#147 From Stealing Cars to Self-Taught Software Engineer with Dorian Develops
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It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to pay to be successful as someone who's learning how to code. And we have that idea that if we pay for something, it has more value than something that's free. But there are some amazing free things out there. And I usually try to recommend things that are free or affordable. ♪♪♪

Yeah.

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. This week, we're talking with Dorian Develops. He's a software engineer and prolific YouTube creator.

Dorian grew up in Little Havana as a child of a single mother refugee from Cuba. After a rough childhood and dropping out of high school in ninth grade, Dorian eventually found himself as a valet car parker in Las Vegas.

It was here that Dorian realized he needed to make changes for the sake of his family. He taught himself to code using Free Code Camp and other free open learning resources, and he has since gotten six-figure jobs as a web developer and created a popular YouTube channel. Dorian, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, man. You're somebody I've followed for...

I don't know, like four years or so? I've watched a ton of your videos over the years and kind of followed your career progression and your many popular videos on just learning more about you. Learning about Dorian is like peeling back different layers of an onion and exposing new kind of levels of Dorianism. Yeah.

I'm like Shrek. Anyone who's got kids and has watched Shrek will get that reference, I'm sure. Yeah. So, first of all, most people listen to the audio edition, but if you're watching the video edition, you can see Dorian's background, and it's just like...

It's like raw construction. Where are you? Yeah, it's OSB board, I think is what that's called. I don't really know too much about construction work. OSB board. Yeah, I am in a...

I am in a wooden shack that my brother-in-law built for us to have a co-working space and office where we can work together as we are visiting his new house in Washington because we're stopping by for the summer or the tail end of the summer before we head back out to Southeast Asia. Yeah. So you have lived in a lot of places, of course, Florida, Las Vegas, and now the Pacific Northwest. Yeah.

But you've also traveled extensively. We're going to talk about a lot of that. But right now, what is going on in your world? Right at this exact moment that we're catching you. So right at this exact moment, we just came back to Washington about four weeks ago. And we got about three weeks left before we go back to Asia about...

I don't know, like seven, eight months ago, kind of decided to take a break from working and try to pursue full-time content creation and dabble in some indie hacking while my family and I travel the world a bit. We did this about a year and a half before that, and

And we went to Europe. And I have some videos where I kind of talk about that being a bit of a failure on my end because I couldn't make it work for various reasons. And then after coming back, I immediately went into a...

a developer job actually was a design job, but it was back into software. And, uh, almost instantly I was like, ah, we want to travel again. Even my wife was like, ah, we're not really liking this, but we signed the lease and did the right thing. So we stuck it out for that year. And then we pretty much got back on the road as soon as the lease was up. And, uh, that's what we've been doing since. So that was, uh, about January, February this year. We, we had it back out. Awesome. Yeah. I, uh, when I was like,

I was living in China as a 24-year-old, like 25-year-old with my wife. We got married, like you, we got married very early. I've been married for like 19 years. And you've been together with your wife for probably nearly that amount of time.

I think you mentioned you two got together when you were like 23 or something like that. Yeah, we started dating right around 23 or 24 for me. She's a couple years older than me. So I got married right before turning 28. So if she hears this episode, she'll be like, how long have we been together? You messed it up on the interview. But no, we've been together forever now, like 15 years. And we've been married for over 10. Yeah, that's awesome, man. And you have kids as well.

Yes, yes. We had kids a little later. My first was born when I was about 31. Yeah, and similar with me. We waited, I think, 34. I'm slightly older than you. I'm 43. But yeah, similarly, we waited to make sure our economics were in order and we'd done what we needed to do as far as earning degrees and certifications and everything.

My wife got her CPA and everything like that. And like, so we're like, finally, okay, we feel like comfortable that we can have kids. Uh, but, um, we didn't go. So what I was going back to is like, I was in China and there was this book that came out called vagabonding by Ralph Potts. And it's about like basically like saving up a bunch of money and then going on the open road and like traveling. And he talks about like,

how this is really something designed for like, you know, people that are young that don't have a lot of responsibility that don't necessarily have a spouse or kids or anything like that, but that it is technically viable to do with kids. But he's not sure exactly how you would do it. Cause he didn't do it with kids. So, but he, that he'd met people doing this, like basically, uh,

And this was 20-plus years ago, so it was before indie hackers like Revolution and before Peter Levels and all these other people kind of proved out the concept of being a digital nomad, right? Yeah.

