i mean
when i started programming there was
jquery and angular okay that's
some react i know what it is and
basically it was so fast and now
i like how it's moving forward there i
mean my to-do list it's so long and i
never be able to like to try all the
technologies but i love all the people
who love what they do and you can learn
from them so i maybe i just
uh and you ask what i do yeah also right
as i mentioned blog posts uh for medium
publications and it will help me it
helped me it helps me and the audience
is because for me when i code something
you know where you code something you
basically don't care about anything you
just said okay it works so that's a good
but when you write a blog post about it
you need to like really understand you
will need to go deeper
and eventually after that i even start
going to conferences and speak about
programming and it really
helps me even more because at a
conference you have
qa right q a people might ask you and
this like most stressful thing for the
first time because you need to go really
deep because people might ask you
different questions
so i know what i really love about all
these stuff record camera conferences
that you that i learned something like i
share with us and the thing that i just
learned it it makes i think more
approachable for other people because
i'm on this level uh they were there on
the level i were before so i'm not that
like not that on a high level so i like
can understand what they need to how
they need to learn so that's why i'm
doing it
yeah that's great so
essentially what you're doing by writing
these articles and giving talks at
conferences
is you're almost over training to make
sure you really have mastered something
so well that you can explain it and it's
interesting because we were just talking
with brianna a minute ago and she said
you don't really understand something
until you can explain it in like seven
words
and it's absolutely true because so much
often when i write article there are i
just got stuck and i was thinking
why why is it working i mean why why and
really forces you because you need to
understand to to some person who doesn't
know so so many stuff like you do
because you are into the topic you truly
and write it in the understandable way
that's why i think it's like challenging
for you to learning new technology
because sometimes there are not enough
resources and these resources are often
right by people who are
really good at it
but sometimes for you as a beginner it's
more challenging so that's why i'm
trying to write it for like
most approachable as i can that's why
i'm kind of perfectionist so like when i
write article okay i write it it's not
complicated but i spend so much time
just to reading it we're reading it
sending to my colleagues for
proofreading
it's like really the right wording
article is not the most difficult part
the difficult part is just to make it
approachable for people coming from
different levels of their knowledge
well thank you so much david for all
your amazing articles that you've
contributed
and
i've enjoyed reading so much so many of
them and of course i'm very inspired by
your just rapid transition from working
as a lawyer
uh to working as a as a developer and
working with all these cutting edge
uh tools you know reason ml very
exciting stuff working you said you're
getting ready to learn some view so we
hope that you'll continue to write these
amazing articles yeah i'm looking
forward i i was also playing with idea
to make some screencasts and i was
discussing with with other people here
and i think it will be really useful and
again
again quincy thank you very much for the
free codec because it makes really
difference for people like on the whole
planet i think
well thank you so much that means so
much to me and i hope you have a
wonderful time in dublin are you gonna
are you gonna come run with us tomorrow
i hope so i i have my running shoes
running a running t-shirt and my
half of my luggage is just a running
stuff so i guess i should because i just
brought so much stuff with me
well great hopefully it'll be nice and
cool here uh the weather is very dynamic
in dublin
tomorrow it should be nicer i just
checked the weather and it should be
like not so much clouds or too many
clouds so all right well great i'm
looking forward to running around
phoenix park with you tomorrow me too
cheers
likewise thanks again david
yeah
oh perfect
hey james phillips thank you
doing my best
and next we have
a man
whom i have worked very closely with for
years
every still
thank you so much for making it out here
and perhaps you can just give us
i'll give you a very quick introduction
so evaristo has basically been leading
free code camp's data science effort he
is one of the most prominent people in
the data science chat room on gitter
and he's done a number of different
analyses both on medium and on kaggle of
different data sets we've we've made
public
um of course when we make
data sets public we're very responsible
about the disclosure and you know
cognizant of privacy concerns and things
like that so we have these huge public
data sets and every so has analyzed them
extensively thank you for joining us
every so yeah
no not everything i'm eduardo edward i'm
sorry yeah yeah i'm eduardo vidis from
portugal
i'm sorry i gotta make something you
make stuff
yeah so tell us a little bit about um
i feel so embarrassed
yeah
um so so tell us a little about uh about
what you're working on out in portugal
uh eduardo and and you're leading the
study group there
well
i first knew free code camp in the
beginning of 2017
and i was a civil engineering and i was
not happy with my career i wanted to
reboot into into programming
and when i'm at free code camp i'm at
the right path
to start learning how to program i've
tried a lot of boot camps without effort
but with free code camp it was very very
easy to to follow follow up
and and at the same time that i was
studying
i started to motivate people to study
with me
i started at the same time as juan
enrique and together we started the
study group in our
city
and we impulsionated also the starting
of the study group in lisbon the capital
of portugal
and we are doing
that effort
every week
even after we get
got our jobs
yeah i've rebooted my career in
five months studying
more or less 10 hours per day but it was
nats it was five months and i got from
civil engineering to a front-end
developer
yeah and so eduardo you said within five
months you were able to transition from
civil engineer to developer just
studying on your own
yeah yeah correct uh
because when i found uh free code camp i
found the right pass i i was in a big
doubt of what i should study first and
what i should study after that
and with frequent camp i got the correct
path and i followed that path and it
worked very well
i also
got a mentor uh thank you miguel coque
for supporting me
uh uh mentor is uh
he was very helpful in in my study
um
and i got the job very quick with
with this help and with the help of free
code
yeah yeah
so
you even though you've gotten a
full-time job and and you've made the
successful transition
you're still giving back to the
community and you're still helping run
the local study group talk talk a little
bit about the the group and how you how
your leadership of it yeah
of course we have we have two main
events we have one event that we call
the social event uh
where
where we try
to join the local community of senior
programmers with the students and we
have a second event called the study
group where we focus just on solving
challenges
uh and it's working
great it's amazing
how people are are motivating and are
studying and are growing with us
step by step and when they are ready to
enter in the in in the market we have
jobs for them really
yeah um it's it's great it's amazing
yeah
so
uh
when you say people are able to enter
the job market how many people within
your study group have gotten developer
jobs do you think yeah
first quincy let me tell you that we are
in the south of portugal so it's a small
town like 50 000
inhabitants and
in the last year we got five five
developers ready to start working and
they started working so i think it's a
nice percentage
so basically one out of 10 000 people in
your town has gotten a developer job
thanks largely to your efforts and your
community outreach
also
after that i started started writing on
medium because i felt
the the needs to contribute more to free
code camp uh so i started to to write
about react that's the the main area in
which i'm working nowadays
yeah
well
thank you for writing these articles so
in portugal of course you speak
portuguese and and it's also a huge
language in brazil and brazil is i think
the third largest country
for free co-camp in terms of total
number of people who who use it
and frequently i talk to developers from
portugal
from brazil and other portuguese
speaking countries
and they have there's definitely
a strong desire to have to be able to
read
about technical concepts
in their native portuguese
and since you've already started writing
articles i'm just going to put this out
there eduardo would you be interested at
some point in potentially writing
articles about technology in portuguese
yeah yeah of course totally agree with
that uh
i want to to to start writing in
portuguese for the big communities that
we have because portuguese is the fifth
most spoke spoke language in the world
but at the same time i feel the need
to motivate people to learn english
because when you start working in a
remote team or something like that you
need to interact with people from all
over the world so uh in spite of having
uh
a way to learn in portuguese you also
need to train your english skills
i think that that's very
that's important to train your english
skills
of the people
uh in your study group
that are getting jobs how many of them
are getting jobs at local companies
versus i don't know how many uh
multinational corporations and have like
branches
there but what would you say the ratio
of like local employers
and small businesses versus
multinational employers
okay uh basically portugal is very
trendy now so i have some difficulty to
do this
this this calculus but i can say that
three in two got remote jobs
in the
north of europe um so two are working
locally but basically that two local
companies are startups that are based on
germany or in the netherlands or in
sweden
so i think
we can speak of 100 of international
internationalization
that's great well what are some of your
goals now that you've gotten a developer
job you've you've gotten this community
running
you've proven out
the notion that people can
come into your community they can learn
to code you will help them