And it sounds to me like you're kind of like living that lifestyle, like you're parking somewhere, you're saving up some money, and then you're getting on the road and exposing your kids to all these different cultures and all these different experiences in Europe and Asia. We're absolutely, just to be completely clear, we're going to talk a lot about software development on this podcast, but I cannot resist. I have to talk a little bit about your recent travels and your philosophy toward taking your kids and showing them the world.

So yeah, it's funny because it's actually like thinking about it and I've thought about this a couple of times recently. It kind of all goes back to learning how to code. Funny enough, because I remember when I was learning how to code and I was talking to my wife and back then at that point in time, it still felt very much like a dream, right? Like I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to land a job. I wasn't sure if what I was doing was going to

eventually lead to me doing it as a career. And I was just kind of learning online and free code camp and different resources. And at that time, I remember talking to my wife and I was like, you know, one day if I do this as a job, I could eventually go remote. And then one day we could live anywhere in the world. And it didn't exactly play out that way, but it kind of did in a way because I do think that my YouTube channel started around me talking about learning how to code. And then that's kind of helped us afford

being able to travel because it does kind of fund that a bit. But it is a bit of a weird life to live, I guess, when you try to do it. There are a few things that we kind of

you know, did not intentionally, but it kind of worked out that way with the way that we educate our children. You know, they were at school age during COVID. So we had either the choice of like, we start them in school and they go to school on a tablet or my wife at that time, she had a friend that was a close family friend that had two kids the same age. And they were like,

Maybe we just start like our own little homeschool with just our kids. We, you know, at that point it was social distancing and we, like we knew that they were being good about following the rules and we were too. And we were like, all right, we'll just do this. And they converted their basement into a preschool, her, her,

My wife's friend's husband was in construction and he built a whole, like it looked like a legit preschool. It even had like the floors that put the specs just like the floor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fall. They don't get hurt. Yeah. It was like a little puzzle piece, like borders. So you can like clamp them together.

If I could find pictures, it would be great because if you'd see it, you'd be like, man, that does look just like a preschool. So that kind of set us up for homeschooling, and then we just kind of kept doing it. Even though after COVID, we could have put them in school. My daughter wanted to go to school for a bit, so we let her do it. And after a few – it was about a couple months. She was just like, I don't like it. It's –

it's not like how we learn at home and we just sit at the chair all day. It is like, all right, well you got to try it. And then we just kept homeschooling and homeschooling has been like, it's really hard to travel with children and like work out the education aspect of it. And like, I can't take too much credit for that because my wife really does do a lot of that part. Um, you know, I, I, I do my best to help where I can and, and you know, everything is a learning experience, especially when you travel, you have a lot of like,

real world experience that you can't really get in school. Like my kids have been to anchor watt in Cambodia, which is, you know, like 2000 year old temples and they're learning about all kinds of ancient history and stuff like that. That's like really cool. And you know, they've been to London and they've gotten to see like big Ben and,

and the Royal Palace, and Buckingham, and all of this stuff where that's definitely more geography and history that we're teaching them, but we make sure to also teach them reading and math as part of stuff that we do at home because we feel like as long as they got reading and math down, that's really like...

That's the bulk of what you need. There's a lot of other stuff. My son loves science. My daughter loves art. So we're always like, how much science can we teach you? How much art can we let you create with? And it's a lot of fun. And we meet traveling families as well. I haven't read that book, but it would be a good one to read for me because...

we have met other families in the process and they refer to themselves as world schoolers. And what they do is they kind of either stay in certain places for a while or they hop around to different locations and they kind of travel in packs and it's, um, it's expats and people from different countries that are living the same lifestyle and they try to stay in the same areas together. So then their kids can socialize because socialization is a big aspect of like traveling with kids to like, I'm not,

my wife and I just, you know, we talk about like, man, this would be so different if we were single, but we, you know, we wouldn't do it any other way now. And it's an experience that my kids will have and remember as they grow up and,

meet people when you say you've been to so many different parts of the world. I didn't get on a plane until I was 22, I think was the first time I got on a plane. And my kids have been to eight or nine different countries now, maybe more. And my daughter is only eight years old. So it's kind of crazy to think that.

Yeah, I mean, that's like you want every generation wants the subsequent like their kids to be better off and more worldly and more capable, more confident in navigating the world. And, you know, I'm like right there with you, like, you know, prioritizing your kids having like a lot of world experience. Like that's one of the things we we you know, we try to save most of our money. But like to the extent that we use money, it's to.

Take them out to have experiences. Like take them to Boston, for example, so they can see like the early colonial days of like the United States and stuff. Or take them out to San Francisco so they can see where they were born and like get a feel for the city and stuff like that. Right? So like little things like that. But I mean the thing you said about getting on a plane at age 22, I would venture to say like many Americans –

air travel is just a routine part of their childhood. Maybe they're traveling for like a soccer competition or something like that. And I think the fact that you didn't ride on a plane until you were 22 kind of speaks to the, you know, relatively like,

hard early life you had. And I want to get into that. And I think now is as good a time as any, because it really informs a lot of who Dorian develops is in my mind. Like my, my, my image of you as someone who your mother immigrated from Cuba to the United States, Cuba, of course, famously,

had a collapse. If you watch the Godfather part two, very dramatic retelling of what happened. Uh, but basically that country went to hell, right? And, uh, a lot of people from Cuba got on ships and traveled to Florida and settled this area called little Havana. And it's, and that's where you grew up, right? Like, yeah.

Can you talk about your early years? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so there was two big times in Cuban history when like basically, you know, Cubans just left in mass exodus. And like my, my mom was from the first time back in the, in the sixties cause my mom is older and she had me at an older age and yeah, pretty much the whole family had to come. And I've heard the stories, um, you know, as, as I was a kid where they were given like one personal item and told to, to leave, um,

And there was a lot of my family that came from Cuba. We still have a small family. It's weird because my mom, my grandmother, my uncle, and my grandfather, who I don't know but was alive when they came from Cuba, were kind of like the outcasts.

of the, the whole family. And even though there was a larger family, they didn't really talk to us unless like someone had, had died. Um, and then we get called for a funeral. And then, um, it mostly because like my grandfather, I guess, wasn't the, the best individual. And again, I didn't meet him. He was dead before I was born, but yeah, I, um, you know, they, they lived in Miami for a while. My mom actually came, um,

from Cuba to Miami. And then she went to Vegas and she came back to Miami when she was pregnant with me. She was living a very crazy life in Las Vegas. I won't get into too much details about that, but I know some of that history and I haven't really talked too much about like my mom's like lifestyle. But when she came back to Miami to have me because my grandmother was there, my uncle was there, it gave her like some better stability than what she had going on. She was still struggling with a lot of

Just, you know, addiction. And like she came from Vegas when she found out that I was I was going to be born because she was three months pregnant. She had been partying, doing like cocaine and freebasing and drinking and then found out she was pregnant with me and was like, oh, I got to go get pregnant.

to see if he's going to be okay. And then when she got positive results that I was healthy, she made a big decision, which, you know, I give her props, even though her and I don't, don't have like the best relationship. That was a big thing for her to do come to Miami and then eventually have me. But you know, those, those demons stick around. And my, my mom was still like a heavy drinker when I was a kid. And she still kind of

She still struggled with her own problems, which wasn't good for me growing up. Luckily, I had a bit of stability with my grandmother and my uncle being positive role models in my life. And then...

but it wasn't enough, you know? Um, also like the, the area that I was in, if anyone's familiar with little Havana or Alapata, I kind of lived on, on the, on the line between little Havana and Alapata. They're both pretty, pretty bad neighborhoods. Although Alapata is getting like gentrified now and it's become like the art district. It's still, uh, at the time when I was there, it was just like Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans. And it was like the nineties and, you know, Latin Kings and, and the,

the disciples and gangs were just like a big thing in the nineties there in Miami. And it was a really rough neighborhood. And I went to a school in little Havana that was, you know, even for a middle school, it was rough. Um,