build up their skills help them build up
their network and that they can get jobs
now that you've proven that and you have
this proven path
to help people in your community get
developer jobs what are your goals for
the near future
well for the near future i have to do i
have two main goals one is
to become a senior developer in my team
contributing more for the for the future
of the architecture in the web
application uh but in a second plan not
less important than the first i want to
continue thriving and to motivate people
uh to learn to how to program on
frequent camp i will say i'm a free code
camp evangelist because i really believe
in free code camp because i've tried a
lot of other boot camps and i didn't
have uh success and i think free code
campf as the the main ingredients uh to
turn you into a successful programmer in
less than one year
yeah so i think people should try free
code camp they should join they should
try the challenge they
they need to speak with people and to
surpass the challenges and learn how to
program they have everything every tool
they need it's on their hands at the
first moment they sign up to free
all right well thank you so much eduardo
for joining us thank you very much i'm
sorry for my english i'm not a native
speaker your english is excellent
thank you very much
thank you very much mr larson
you're great yeah it was nice to meet
you absolutely i'll see i'll see you are
you gonna come run with us tomorrow of
course all right well we'll have fun
running tomorrow yeah
all right
awkward fist bump
all right next
robert have a seat man thank you thank
you welcome
yeah so uh
thank you for flying in from vienna yeah
you lead the free cocaine vienna group
along with daniel deutsch who who
couldn't make it uh he's a student
uh tell us a little bit about the
origins of free co-camp vienna which i
think you said is about three years old
now yeah it is it is um
yeah it's like there's so much to say
but
um
it basically started i i
now have a developer job and i mainly
attribute that to free co-cap which is
awesome
and when i started as a student shortly
after there's this there was i think it
still is but this is getting started
guide and you're getting courage to
check up your local group there was no
local group but there was a nice guide
saying if there is no local group start
a facebook group this is how you do it
so i did
and then
no one came so i asked my wife to join i
invited her we were two then like this
is probably just in the span of a couple
of days there were still no more people
joining so i got impatient so i think i
texted you on gitter or something i was
like i don't know if quincy larson will
reply to me but he replied and it was
awesome and i was asking can i start a
meetup.com group because i knew meetups
from my city there's a quite a bit of
them
thinking that that's the way i could get
more people involved because i wanted to
meet other students right
um and then i did that and you replied
like yeah of course sure just keep in
mind it cost money and stuff and i was
like that's fine
so that's basically how it started in
the format that we have now
um we've been going almost three years
like this i think november or december
and
we basically have it where i always try
to say that this is the local group for
frequent vienna this is a meet-up but if
anyone wants to help in any way you know
i'm just here now helping it to grow
starting and keep it going
so we have a format normally now of one
or two talks
and some group coding or some group
discussion whatever people want to do
just to keep a monthly thing where
people can meet other students which is
yeah what i've been doing yeah
awesome and
so it sounds like you have a very
supportive wife who's
how has that
helped you because i also benefit from
an incredibly supportive wife
jade i don't know if you're watching
thanks
uh and i none of the free code camp
would be possible if uh if jade hadn't
believed in me and
let me take an extended uh departure
from working full-time so i could so i
could build free code camp and start
trying to try to build up the initial
community um so
talk a little bit about your your
relationship with your wife and how is
she learning to code as well no no
yeah i think she could benefit from
learning i don't i think she doesn't
know what she's missing out on but
yeah she's been super supportive um
in the beginning there
um
maybe we can touch a little bit on
because i used to work a longer career
of all sorts of jobs from
theater stagehand to customer service to
sales to you know selling newspapers on
the phone selling software i was working
actually here in dublin for two years in
xerox and also in oracle but mainly
support or like phone sales so i was
exposed to technology and i've always
loved computers since young age but for
some reason i figured programming was
harder than i like i imagined it to be
this
really hard thing
so long story short then back to
i was starting a um
agency kind of company with a with a
friend while working full time so in my
spare time and my wife is so supportive
so um
when she was watching tv or series i was
sitting on my computer trying to make
some business happen right and i did
that before i learned to code with
wordpress sites and themes and prepaid
you know themes and plugins and stuff
and
that led eventually to me being curious
we are doing shared hosting can i do the
hosting myself and we have a better
margin so i that's for the first time i
get exposed to online courses like
treehouse and linux academy where i was
realizing it's hard easier than i
thought
to learn
these technical skills that i was
interested in but a bit afraid of
so that led to me discovering that oh i
should probably try and do this with the
programming as well again
and uh
it really clicked with me but it wasn't
until i really was like oh i can do this
i got the belief that this is not as
hard as i thought
but it was mainly via free code campus
sort of my
base or like
my go-to place for learning that i kind
of got the ball rolling and really got
into learning and through all of this my
wife has been super supportive because
as i said you know like she would do
leicester's leisure stuff at the evening
and i would you know be on social doing
my stuff
which works but it can only work for
that long kind of you have to find a
balance yeah
yeah well i wasn't aware that you'd had
such a whining career and and done so
many different things and it's great
that you've worked here in dublin
uh
so
it sounds like are you originally from
vienna
i'm i'm from norway
um
i worked here in dublin and that's where
i met my now wife she's austrian so we
moved to norway we got we established a
family and then we moved to
vienna her home city like five years ago
yeah
wow so
it sounds like you all have really
benefited from the eu's like ability to
fluidly move between countries because
you've been moving a lot yeah yeah for
sure for sure
no way it's not in the eu we're in this
collaboration like switzerland and uh
us and i can't remember luxembourg i
think
but it makes it basically
i can only remember the norwegian one
efta but it's something like that
e-e-a-a or whatever oh okay yeah i
thought it was when i was in customs
yeah it's a like special line for people
who are in the eu
uh
switzerland ch yeah and then like the
eea yeah i think that's what it is yeah
but that's really nice because basically
that and schengen so that the passport
agreement makes it so it's really easy
to visit anything in europe and it's
really easy depending on the country to
get like a work workers license or just
the extended visa you don't even have to
apply often so that's nice
and yeah so if you're curious about like
working abroad then europe
europeans should like more europeans
should avail of that
yeah
yeah so
now that you're
leading the study group what are some of
your goals
for free co camp vienna and for your own
personal career
for 2019. yeah oh that's nice um
i'm
i'm really grateful that i have daniel
deutsch with me he's been i think about
two years my co-organizer and co-host
i also run two other meetups now over a
year one is for vue.js and one is for
golang
which because i love this interjection
of meeting people getting to know them
help them if i can and this like mix of
people in code which is awesome
um
so i know that even if i take a break or
slow down free cold camp vienna is still
going to be there because daniel deutsch
is just running the show and it's
seamlessly it's perfect
with the other meetups i'm slowing down
now because um i think what i want to
happen in let's say 2019 to put a number
on it or yeah is to switch
a little bit my career from pure
developer to doing more developer
relations in one form with another my
dream
future would be where i get to do
professionally what i do
um
as a hobby you know with the meetups so
if i can be more you know conferences
traveling online forums doing community
work and that be the focus of my um
yeah professional career that's where i
want to navigate towards
and but i still want to do some coding
even if it's like demos or prototyping
or preparing technical talks and stuff
like this
yeah
awesome well thank you so much for
flying out to dublin
and it's such a pleasure to finally meet
you in person you and i have
corresponded for years
so it's great to finally meet you and go
out on the rooftop and take a selfie
together yeah yeah yeah we did and i
want to thank you personally like this
has been so awesome the fact that you
started free code camp and one person
can start something that trickles down
to now this huge movement which it is
with all these channels i like i find it
so amazing and inspiring you're a true
inspiration you are
thanks thank you but it would be nothing
without the help of so many amazing
contributors like yourself so thanks
again for everything you're doing uh to
inspire developers around the world and
especially in vienna
take care all right thanks
hey
welcome
have a seat
thank you
so elephania am i pronouncing your name
correctly yeah you do
lift there yet
ellie
all right well i i like your entire name
it's just so cool and and distinctive
and yeah
actually in my country
means freedom so yeah it's cool like
freedom yeah
great
well elephant thank you so much for
flying in from greece
you are a very prominent person in the
freco camp community especially recently
uh you've been live streaming a whole
lot of
videos you've been creating videos
on things like angular
it's
it's incredibly helpful tell us a little
about how you got into tech and how you
started
deciding to record all this and share
all this knowledge okay
uh well i wanted to learn and firstly i
wanted to learn