I was kind of like a crappy kid for the most part. I hate to say that because you want to be like, no, kids are good. But I had a lot of bad influences and I let them get the best of me. And I wanted to do bad stuff because I thought it was cool. And I was probably lashing out as a kid trying to get attention that I wasn't getting. And eventually I became a teenager who then became a

a criminal. All right. I, uh, uh, by the time I was 16, just about to turn 17, I had already been arrested four times. Um, you know, different things like, uh,

assault and battery disorderly conduct, uh, grant the photo possession would intend to distribute. And like, like I was really just headed down a bad path. And, um, I did make it into high school and I was there for about three months before I dropped out at ninth grade. Um, I was in a school at Miami senior high, which is a really, you know, everybody knows about Miami high in Miami. And I wasn't technically supposed to be there. Like I said, I lived on the cusp of

of, um, of little Havana and Alapata, but I was worked into going to Miami high. And then when I got kicked out of there for, for fighting and different reasons, uh, I got sent to the school that I was supposed to go to, which was, uh, Miami Jackson, which, um, is a really rough school. Like that school had bars that faced, uh,

inward with motor grease on it to like prevent people from climbing out to skip, skip school and stuff like that. Like it was, it was, and then I was just like, you know what? School's not for me at that time. I was working like, gosh, I think I was working like a bus boy job. Um, cause I always kind of, kind of had jobs even though I did other dumb stuff. And yeah, eventually I was just like, I'm not going to do that anymore. And

dropped out real young, kept getting in trouble. And then my mom was like, you know, we're, we're out of here. Um, she always talked about going back to Vegas my whole childhood. And it was just like, uh, you know, most of the time it's just kind of like crazy drunk talk. And then one day we just, we did it. She had a, like a,

her tax return saved up and, and like, it was, I don't know, like looking back now, I think it's like crazy. Cause she had like 3000 bucks, which I realized is not a lot of money now. Um, and yeah, we drove to Vegas and then, uh, you know, I'd lived there since I was 17 till, um, 33. So I felt like I was born and raised in Miami, but then I kind of grew up in Vegas. So, um,

Yeah. I felt long-winded. I hope I answered the question. No, dude. Don't worry about being long-winded. I mean, just that portrait of young Dorian being arrested repeatedly and lashing out, I think a lot of people can relate to that. I've had lots of people on the podcast who had relatively rough upbringings, but a lot of that was...

Kind of like they did it to themselves, like in terms of like maybe they didn't have circumstances as dire as yours where they're literally greasing the bars on the school to keep people from climbing over and skipping school. I mean, like what kind of...

Crazy environment is that to like, what does that signal to kids? Like, we don't trust you to like be responsible adults. We're going to literally trap you in here as though this were a prison and you're going to be here for like eight hours a day. Like it doesn't jive with me as an educator. Like I'm trying to figure out like the decision process. Um, I, yeah. So, um, so yeah, you're in Vegas, uh, kind of like a clean break. You probably separated from a lot of like friends that were like bad influences and stuff like that.

Yeah, but old habits die hard. Kind of similar to my mom having struggles of leaving Vegas, going to Miami for a better life, but still battling those demons that she had. I guess, weirdly enough, it's kind of like I kind of did the same thing when we went to Vegas.

I didn't want to go to Vegas, even though I was coming off my last arrest and my mom was able to work something out with my probation officer where she got my probation cut early. And the last arrest that I had was a big one. It was possession with intent to distribute. And it was for marijuana, but it was a large amount of marijuana that we were caught with. And she...

Basically, I took that to court. It cost her money. It cost me a little bit of money because like I said, I was working and we kind of beat that case to where I got it reduced and I was on probation. And part of my probation was like, you can't leave your home city and move across the country. But my mom was able to talk it out with the PO and tell him like, hey,

I'm going to move him to Las Vegas and I want to get him out of here because he's going to get in trouble. And he was like, all right, you get there and you send me a postcard. You contact me when you get there and I'll drop it. But if anything happens, then he's looking at being in a lot of trouble. And that kind of worked out that way. But I didn't want to be there. I was reluctant to go. I...