for me and for myself but i knew that
eventually i wanted to find a job and i
wanted to be sure that everything i know
i can also
like
go to another person and maybe teach
them so i said okay how can i do that so
start coding in my computer as always
and then i'm going to record these
videos and if they're very good then i'm
going to upload them so basically that's
how i started i wanted to pass this
knowledge to other people and make sure
that i also know these things
that's great and
i think it takes a lot of courage to put
yourself out there and to record videos
about
a topic that you yourself or are just
learning
how did you get the courage to go out
there and what was your thought process
like
because i always wanted to get better i
thought that i should start from
somewhere i should really start from
somewhere because if it's only me that's
studying in my own little room then it's
not going to be
anything i wanted to to pass this
knowledge to everyone else and yes
i'm still learning i don't know
everything in angular but it's something
that i like doing so i'm doing it
great and
your videos have been very popular
and we've had so many people who've
asked for more
content on angular so it's perfect
that you started creating these great
videos
what are some things that you plan to do
2018 is almost over coming into the end
of 2018 2019
what do you plan to focus on for the
near future in terms of creating videos
creating articles and
teaching other people about technology
i have a few plans on my mind
as far as angular is concerned i would
like to focus more on angular and
angular material so i would like to
create some videos based on angularjs
and maybe mix it with a material library
i would really love to do that but other
than that i'm also interested in ux and
ui design so i was also thinking to
contribute and make some videos in ux
and ui design
and other than that i also have like
some plans about teaching maybe
javascript like volunteering and i would
love to go in some other conferences
that i have in mind and maybe if i could
help them and also pass some knowledge i
would love to do that um it can be quite
scary because as you mentioned i'm still
learning and i'm still quite new but i
believe that if it's something that you
love and it's something you like then
you should do it no matter what
you seem to have a very strong passion
for learning
and a desire to improve yourself and
expand your horizons
tell us a little bit more about your
background and
how you got to be so adventurous
uh well it's true i'm very passionate
and i really want to improve myself so
when i was 18 um i had to make a
decision and just study something
in my country in greece you have to give
some final exams
and i wanted to go into an engineering
school i wasn't that good and my exams
weren't that good so i didn't really
pass but then because my sister was in
this university i got an opportunity to
pass because she was also there and as
soon as i got in i really liked
everything but the problem was that you
only get the basics from back-ends like
java and some php and some basics on uh
printed development like html css and
javascript and then i knew that if i
wanted to get a job that wasn't enough i
had to study on my own and first i found
an article on medium and they suggested
free code camp so
i went there and i at first i didn't
know what freak.com was i started doing
the first challenges which was about
html and css and so i fell in love with
it so i continue building yeah
yeah but that's the truth because i i
continued building and i saw that i
could progress and i could learn stuff
and i could have some the most important
thing was that i could have some of
those projects in my portfolio so i also
beat the portfolio and i had these
challenges and uh it was really awesome
yeah
well thank you so much elotheria for
coming out here from greece and
thank you for everything you're doing to
encourage people to learn to code
i think a lot of people when they watch
your videos
they are not only they learn a lot but
they get really motivated because you're
just such an enthusiastic person and i
think that really carries through in the
videos
all right well are you gonna are you
gonna come out and run with us tomorrow
i don't think so i have plans so with
the family they are here with me so yeah
okay wow you said your family came here
with you my dad and my sister yeah great
well what what is something exciting to
do that you plan to do while you're in
here in dublin
well uh tomorrow we are planning on go
on a tour in ireland so not only dublin
and i'm really looking forward to it
because maybe i won't ever have a chance
to visit dublin again or even ireland so
i really want to go there i like
traveling and exploring so it will be a
great opportunity for me to do that
awesome well we're so excited that you
were able to bring your family with you
and i hope you have an amazing time
exploring ireland
[Music]
thank you thank you very much
all right i'm going to pop
ella theria's information up on the
screen i encourage you to follow her on
twitter
and we're going to get the next uh
interviewee
oh great thank you you're very fast
all right next uh
let's bring him in
the the man
the main man
i am thrilled to finally hang out with
you in person we've spent
my gosh
hundreds of hours so many hours
oh ben mcmahon
yeah ben is
a prolific contributor to free co camp i
think i've spent more time pairing with
him than pretty much anybody
in the free code camp
uh community
let me let me let me just let me just
recount some of the things you worked on
so
you were
you were very heavily involved in the
javascript curriculum which pretty much
everybody who's watching this has
probably tried at some point um you
created the challenge-o-matic which was
the tool to make it easier to contribute
challenges which we're not actively
using anymore but it's an inspiration
for what we're building the the
challenge dramatic i think yours was the
challenge of
5000 name at all oh that was how i just
probably not a fan matic
take memories why is it one day i'm like
it sounds cool yeah well i think this
next one's gonna be challenge-o-matic
5001. perfect that's exactly the very
thing should work
just start a random high number and keep
increasing it yeah that way people will
think there have been so many iterations
to get us to where it is well tell us a
little about yourself you're here in
dublin right yes so i am based here i am
currently kind of a college student
uh detergent my degree is all work
placement
so i'm currently a working man for a
year um
in kernel development actually which is
a complete pivot from javascript but
curl development kernel oh like linux
kernel okay i was like girl like the
command
how much can you really do that kernel
development okay so talk a little bit
about uh what you're doing with kernel
development and where you're working
so i'm in arista and there's the
networks they've been the same market as
cisco and juniper and those guys um
mainly what i'm working on is
you're most york revolves around you're
dealing with you know
they're linux boxes but they're links
boxes with a lot of network cards which
linux you know
it works fine with it but it's not you
know the first purpose so there are a
few tweaks and changes that you made
um
and yeah that's kind of my day job now
at the moment um it's very interesting
because i'm learning c and current
development
and a lot of other concepts all the same
time on the job
which is an interesting uh take deciding
stuff up for about sherlock
yeah and
so
you're
doing you you've gone from doing
primarily web development which is what
you're doing with free code came to
really diving many layers of abstraction
down i'm on the opposite end of like the
spectrum at this stage yeah um no it's
something i got a choice when i
got the internship there to pick a team
when i was going i need to pick
something that i know nothing about um
interesting that's also how i started
free code camp was i tried to help i
distinctly remember helping you at like
2 a.m with riding jade
five years ago or four years ago now
back in the cloud close the streams
bring back to all the streams
bring back closet streams well i'm happy
to report that i no longer live in the
bay area in a one bedroom apartment and
i actually have an entire house with
little kids running around it now so
i have a spare bedroom that my in-laws
stay in when they visit
and i've i can stream from there we
should absolutely get on and do a stream
at some point there has to be a closet
though it's not the same it's not a
cloud boat okay so we do have a closet
it's just very hot and i'm small what
could i say i did my time in the the
freako camp closet and now i want to sit
in a proper room free close the camp
so
what are some uh
you've been
active in the free coaching community
you've primarily been focused on your
new job
and your your internship before that
which
involved probably an incredible amount
of learning
are you
are you interested in coming back and
continuing to contribute to the free co
camp community in the near future oh i'm
dying to get back uh the problem with
working with coding full-time is you
have to you do actually have to live to
some degree because these days i'll come
home and i'll be like i don't want to
write any record i want to go to bed
um
but yeah i'm hoping to find some time to
start getting back into it it takes i
want to like block off a week or
something to reacquaint myself with the
code base and stuff before i dive back
in because it's definitely changed and
excuse me in the
year or so i've been on active
yeah for about a year
well great well uh stuart's actively
working on making the curriculum a lot
more accessible of course stewart's only
a few hours drive from you if you
uh ever want to pair a program in real
life which is kind of a clean thing that
we used to do back in the day right back
in the day
so
i think we should stop
talking about tech and talk about this
wonderful city
that you call home where we're having
this event
as far as i know you're the only person
i've talked to tonight who
lives here i've talked to a few people
who've lived here uh for shorter periods
of time but what is dublin all about if
you had to describe dublin how would you
describe it
jesus was not prepared for that um
god one one word okay one word's tough
it doesn't have to be one word i didn't
impose that restriction
i'm trying to be concise though as well
like dublin's such a strange place
because it's got like you have google
and then you'll have like a pub next
door with an old man drinking guinness
in it it's kind of got like a foot in
both of those worlds uh and it's very
interesting culturally from that point
of view
um
it's kind of it's a country that's grown
up really fast
and it's become really progressive of
late um
so it's it's a it's a happening place
for definite um you can't see it anymore
but if you looked at the windows earlier
you can see cranes everywhere there's a
huge amount of construction a huge
amount of development
um we're very lucky as well like you've
no shortage of tech companies around
here so for people
definitely in europe it's a good
destination to kind of pick if you're
looking for somewhere to you know
start a career in tech because there are
a lot of places and they're doing a lot
of hiring at the moment um
but other than that like i like to think
that people are friendly enough they're
funny to me because i'm from here i
guess but
um it's it's definitely an interesting
culture it's funny when i go to the
states one of the first things i miss is
the people and because it's a very
different like interpersonal culture
there
um and it's nice but you do you do miss
the the kind of i don't know
everything has to be witty only has to
be sarcastic all that kind of stuff and
it's just it's the funny little things
like that just kind of miss
yeah so in in dublin people are
constantly kind of like it's
i mean do you think it's like a city of
kind of
entertainers and jokers kind of
everybody's trying to figure out a
clever way to put things
well they always kind of portray the
irish as that kind of like quick-witted
like smart art type of character and you
know maybe they're right um
i like to think i'm pretty all right
but no like huh
you probably shouldn't um
but
no yeah like i think there's a lot of
value place
placed on your words and you better wait
and you know i think it comes across
when you meet people they're normally
you know decent speakers and you know up
for a chat
and
someone were a bit too up for a chat but
that's a different story altogether
yeah well what are some things that uh
aside from kernel development and
hopefully getting back into free cooking
contribution what are some areas of
technology since you're somebody who
is you know at many different places in
the stack and has a pretty good
bird's eye view on on how things are
moving what are some things that really
excite you about
tech information technology and the way
things are going
in terms of new things um
i guess there's a lot of scope for
i guess
like this is trying to unlock but the
entire integration of
technology and people
i feel like there's a lot of issues that
are not serious enough that they've
needed a solution in the past but it
becomes so easy to solve that they will
be
um
a great example is the the whole health
technology kind of revolution the way
everyone's get their heart rate consumed
and all that kind of stuff um there's
been many cases of people finding that
they have asip or atrial fibrillation if
you want the full visible thing uh
because of their smart watch i think
there's an article really recently an
apple watch that alerted the person to
it um and it's stuff like that that can
you know makes huge differences to lives
because they're you know if you find out
you've atrial fibrillation you need to
get it sorted and it's fine
if you sort it and if you don't you get
yourself a lot of trouble so
there's all kinds of applications of
health technology in particular that are
not only really exciting because they're
cool but they're also really exciting
because they're good they're doing a
good thing in the world
that's a really good answer so
are you planning to event i mean do you
want to like
ten years out you're so young first of
all i think this uh this guy was one of
the youngest free co camp contributors
uh how old were you when you started
contributing to free cocaine
what year is there 2018
it was like four years ago almost 16
then yeah
yeah and so you're you're
right at the beginning of your career
did you did you end up going to
university or yeah yeah so this this
year of work is my third year of college
effectively and then i have to go back
one more year um
so yeah i kind of i took the weird right
because i did the self teaching and the
free code camp and in the classical
training as well so i've kind of done
all of it
in a weird way
so
knowing that you know techn you know
health technology and preventative
medicine all that is
is an area that there's tremendous
potential for
improving people's quality of life and
it can be you know a huge industry
knowing that and knowing what you know
about uh kernel development and knowing
what you know about web development what
would you say the the
long-term direction you hope to take
your career in at this point is
i actually am very happy where i am i'm
serious it's a very good company to work
for and i find my work really
interesting
um i try not to worry too much about the
future the nice thing about tech is that
when you get yourself to a certain
standard you don't have to worry too
much about you know you're not going to
be unemployed probably
for any great period of time so i i do
like a degree of you know
let the river take me wherever and see
what happens for now i definitely for
the next five years i can see myself
staying in arista um but i have no plans
even beyond that so i'm looking forward
to seeing what opportunities do present
themselves
all right well thank you so much for
joining us here and
yeah coming out and giving us some local
flavor that's it that's what i'm here
for quincy it's great to talk to you
live yeah great to talk to you in person
in the flesh that's it
hey coming up matt
yeah
welcome
matt uh tell us a little bit about your
background
and what you're doing
so i'm i'm originally a music teacher i
studied music at university
um taught guitar on piano for several
years
um and then which i still do actually
just a little bit um in the evenings and
weekends
but i realized
um
it wasn't the career for me i wanted
something which had a bit more direction
had more of a challenge
um
and i met a friend who i'd not seen in a
long time and
he studied music with me and he was like
oh i'm a developer now i was like how
did how did that happen and uh i knew
that well i found a lot of courses
online and sort of taught myself and
then a couple of years later and
developers like that's incredible and uh
so
i started just looking around different
resources um
and
this was
so this was uh like three and a half
years ago four years ago
um so i was started with
a lot of courses on coursera edx and
those kind of things which were really
good because they had these kind of
deadlines so you had to get the
project in by a certain time and then
people peer-reviewed them um
and then listened to a lot of podcasts
and i think
i feel it was probably javascript java
you were on and you were talking about
free code camp or maybe it was code
newbie maybe both
and um and i heard about free code camp
and started trying that out and and
realized actually this is this
incredible free platform um
and yeah just got really into it and got
quite disciplined about doing it every
day
and then uh and then i heard about these
meetups that were going on and um which
at first i was i'm not good enough to go
along to these i bet everyone's amazing
and
you know very
uh i was quite intimidated but i forced
myself to go
and then met people who were very
similar to me you know some people who
were above me some people who weren't
quite where i was and
um
and found that really and suddenly it
was oh you know maybe i can do this and
yeah it's gone from there really
that's awesome so
describe the transition uh
you're a musician
and just looking at
the different steps you would need to
take and planning out your progression
as
it became clearer and clearer to you
what you needed to do yeah
i think yeah to begin with it's it's
fine just to
accept you're not going to learn
everything in one go i think some people
think
they maybe do it for a week and think oh
i feel like i don't know too much yeah
i'm never going to be able to do this
it's so this just it can be overwhelming
um it's good just to yeah just do it
initially which i think i did
just to try a few things out and just
just enjoy it really not necessarily
immediately think i need to do this and
become a developer as soon as possible i
think it's good to take your time just
to
yeah try try some things out and but
then as you
enjoy it more hopefully and get a sense
that it is what you want to do
trying to um
find ways to keep yourself motivated in
my case it was initially doing these
courses which had deadlines at the end
of the week
and then in the meetups thinking okay
there's another meetup in two weeks i'd
like to be able to show
something to someone by then
you know sometimes you feel like if you
go along and you've not done anything
since last time it's like oh you know i
should have done it it's a nice kind of
motivator having some peers around you
i think it's very easy to sort of
stay by yourself and
get a bit isolated but you know what we
try and encourage with the meetups is to
get people to come along and just
you know
talk to people um see where everyone
else is don't feel shy about it
everyone's there to help each other
we're not about
you know criticizing i mean might be
constructive criticism but um
yeah
so yeah yeah and so
your leadership within uh within these
meetups and and helping people in your
town
pick up these skills what are some
observations you've had about people
who've approached it and how do they
generally find out about the events that
come to them yeah so we uh so yeah for
some more context i've been going to the
meetups for about two and a half years
but i've only been
leading them since the beginning of this
year um the person alex who was really
great she was running them for a few
years
but just had a lot on her plate so she
looked for a volunteer to to carry to
carry on with them and as i was going to
them all the time i thought i should do
that
[Music]
ask for observations yeah i mean we get
such a
huge range of people that come there are
people who have surprisingly you get
quite a few people who turn up
um and they they ask me you know i'd
like to learn to co where do i start and
okay if you try free code camera like oh
there's an online platform they actually
don't realize they've heard seen the
meetups on
meetup.com or i mean we have the
facebook group obviously which i
moderate and
or just like the venues have their own
websites and stuff so it's sometimes
quite funny when to see the look on
their face when to actually see someone
for the first time see the curriculum
and they're like this isn't all free is
it and actually you know you explain yes
it is and so that's great um yeah so we
get we do get people who are really