I loved my hometown Miami even though my life was crap at the time. I didn't see that. That was where I grew up. That was where my friends were. So when we went to Vegas, like I said, my mom had a small amount of money and she prepaid for an apartment. And that apartment was like a three-month lease or a mini lease that they just kind of took the cash up front. And when that money ran out, I wasn't trying to get a job. I wasn't trying to work. I wasn't really happy to be there.

So it kind of put us into some struggles and my, my mom was having a hard time getting a job and I wasn't working. And then we eventually like got to the point where, you know, we slept in our car for a couple of days and then I had made friends with a few people that eventually let us crash at their house. And I remember my mom and I like sleeping on their floor to then like renting a room from somebody to then eventually like I started working and kind of trying to get on, like my mom started working too and we kind of started getting on our feet and we were

you know, rented a room for someone. Then eventually we rented from a, like a weekly apartment that would charge you by the week. And then we eventually got our own apartment with that kind of took some time. But those first, that first year or so, man, it was still like, even after that, I would say up until like,

21 or so, I kind of got away from all the bad people I was hanging out with in Vegas. I still like trouble finds trouble. And like the friends I started making, the people that let us like sleep on their floor and rent a room from them were still not the best people. And there, you know, there was still like a lot of drug use going on and a lot of,

just bad stuff that could have led me down the same path I was already on in Miami. But luckily, you know, I just by, by luck, I didn't get pulled over at the wrong time or I didn't do anything bad enough that would have got me arrested again. Because at that point now I'm an adult and things would have been more serious. And, and, you know, eventually I was just like,

I don't know. I was hanging out with like not the best people and, and I was working a job and I started like getting closer to 21 and I'm like, man, what am I doing? Like, like what am I doing with my life? Like I'm kind of hanging out with people that aren't doing much and I'm trying to work. I'm trying to like save money and I'm trying to like be a little bit better. And you know, I just like, I can't, I can't really do this anymore. So I started like distancing myself from friends and by doing that, I kind of, I feel like I just talked about this in a video, but I, I kind of, uh,

I'm going to work two jobs. I ended up working 16-hour days for three months. But that was actually really good because it distanced me from some of those friends that I would see after work. And I consumed myself with work, which was waiting tables.

at the time and running food in the kitchen. And then eventually that led to a valet parking job in my early twenties, which I did that for a while. I was a valet bellman at a small boutique hotel as they called it. And then eventually I, you know, made different friends, started working for a valet agency. Time went on. I still struggled with drinking and smoking weed like that. That just kind of followed me my whole life. But I stayed away from like doing a lot of the hard drugs that I was like

in when I was younger, like in Miami and those first couple of years in Vegas and

And then eventually I kind of grew up, met a girl. We started dating and in my late 20s decided to get married. By that point I was working a decent restaurant job that made decent money. And my wife was a blackjack dealer and she made good money. And anyone who's lived in Vegas knows that people make careers out of those hospitality jobs. And we were able to kind of get married and buy a house together.

fairly young, you know, just good timing. Um, the market was just starting to bounce back. We bought a foreclosure. We had just got our credit just enough to get an FHA loan and, uh, you know, started growing up. But, um, at that point we hadn't even had kids yet. Um,

And I guess I can get into like, that's when eventually we started talking about having kids. And then, you know, one thing led to another and we, we end up getting pregnant with our, our first child. And that's when I started looking into tech jobs and thinking about maybe changing careers. Cause I was getting sick of parking cars and not that it's a bad job, but I didn't want my,

my wife having to be a blackjack dealer and me be a parking cars at a strip club as a, as our, our life goals, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I think I, you know, I spoke probably for a lot of people. I mean, there are definitely plenty of jobs in hospitality that are like, you know, seen as like terminal jobs in the sense that like, okay, I've made it. I'm running an entire, you know, hotel, right? Or I'm a chef at like this really good restaurant or something like that. But there's also a lot of...

that are seen as kind of like steps towards something better, right? And I would imagine, you know, being a valet car parker or even a bellman, which is that like a higher rank than like the...