right at the beginning like that um and
again this is
what i keep telling i think there's we
have
i think we're getting on for like 6 000
people on the groove but we get about 20
to 30 people who actually come and i
think there's a lot of people there and
this is partly why i'm sitting here is
too much i'm trying to make them realize
don't be shy you know we'd love to have
you um
yeah so we do have that we got a lot of
people who come
who are yeah i mean we very rarely get
people who are
overly cocky actually most people are
a bit unsure of themselves and it's nice
to tell them actually no you're doing
really well and
yeah and we've had a lot of success
stories lately i think the last meet up
three or four people since the previous
one had got jobs
since that one so it's always nice when
people come along and say hey yeah i've
got a job since last time so
that's really good to see
yeah well that's amazing so
having uh 20 or 30 people show up at a
meet-up is is really good
i talk to people all the time uh who
have been working very hard to build up
a
kind of a critical mass of people coming
and it takes a lot of work to to get a
group to that size
it's you know because it's hard work
showing up in a meet-up and you have to
put yourself out there you have to learn
new things in programming pretty much
everything you do you're doing it for
the first time
uh otherwise you just rerun the script
you wrote last time right
so
uh i
let's talk about
music specifically
and you said you were inspired by your
friend who was a musician and how he
transitioned into development
and the parallels you see
uh between
music and coding
yeah i think
certainly self-discipline is a key one
like as a kid just getting
into the habit of practicing an hour a
day of guitar on piano in my case and
whatever instrument it may be that's
definitely really been a key one is
being able to
um yeah just just motivate yourself try
and
sometimes it's a chore sometimes it's
really not but but trying to doing a bit
every day even if it is just maybe even
20 minutes is better than
leaving long gaps and then doing a huge
amount you know doing nothing for a
month and then spending a weekend solid
it's better to do yeah a bit every day
or every other day so certainly that
kind of thing um other parallels in
music i guess
patterns looking for patterns and things
when i'm looking at chords and scales
there's a lot of this kind of i'm i've
come from a background i've been quite
interested in music theory and that kind
of picking things apart and seeing how
they work so certainly from that that
translates quite nicely into looking at
code bases and trying to figure out
what's behind the scenes and how that's
happening so yeah
well what are some of your near-term
goals as far as
your leadership of the the study group
and also just your personal career goals
uh as far as the study group um yeah
trying to get them get the meetups more
regularly we are increasing this now
we're getting i've been talking to some
more venues around london and so we're
not usually we're just in the same place
but we're now trying out some other
things so that's helping to keep things
keep a bit more momentum going getting
more people going obviously it's always
good and i try and encourage
people on the facebook group and our
group and people who come
this doesn't have to be the only thing
go to other meetups or start your own
um
we're not we don't own the freecode
brand you know we're just volunteers and
so we do get people who
you know
after a session go hey you want to meet
up
the weekend and do some coding and stuff
so always constantly trying to encourage
that
um talking to a few people about maybe
doing some some talks and workshops at
the moment our meetups are quite loose
so
which is kind of deliberate because i
want to keep them as unintimidating as
possible so that and also for me
personally when i've been coding all day
to go and
have like three hours of lectures as it
were they can be really great but
sometimes you just just want to talk and
um and enjoy the social aspect so yeah
but but i think maybe we could
also be a bit more structured have
occasional talks on that kind of thing
as far as career i've just started a new
job this week so um wow congratulations
tell us about that so it's with um it's
with a company called bulb who are
a green energy company so do 100
uh renewable electricity and 10
renewable gas
so it's quite a good mission which i'm
you know quite passionate about
um and they're growing at a phenomenal
rate so i think they had about a hundred
thousand customers at christmas and now
it's on to eight hundred thousand so
it's um they're
hiring more developers they want to you
know obviously keep on top of things it
was an interesting first week because it
was
everybody whether you're senior
management or
entry level
does the energy specialist training so
um learning about the energy industry
and how to deal with customer
interactions we haven't even seen the
code base yet but so we'll see what it
looks like on monday which is going to
be fun but it's a really good stack you
know react redox and enzyme just node on
the back end so lots of good stuff
that's great they're working with a
contemporary stack so you'll you'll be
pretty at home because you've been
working with that previously and that's
what you learned yeah yeah
my previous job was mostly react redux
so
um quite familiar with that but i've
done bits of back end but not too much
so it'd be good to have a chance to do
that as well and we're doing and it's
all in typescript as well which i'm
liking more and more that kind of thing
so
yeah i'm excited about typescript too
there's a there's a new version and node
that's typescript based i don't know if
you've heard about it it's called deno
it's like node but up backward
or i guess an anagram of node deno
i have the subreddit if anybody's
interested in posting about deno uh r
deno
i'm the
administrator on that subreddit now so
as you learn more about typescript
especially i'd encourage you to teach
the community about it because that is a
topic that i think everybody should get
some exposure to we're hoping to add
typescript to the free cooking
curriculum as well yeah brilliant i mean
to be honest i'm
pretty much a beginner in it myself i
mean i did
you know the twitch project i did that
for the hell of it i did it in angular 2
like two years ago and built that with
types where i learned it for that i
think it's changed a bit since then i've
mainly been using flow in my previous
job so but a lot of the principles are
quite similar so but it'll be nice so
having said that it is good to teach
things even if you're not yet an expert
because by teaching you do learn
yourself so yeah maybe that's a good
goal i should set myself is try and
teach some people some typescript at the
meetups
all right matt well uh thanks again for
your leadership of the free cocaine
london uh group and i popped your
information up on the on the screen
uh i think are you on twitter oh it's
not really not really okay there's a
free code camp which we're doing which
i'm actually probably
not so great at maintaining as the other
platforms but um
yeah if anything i'm trying to maybe cut
down social media just a little bit so
but um but yeah i'm i'm on facebook and
happy people linkedin obviously i'm
happy for people to have me on that
right well i would encourage you if
you're visiting london which is one of
the most popular tourist destinations in
the world or if you happen to be in the
area
um if you happen to live in in the uk
and just travel there occasionally
i would encourage you to attend one of
the free co camp london events i've
heard great things about it you've got
some amazing photos from your events
that i've seen and and
i've heard great things about the events
from various people have gone yeah
likewise if when you're in london please
do join us
all right well hopefully within the next
year or two i'll make it out to one of
your events i'd love to go it's a it's a
beautiful city it's got so much history
fantastic okay
okay thanks again matt
i'm great this is teemo
hey teemo
thanks timo uh can you tell me how to
pronounce your last name
granches
gurenges
goodanges teemo gullenges
okay and you're from the netherlands
yeah from veda from the south of the
netherlands
okay so from which city in the south
netherlands
okay
so
first of all i just want to
make sure everybody knows teemo is a
prolific contributor i think i was
talking about you earlier when we were
going around in the circle but you've
contributed an incredible amount and if
you look on the github repo and look
rank everything by commits you're way up
there
along with ben mcmahon and some of the
other people we've talked to tonight
so timo
you are a young developer who is
rapidly
learning new skills and contributing to
open source talk about how you got
interested in technology
i've been thinking about that recently
and the truth is i don't really know
what got me into this just
i found out about it i tried it and i
liked it and i stuck with it because it
seemed fun and
yeah i i can't really tell why why i
like it but i like it and i think i like
solving the puzzle
i specifically like helping other people
with the things
i can help them with but
yeah
why why programming i i don't know it's
just it seemed fun and it turned out to
be fun so i stuck with it
what are some
of the ways that you've contributed to
the free cooking community over the past
year and a half or so
so when it started out
almost exactly two years ago now um
i started with making small changes
mostly to the curriculum uh small fixes
to the test mostly so it was a test that
was missing correct uh solutions or it
was allowing
solutions that shouldn't be allowed
i try to fix those and that's mostly
what i started out doing and then uh i
found out about the free guide being
developed
and actually you had quite a bit of time
at the time that it uh
was an act of development and uh i got
involved and i spent a lot of time
on uh contributing to the freakout
combine to the platform not the articles
the content but to the platform
the site around it
yeah and
the guide specifically what are some of
the articles that you wrote that you're
particularly proud of
i the only article or the only content
on the guide that i wrote is the home
page
which i'm still i'm kind of proud of
because i'm sure a lot of people have
seen it and it's
actually in the past year or so it
hasn't changed at all so it's
kind of fun but i haven't read any other
in any other content for the guide it's
the only content i've written so most of
your contributions have been to
uh the the application itself and yeah
yeah exactly yeah i've done a lot to uh