A bellman is just who carries your bags. There's bellman, doorman. So doorman stand at the door and get your door, get you cabs, help you with things that you might need at the door. Then there's the bellman. That's the guys that deal with your luggage, take it to your room, take it from your car, and then valet. The hotel that I worked at was kind of like you were valet bellman, so you kind of did it both.

And, um, you know, anyone who knows about like Vegas jobs, like man, like being a valet attendant in Vegas, like at one point I think it's gotten bad now with Uber and like, there's just been a lot of change in Vegas since, but like at the time it was a, it was a decent job to have, like you made good tip money. And I did have a chance to eventually go into a management role and, um, at my valet Bellman job that I worked at, uh, I eventually became like the bell captain, which is the, like

basically the manager for the Valley and Bellman. And, um, and I, man, I had that job when I was like, I was too young to have that job. Um, I was probably like 22 or 23 at that time. And, um, I hated it. It was my first taste of management. And I realized that that wasn't really, uh,

Something that I enjoyed doing. I was younger than everyone else there. They gave me the job because I had been working there longer than some people. And then the people that had seniority on me didn't want the job.

And I kind of understand why now because I didn't know any better. And they offered it to me and it was kind of like, hey, you take it now or we're going to put out a job rec for it and start interviewing people outside of the hotel. And I was just like, all right, I'll take it. I'll take it. And then I got a taste for what it's like to have to manage people and everything.

You know, there's a bit of babysitting involved and there's like listening to people's complaints and then having to deal with people taking time off or just calling in sick. And then you got to deal with getting shifts covered. And after I did that, I was like, I am never doing a management job again. I just...

I was like, why did I take on more responsibility for less money? Or essentially that's what you do in some of those jobs because like, you know, you can be a hotel or you can be a hotel manager, but the guy parking cars could, a lot of the times, you know, back then we're, we're making just as much money as the managers, right?

So it's just like, why do so much extra work? Same thing in restaurants, right? I worked at a very high-end steakhouse in Vegas. And the managers there were people who were waiters before and got moved into management positions. But a lot of the waiters, especially the ones that had the good sections and the good shifts, they would make a lot of money, more than the managers would. And they would work four to six hours, and the managers would work like 10 hours. And it was just...

It sounds like the lazy way to do it, but I was just like, I'd rather have more free time and not have to work as hard and maybe not have a career out of this. But I'm happy with my tip money and working four to six hours would sound better than working 10 for the same amount. Yeah. And one of the things that strikes me from watching a lot of your videos and hearing you talk about the nature of work.

which, you know, working as a developer is similar. Like, you can be an individual contributor. You can just say, okay, I'm checking in. Here's my work to be done. I'm going to be coding all day. I'll go to some meetings. And then I'm going to go home, right? But the manager has to, like, figure out how to coordinate. And they're probably also having to code and, like, you know, fix other people's code and do other stuff on top of just, you know, their own responsibility. So there's almost like this kind of like,

Fosse and Bargain, you can either let people promote you to a manager, which sooner or later, if you're doing a good job, somebody will probably approach you and be like, hey, you should be the manager. You can either take that management or you can become...

to the management of whoever's foolish enough to take that job. So it's kind of like, do I want a bad manager or am I willing to become a manager so I don't have to deal with a bad manager? But I imagine a lot of the people who become managers, they're like...

Not the kind of people you want to give power to, and now you're reporting to somebody who's pulling rank on you and stuff, right? Yeah. Did that happen a lot? No, it does. It definitely does happen. For the most part, I think that some people that do become managers, I think there's a bit of that stability aspect. I know people, at least in the waiting world, the restaurant world, it comes with...

You can't wait tables forever, although there are people that do. I met 60-year-old waiters that have been waiters their whole lives and they were career waiters. And I think eventually people move into those management positions because there is more room for growth and to make it a career because many times you'll become a supervisor, like a wait staff supervisor, and then you move into a management role.

role. And then you move into like a higher management role. And then eventually like you become the general manager at the steakhouse that I worked at. There's a real like Cinderella story of the, um, the person who was the president of the company and he started as a dishwasher, uh,

And just years and years and years of working for that company, he eventually – from dishwasher to – we didn't do Busboys. Sorry, I don't know if I cut out there. My phone's starting. Yeah, it's fine. We didn't do Busboys, but it was waiter teams. But he eventually started as the food runner.

And because there was a back waiter and a front waiter, and then he moved up to a waiter and then he moved up to like another position and another position. And then eventually he was a general manager. And then next thing you know, he's in charge of 10 restaurants and he's like the highest guy on the, on, on, on the list. And, uh, you know, when you hear stuff like that, like that really is possible. And that was something that my mom knew about Vegas that sounded like,

It didn't sound real when she would tell me when I was younger and it was just like, yeah, whatever. You're not going to go to Vegas and have no high school diploma, no kind of experience doing any real jobs and just become a waiter and then be set for life. But there was some of that to it. Of course, you still had to work hard and you still had to do a good job, which eventually gets you promoted. I have a good friend of mine now who...

who, you know, he was fairly degenerate-like like I was, maybe not as bad as I was, but I met him when we first moved to Vegas, and he's a good buddy of mine. I still talk to him. He was at my wedding, but he has now moved his way up to, I want to say he's like assistant general manager of the Palms Resort, which is kind of a big deal, and he started off same thing. He was parking cars. I got him some of his first jobs

and he's moved his way up the ranks and now he's got a good title and eventually he'll become the general manager and he could continue to go up and he's also a high school dropout. So there is potential there, but when you don't have a lot going for you, those are your best case scenarios and a lot of people don't end up

like in a spot like that. But yeah, for me, it was just like, I don't know. I just didn't like the extra responsibility. You mentioned that with like software and it's true. And there's kind of like a meme where people will tell you like the longer you work as a programmer, the less code you write. And it does seem like when you have more experience, you do become more

Eventually, you'll start mentoring some newer developers, and you might take a junior developer under your wing. Then that's a little more responsibility where you're watching over someone else's code, and you're trying to help them write their code, which will cut into some of your time. Then you'll start getting more meetings because there's more higher-level decisions that need to be made that don't really require you just...

sitting there writing code. You need to start talking about architectural decisions. You need to be parts of hiring processes because you have more experience and you understand the code base better and you know the process is better. So middle management and upper management will want your input on a lot more things. And then eventually, like you said, you do kind of go into, uh,

potentially a manager role or like a tech lead role where you become the go-to guy for certain things. And then next thing you know, you're, you're in way more meetings and you're like writing code very little. And it's like, Hey, I'd like, I started this to write code and that's like what I enjoyed. And now I'm just kind of managing people and, and I hardly ever get to write code. And when I do, I get interrupted. Yeah. Yeah. Manage your mind versus, you know, uh, uh,

creator mind, I guess. I can't remember the exact terms. But basically, it's two completely different types of work. And if you want to be able to succeed, you have to figure out a way to compartmentalize the two. I'll get a little bit autobiographical here and say that I only check my email two or three times a week because that's manager mind stuff. And then when I do, I try to hit inbox zero. But I can't be having notifications. You should go to the email. Like,

It just pulls me out of what I'm actually trying to do, which might be like, you know,

watching as many Dorian develops videos as possible and, and researching and reading your blog and all that stuff. And then suddenly like, like I don't want to, like I have zero notifications on my phone. Even if people call me, I don't get a notification. I just call people back. And I know that's kind of like, Oh, that's such an egotistical thing. Like you'll, you'll, you'll talk to them. They won't be able to talk to you, you know, but like it works for me. Uh, one thing I want to emphasize though is like you are,

a high school dropout, right? Like you dropped out in ninth grade. Uh, people who've listened to the podcast may know this about me, but I dropped out in 10th grade. I spent a year living in my car. Um, just eventually, you know, made enough money working at grocery stores and stuff like that to basically be able to pay, uh,

one of my friends so I could sleep on his floor. Um, and just gradually kind of worked from there and, you know, got the apartment and eventually was able to pay a thousand dollars a semester to go to a state unit, uh, a state university in the middle of Oklahoma that people probably haven't heard of. Uh, but it was, it was a pretty good school in, you know,

1999, 2000. Uh, and, and it was just extremely inexpensive. And I, from there I, you know, went to China and pursued a lot of opportunity. But, um, I want to emphasize that like, just because you had success as a dropout, just because I've had success as a dropout, just because your friend had success as a dropout and has been able to climb, uh, the ranks at the Palm, uh, and probably has a, an illustrious career ahead of him.