just for the looks of this fight for the
performance i
cut it in half at one point there was a
weird issue that made the
loading time twice as long as it
could be
so that's a fun thing i did and
lots of stuff around that making the
tests better making it making sure it
would
give better errors when the things
failed and
that's sort of what i did around the
kite
yeah so
next month
we're having the freco camp jam stack
hackathon we're going to be building a
lot of applications using tools like gas
bjs which is what the guide is built on
are you do you have any time or energy
to participate in that hackathon i think
i heard about it and then i checked my
calendar i think i could not that was i
don't remember but i think it was
something that made it so that it was
difficult for me to attend but
yeah i'd like to and i'd definitely
check again but it probably won't work
yeah okay well we moved it back a week
so now it's november third
november third and fourth and even
though we're having it in person in
san francisco at github we're also going
to have
a much larger online hackathon and one
of the things we're doing
is we're building kind of like google's
lighthouse score you know how you can
you can add like a chrome extension we
want to do is we want to build something
like google's lighthouse
score
that checks whenever a page is like
redeployed through nullify we create
some sort of web hook and then we can go
in and we can just run a bunch of tests
against it and figure out you know
performance
how it's doing performance wise how it's
doing seo wise accessibility wise
and
and other like basic security
considerations things like that so
if you're interested you're somebody who
has
a ton of experience working with stack
and and
me and stuart are going to be working on
this basically all through the month of
october during hacktoberfest
putting this tool together to
to basically test hackathon projects
programmatically would that be something
you might be interested in contributing
to yeah i think it definitely sounds
exactly like the kind of thing i'm
looking to contribute to right now so
that's really cool to hear about i've
been
away from the contributing to africa
again for a while now and
that sounds like right up my alley so
yeah i i definitely i'm definitely going
to look at what i can do to contribute
to that yeah
great well we'll plan to include you in
some of the meetings that steward and i
have um
right now we're focused of course on
getting the freco camp repo easier to
contribute to
in preparation for oktoberfest got like
a week
left but
that
i'll definitely loop you in because we
would totally welcome your help with
that you've got so much knowledge about
performance and and security and things
like that
what are
currently uh
what are you doing
uh as a developer and what's your what's
the next year and a half or so of your
life look like
wow that's a different question
so right now i work at a very small
local software company where the only
developers are
me my boss
and a
freelance software developer
but it's i'm having a lot of fun there
the people there are great so
that's fun but the tech is quite old but
also because it's such a small company i
get to do a lot of different things and
i quite enjoy that so
um
i
i'll be looking into progressive web
apps and we'll probably be turning our
application to progressive web apps i'm
quite excited to do that and
we have a lot of
ui
improvements and performance
improvements so
i really like those areas and
also happen to be the areas that we are
going to focus on in our application uh
at my job so
it works out great
awesome well timo it's been so wonderful
having you fly in
from the netherlands hanging out with us
what are some things you plan to do
while you're here in dublin
um i'm usually the kind of person that
really plans out in advance what i
potentially like to do but for this trip
i didn't
look at anything at all so i'm leaving
monday so i've the old day tomorrow here
so i'll probably be at the fun run
and uh
don't have any idea what i'm going to do
tomorrow apart from that but hoping to
see do some sightseeing in dublin
tomorrow and that's about it really yeah
well thank you so much for joining us
timo it's great to meet you in person of
course and we timo ran into us at the
airport actually
and we you just saw the free cookie i'm
sure he's like hey
and i was like oh tivo
and uh so yeah it was pretty dramatic uh
sudden
meeting and uh you came back and hung
out at the airbnb with us
so
yeah we're excited i'm looking forward
to running around the park with you
tomorrow yeah
cheers
yeah hey sam sam williams welcome yeah
likewise have a seat thank you very much
just very quickly we've got 36 minutes
left in the venue so we're gonna try to
get some more interviews
yeah well thanks for all your articles
so far sam they've been they've been
great thank you and very well received
by the community
yeah thank you virtually like the first
article i wrote i was
i wrote it just because i was in china
and
i hated the great the great firewall of
china and i sent it to you and said can
you have a look and you said you loved
it and actually
made me an author on the uh on the free
code camp media mask on the medium
publication and
that just gave me the boost i needed
every other article before that i got
like five ten maybe fifteen viewers
getting on the free code camp thing
boosted me and gave me the confidence to
write more and that was really big for
me
right on well so you're somebody who's
traveled extensively and
seems like you're constantly learning
new things and kind of pushing the
bounds of your comfort zone you talk
about how
you came to be and like what what
inspired you to to travel and to learn
all these new technologies
well
i'm an obsessive rock climber and that's
what got me into travelling and that's
what actually got me into software
development i worked as an aerospace
engineer and
i realized that it wasn't what i wanted
to do so what i wanted to do was do more
travelling and i realized that doing
that doing
engineering as a career wasn't going to
get me there and
software development would so i actually
used free code camp to teach myself how
to do that
and after a couple of months of really
hard work i managed to get my first
software job
after that i decided to save up all of
my money and go traveling
and
then after that i was like okay i need
to take it to the next level so i spent
six months traveling and learning all
the newest things i learned i taught
myself react through
yourselves free code camp and a couple
of other resources
um i pushed my node skills
and i did everything i could and i wrote
a lot of articles whilst i was traveling
about
what it was like to go from i know a bit
of html and a bit of css to i want to
become a really serious developer and
that's a transition that
i found quite tricky but
hopefully um through those articles have
helped some other people like
find their pathway from
very junior developer through to like a
mid-level developer and
it's cool because like some of the
articles have had comments saying this
has really helped this is like giving me
a pathway and that's it's just such a
good thing to see that other people
are making that transition with us
so
i have to ask as a rock climber uh
you know
i've i enjoy climbing i enjoy bouldering
i am not good at it at all
but
that is a very itinerant lifestyle
you're traveling around from
uh climbing location to climbing
location probably a lot of national
parks and places like that that you you
visit you do outdoor climbing as well
yeah
yeah so i grew up doing indoor
competition climbing which was good fun
but i realized that when i started going
outdoors that was the beauty and scenery
outdoors and just climbing on real rock
is
so much better than climbing indoors
so yeah i've been traveling around spain
germany france europe i've been across
to canada i've been to uh north africa
and then this was five months of
traveling around asia so like months in
china
thailand lao
vietnam and
it's just brilliant fun traveling and
the great thing is with traveling and
doing software development is that you
can take your laptop with you
which means you can do work whilst
you're traveling i met
five or six other developers whilst i
was traveling who
had their laptop with them and on their
rest days would take the laptop out find
a quiet corner and would do a day's work
and that's how they sustained themselves
on their
perpetual travels which is a really
i think long term is something i
definitely intend to do
so when i was
i spent about five years in china myself
uh when i was uh younger like right
after college i moved there and i i
taught and
i was the school director and i did an
intensive mandarin program and and uh
did an mba
but
while i was there
um
i definitely
enjoyed it and i
thought about just living in different
countries for the rest of my life
ultimately i kind of settled in the
states and i still go back to china like
i'm getting ready to move there for like
six months or so uh just just to live
with the family and give my kids some
more exposure to the language but
there was this amazing book i read i
wanted to see if you'd heard of it it
was really inspiring to me at the time
it's called vagabonding by ralph potts
ralph potts i've never heard of that
i've never heard of that book no
i think it was kind of a precursor to
the digital nomad movement and i'm not
sure you know whether it holds up and
whether the advice in there is still
like best practices and stuff
but it definitely opened my eyes to it
and now there's this entire digital
nomad movement
do you identify as a digital nomad and
are you parts of it a part of any of
those communities
uh currently i'm not a digital nomad i
have a full-time job in manchester and i
love it and it's brilliant but
in the future i can definitely imagine
myself well my aim in the future is to
get to the point where
i can comfortably sustain myself
in a perpetual travel so i can go around
i can live in a city i could live in
like
i could live in barcelona for a couple
of months and then i could move to china
and then i could move to chile and i
that is the goal to have a digital nomad
life where i can work
where i want when i want
and have complete autonomy of my life
outside of
like the the constrictions of
a traditional job system
in manchester
uh do you are you able to work remotely
at all or do you generally just work in
an office
currently i work in an office when i
started this job i started as what i
thought was
a low to medium level developer
i very quickly got pushed into being a
mid to senior level developer like
making quite big
architectural decisions which
turns out i really enjoyed
so
we've got a really small team and we
tend to work all in the office
if i want to work at home for a day if i
need to i can that's fine but
at the moment with the size of the
company i work at working at an office
especially because it's a 10 minute
commute
it's not two hours of driving i find
it's quite nice to get away from home
because that means that when you finish
you go home
and you can shut off yes occasionally
you do have to pop occasionally you do
have to pop online because there's a bug
on the live system
but you can go back but most of the time
it's you finish work at the end of the
day you go home
and being able to fully disconnect being
is something i'm actually surprisingly
enjoying
compared to when i've done a little bit
of remote work before
well
you came from i think you said aerospace
engineering
so that's a field that's another
engineering field uh you know software
engineering software development
also applies a lot of similar you know
math and and
kind of engineering principles
how much of your aerospace space
engineering training has been helpful in
moving into software development
i think
actually quite a lot of it a lot of the
problem solving and the
ways that you approach
technical problems
through that we were taught and we
practiced through university were
actually really like applicable to
software development unfortunately
they're not actually that applicable to
real world
engineer like aerospace engineering
which is ironic
so i think a lot of the skills the
problem solving and the approaches and
like how to deal with something when you
hit that wall that's the kind of thing
that you deal with quite a lot at
university when you hit a project and
you hit that wall how to break through
that wall whether it's taking some time
off or approaching it from completely
different direction
yeah like aerospace engineering taught
me more about software development than
it did about aerospace engineering
what would be some advice uh that you
would have for other people who have
gone into a field of engineering whether
it's mechanical engineering
or aerospace engineering or petroleum
engineering or a field where
perhaps growing a lot less quickly than
software development is which i think is
probably the fastest growing field maybe
on earth um what would be your advice to
those people who already have kind of a
traditional engineering training but are
interested in pivoting into software
development
if you're interested in pivoting into
software
at all give it a try
stuff like free code camp and there's
hundreds of other free resources out
there they're all absolutely brilliant i
learned
most of the stuff i know now through
free code camp it's free it has
step-by-step tutorials that give you
really good feedback as you're
progressing through
and
the worst that happens is you try it out
you do two or three months
and you find that you don't enjoy it
that much
that's two or three months you've
learned some new skills but you don't
progress
if you do enjoy it and you end up moving
into software you can end up
as a remote developer you could end up
traveling around the world you could end
up working with chat bots like i
currently do and working with some of
like the coolest tech like working with
ai
working with machine learning
and doing something that is so beyond
what you're constricted to within the
traditional engineering roles
thanks so much for coming out uh from
manchester and uh are you gonna you're
an athletic guy are you gonna come with
us run tomorrow
unfortunately i've got a flight quite
early tomorrow morning um which i'm
hoping that i'll be sober enough to fly
on
but it's going to be
yeah so unfortunately i'm not going to
make the run
no worries
we'll have fun uh we're i think we're
going to go and do like a little pub
crawl after this so
yeah we've got some we've got ben the
local here who's gonna guide us around
town so uh yeah that it'll be cool to
hang out with you later tonight uh
thanks again for coming out man it's
great great to finally meet you in
person thank you very much cheers sam
all right
richard
have a seat man
okay great
all right awesome we're making good
progress so
richard i'm so thrilled we've talked so
many times we've been in touch
richard is in charge of pre-co camp
leads
pre-code cam oslo and the free cocaine
instagram which has
i don't know 10 000 ish
like 13 and a half or something now
somebody wrote in the 13s i think yeah
yeah and it's
it's great photos of freco camp events
and just beautiful workstations and code
setups and things like that yeah all
that stuff all the good stuff
yeah what are your goals so you really
took charge on the instagram and
i mean you owned it
for
you were already very prolific on
instagram you had a lot of your own
photos you had a ton of followers
yourself
and you really took the free cocaine
instagram which was largely just
chilling there because
i think i was the only person who had
access to it at the time and and
and now it's it's quite vibrant and
there's a lot of beautiful photos on
there
can you describe that process of
thinking like hey maybe i could help out
with this and and how you went about it
yes so i think
people took it from about three thousand
at the time uh are you saying it was
like underutilized i think the thing i
think you were
very um
very very good on twitter and things
like that that stuff was doing it um and
what i was doing on my own instagram
uh was just pictures of my code stuff
i'm working on
um
and things like that so
we had the conversation about doing some
stuff with the free code can't component
to it have a lot more of the community
stuff in there as well uh trying to re
re-upload other people's pictures um
re-gram them or whatever they call that
um so that's kind of what we tried to do
get the community thing more in there uh
and just try and
try and build that up and have it a bit
more of a community a bit more so other
people could um
you know get involved in that as well so
that was the plan yeah
yeah and uh early on you you made it a
clear point that people could basically
add mention free code camper hashtag
freak codecamp on instagram and we could
basically signal boost
their photos and and of course credit
them and everything uh
are people still doing that pretty
regularly we need them to do it more
do it more
um especially to do with
if there's meetups going on
that stuff's great so if we've got a
meet up and you've got a picture of all
the groups and stuff like that
we love that stuff so like send those
stuff but um
yeah
i'm constantly going in there checking
the hashtags or if you've been tagging
us in them directly as well trying to
find the good stuff out there and
posting it on there so um
if if people send me the good stuff then
it means i don't have to do anything so
that's kind of what we want to do for
sure
yeah so beyond the instagram
you have been leading these two study
groups in two very different cities
you're originally from leeds but you
live in oslo as well
yeah so um
my kind of journey with the whole code
thing started
i was living
in oslo so i kind of got back round to
it uh coding i'd done a little bit when
i was very young it was html with inline
css so we're talking like 1997 here um
so i got back around to it i was
actually living in oslo at the time um
then
i ended up taking over the admin of the
oslo group because
the person who was running it wasn't
really running it so they had a backlog
of people they wanted to get into the
group
but they weren't being accepted so i
managed to get hold of the the admin at
a time and and
get her to add me then i took over the
admin of that
um then as i was going back to uh leeds
so i kind of been in oslo twice
basically
going back to leeds we had marek who
came to the new york
show
and
he was really like i want to do it
and it's going to give me a kick up the
ass if if if i have this commitment that
i'm the person here
okay well i'm i'm back in lead so i went
over to leeds
um got involved in the leeds community i
think at that time they just added some
more admins to kind of
get stuff moving a little bit um because
then also when i was there we started
doing the coffee and code meet-ups
you know we started weekly and doing
once a month and
trying to find its feet which was great
when mike took over that he made it once
a week and that momentum was really good
so back in leeds
we had the first copying code meetup
i think after i've been there a month
uh then they had me as the admin there
so we started trying to do more frequent
copy and code stuff there so we're doing
it monthly day as well
and obviously we've got johnny bissell
the famous the legend of johnny bissell
the legend uh so
if you want to just um
message johnny bizzle on twitter and
just say ninja i think it's at johnny
bizzle i'm sure it is just say you're a
legend you know i go there well
um and we've got charlie as well a few
of the guys
who are helping in lead so we've got the
coffin codes running there and i think
i think that's the good thing about the
facebook groups is
you can look at all the different cities
around the world and there's some groups
that are
slow and some groups are really going
somewhere and it doesn't it doesn't
start
it doesn't start in the groups it starts
outside the groups and when you can
start making that community outside the
group
then it translates to stuff happening in
the group so
um
i said i went back to leeds and we
started doing stuff in leeds and i moved
back to oslo again
and mike did a great job of making the
copy and code meetups every week
and from then you know i've been
i've been back in oslo maybe
six months now i think something like
that
and
we're getting between
seven and 13 people every single
monday night
um
oslo isn't a big city it's like um 800
000 people so we've got 400 people in
the group i think something like that
so to have that community of uh people
who come in every single every single
week is great because
it's the motivation to keep going you
know
even if all we do is just talk rubbish
all night and we don't code anything
which happens like but
for me it happens the majority of times
it's made for monday night it's my
favorite night of the week i get to go
hang out with these guys and we chill
you know we'll go down to the lake we'll
have some beers by the lake
we'll go out and have a party like it's
gone beyond
we're here to learn to code it's like
there's good friendships and i think
with
um
what we're doing also especially there's
a very big immigrant population there
like
as in some immigrant expat community
um
so it's nice to have something that ties
us together and brings people together
that
uh as a social thing as well you know
we've got people from
uh not just people from england norway
america um
you know poland
czech republic we've got lots of people
that
automatically have this connection with
you because you code but also
it brings together it gives you a good
bond which is really cool it's like
it's bigger than the sum of its parts i
guess you could say yeah for sure
yeah so you you just to summarize some
of the insights you've shared
first of all trying to build a community
with like friends
in a city first and get coffee and codes
going and then try to invite the local
facebook group into that rather than
trying to post on the facebook group hey
i'm trying to have this event if you get
a critical mass going first where you
have people meeting it makes it easier
to bring more people from the community
is that kind of what you're saying
no i'd say the way we worked it was this
i'm gonna go study every monday
i don't care if you come
i'm going like this is my thing and for
me that's a
it's one of those things where
i had to do it and i motivated myself to
go do it
and when that when that momentum keeps
going you might have one person one week
might have no persons the week after but
it's it's you're not doing it because of
how many people are coming you're doing
it because that's what you have to do
and i think when you have these groups
where people have got
good leaders then they're just going to
go do it because
that's what they're going to do
and it happens like
even in
the facebook groups if you're not
um
if you're not posting as a leader
as a leader if you're not posting and
you've got to be the one who's doing it
even if nobody else is replying
it's almost one of those things like
you're so selfishly um
blinkered if you like
you almost explain you don't even care
what's going on you're you've got to do
it
people might not be replying just keep
posting keep posting the article you bet
it's like and eventually the momentum
will come you know
leeds is very similar to oslo with the
amount of people it's like 700 000 right
so if
if those groups can do it and you're in
a city of 10 million people it's like
you've got you've got such a base than
even we had and the only thing that is
different is the fact that we went
i'm gonna do it and just
just do it and don't care if you get any
response so yeah just go do it for
yourself
keep posting make sure i make the event
for the coffee and code meetup whatever
it is and
it's like the what is it field of dreams
what's the movie where it's like build
it and they'll come
exactly that build and they'll come and
i have to say uh just a quick
observation because we're running out of
time we're going to do a big group photo
but i have to say that
the study groups like where a study
group will become huge and vibrant and
help tons of people get a job has very
little to correlation with the size of
the metropolitan area has everything to
do with the leadership of that study
group and how passionate they are
and how willing they are to do exactly
what you said like i don't care if you
come i'm going to be there so come and
code with me if you want but either way
i'm going to be there you know
rain or shine and that attitude makes
all the difference so thanks so much for
imparting that in both the oslo and and
in the leads groups and i'm hopeful that
we can take a lot of your wisdom and you
can write some articles and we can use
that to help more people create these
successful groups thanks so much for
everything you're doing richard
all right
okay we're here with andrei do you have
his name up on the screen
okay perfect anderla has contributed
extensively to free code camp uh through
the free co camp guide and also
publishing articles on medium tell us a
little bit about yourself and how you
discovered free code camp and decided to
contribute to it
okay um at the moment i'm a student
actually just started like last week
university um the
my journey with frequent camp started
when i um moved from like g-sharp to
javascript because i needed to learn
node.js for like a server application
and uh i basically discovered frequent
camp to learn javascript then
i started like reading the articles on
the medium publication
and when i decided that i wanted to also
write articles it just felt natural to
go
to publish the articles on the media
publication
and then from there like the involvement
with the community just like grew uh
gradually um leading to contribute also
mainly to the guides repository but also
like to the other repositories like
smaller contributions
awesome well thank you for your many
contributions so far what are some areas
like when you look at the free code camp
community andra what are some areas
where you
see potential for improvement that
you're interested in diving into
oh oh okay um i think that the backhand
curricula um is like very good on the um
beginner level but there are like so
many topics that could be covered of
course like the uh the work on actually
developing the courses is like enormous
for example a technology that i'm very
interested in is graphql
i think that would be a very nice
addiction
you are also using that internally uh in
for the
um in the guides repository
with gatsby so um
very cool technology would like like to
see that uh
yeah well i will tell you under the if
you're interested
in helping contribute to that that's
like we want to add typescript when we
want to add graphql those are the two
things that we're most excited about
adding to the curriculum of course we
have other
like things kind of supplementary things
but we want both graphql and
and typescript to be covered in the core
curriculum
so yes we would welcome your help and
and you're right there absolutely we
basically scratch the surface on testing
on security on a lot of these major npm
modules that people can add that add so
much functionality and we'd love to
cover a lot more would you be interested
in helping with that
yeah okay actually there is a i have a
graphql article in writing should be
published like already a couple weeks um
as um helping the curricula i i can do
some work the whole like not too much
involvement because of like the uh
plenty of uh
things i have to do in this
like
period starting university having like a
startup in the launching
side job
really
heavy on the schedule
but like the article is a good start i
think you said you just started school
you just started you just started
university yeah congratulations yeah how
old are you 18.
oh wow
you're getting really into
uh really deep into technology pretty
young and that's that's excellent
yeah i actually like started my first
experiences with coding like at 12
the story goes basically oh i like games
why not make one and then like i just
started with
the software that lets
you just create the game with drag and
drop stuff
and then you say oh i want to add this
like cool feature i will learn some
scripting and then oh program is super
cool i will learn this
yeah have you uh so are you thinking
like game maker or tools like that
uh what what did you use early on for
building games okay yeah early on i used
game maker we actually had an issue
because we are three people using game
maker
but we picked two
different versions of a game maker
and we didn't know that and so like um
at the time uh of course we didn't use
gate i didn't even know that git existed
and so like sending the versions and
loading them into the software
like broke the code and we are like
these two weeks in which we were like
building this very
uh basic ai and every time we uh like
sent each other the code
it broke
until we realized oh
you're using 8.1 i'm using 8.0
wow that's that's kind of uh doesn't
sound like they have very good backward
compatibility
yeah have you looked at uh
unity 3d or the unreal engine or any of
the more contemporary
big developer tools for game development
i did something unity but
actually in the last three years i
haven't done like anything in game
development i've been doing mostly
back-end
work like on an iot framework
some front-end work with react for the
interface
well but you know iot related stuff is
of course very
interesting and node.js is a powerful
tool for doing iot stuff so if if you
want to write more about that we'd
welcome that if you do want to dive in
and do more game development there we've
published a lot of videos on game
development like build flappy bird uh
build you know basic
kind of almost programming one-on-one
type classes like tic-tac-toe and stuff
but we would welcome more in-depth game
development
especially because it sounds like
something that you you're passionate
about they got you into coding in the
first place
yeah i definitely want to get back to
game development in the future but not
in the short future like
when for example the iot framework that
i'm building at the moment
is like
version one ready then we can start to
think about okay let's begin another big
project
until then
game development takes really a lot of
time so
it's on a stop for for now well it's
it's great to hear about uh your
projects and i'm glad you are staying
focused on your iot
stuff um keep us posted and keep writing
your your articles are helping a lot of
people
thank you thank you very much all right
cheers
all right
i'll just grab the camera
um
so
matt's over here we're gonna take a big
group photo and then we're gonna
gracefully leave
because we do have guidelines for the
leaving i'll talk to you i'll brief you
on after the street okay great
um hey everybody
hey we're going to take a very quick
group photo and then we're going to
follow the leaving guidelines and make
sure that we leave the place in a good
condition
yeah everybody come over here and
i mean this wall is so colorful i love
the
but we can get maybe the window and the
wall in the shot uh unless somebody has
an even better place to shoot it
a couple
strong burly people grab that table on
that table move it out of the way so
that we have uh
can you do it
i said strong as berlin
why are you there
all right
all right we're going to take a group
photo
okay
[Music]
taller people in the back
medium people in the middle
i think
yeah or we could wait we are still
missing
yeah
okay
can you just wait for the guy that is in
a bathroom no
yeah we have a camper who's in the
bathroom
hey hey
[Music]
here
[Music]
all right
well everybody thank you so much for
tuning in for the stream we got to talk
to a lot of exciting people doing
exciting work both within the free
cocaine community and just
working as developers
so i hope you all have a beautiful
evening we're gonna chop all this up
into a great highlight video that will
post uh if you missed any of it you can
catch the highlight video
and
from dublin signing off
have a beautiful day
you