For those listening, I hope you all agree with the sentiment. Mr. T says, don't be a fool. Stay in school. And like, I just want to emphasize that. Like, please don't think like if you're in high school listening to this, don't think like, Oh, you're like, they're giving me permission to follow my dreams and drop out of school. I do strongly recommend finishing school. I also strongly recommend going to college. So just because Dorian didn't go, I did go to college. I even got a graduate degree. Um,

Please, your mileage may vary, and we're not advocating anybody drop out of school. I just want to say that, again, just to make sure people don't get the wrong impression from us. So with that...

You're working as a valet. You have this wife who's working as a blackjack dealer. Both are good, stable jobs in Las Vegas. And it may sound weird, but Las Vegas is a weird place. It's a place in the desert that shouldn't exist.

They've done all kinds of ingenious stuff with water recycling and things like that to make the city viable. They have figured out all kinds of crazy attractions, like this big ball thing that has images on it, like these amazing fountain shows. You can just walk around the Las Vegas Strip and just see an incredibly ornate and incredibly garish architecture. Everything is crazy and amped up to 11 in Las Vegas. If you haven't visited Las Vegas...

I don't gamble, and I strongly advocate that people don't gamble, but...

I mean, these are like temples of vice, basically. It's just like a monument to human degeneracy. But it's very interesting. And there's some really cool stuff in Vegas, too. I went to the Pinball Hall of Fame. Have you ever been over there? Yeah. I actually used to live on Tropicana. So I would drive past it when they first opened it up. I never actually set foot in there, but I know enough of it, and I've seen enough pictures. I'm familiar with it, and it's actually supposed to be really cool.

It's so cool. So like they, uh, the, the owner takes like all the proceeds every year. Not, I'm not sure if it's all of it, but like millions of dollars and donate some to charity. And it's basically, you walk in and you get some quarters and it's reasonable. You spend like 50 cents to play pinball and stuff. Like it's not like some crazy, like get a card. So it confuses you as to how much you're spending and use credits and like walk around and like get a bunch of tickets. No, it's like all retro pinball machines. There are a few arcade machines there as well. But if you're in Vegas, definitely hit up the pinball hall of fame.

But it's a very cool city. My brother lived there for a while. So we did go out there quite a bit. And yeah, it's just unlike any other city I've ever been to. I mean, it might be the only city that's like that in the Western world. You might say like Macau or something in the Eastern world or UAE. I'm not sure what other places would be similar to that, kind of like desert paradise, so to speak. But yeah.

That's the glitzy, touristy perspective of Vegas. What was it actually like being a working class hospitality worker?

So it's, it's pretty funny, right? Because you, you think of Vegas and a lot of people will be like, Oh, I couldn't live there, man. It'd be too crazy. And, and there's some truth to that. Like there's, there's like, it's a very real thing when you, when you meet friends who are, you know, addicted to gambling or, you know, alcohol, because it's just a 24 hour city. You can, you can get a drink at six in the morning. Like it's, it's like, like there, there is no limit to how, how, how bad you can let it get. But the,

I remember when I like very early when I first moved there, like we were walking into a grocery store cause there's slot machines in grocery stores. Like you walk into Albertsons and there's a gambling section. And I remember hearing someone just kind of say out loud, like,

how am i supposed to buy groceries now and i was like whoa that's crazy you came in here with grocery money and you put it in the machine and now you're you don't have groceries like that's the the reality it's hardcore vegas could be if you live there but for most people i will say that there's a lot of us that just kind of live regular lives right but since if you work in the the industry right if you work in the nightclubs if you work in the hotels

you kind of do everything like on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, right? Like industry night is usually like, like Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, because that's when most people would have their days off because most people worked on the weekends because most people work at the hotels. There are some corporate jobs there. And one of my first developer jobs was for Caesar's entertainment, which is like Caesar's palace and all of the different hotels that they own. And like, I worked a nine to five when I got that job and it was in the

corporate office. But for the most part, the majority of people that live in Vegas work in the industry. But, you know, there are some things that do get somewhat like normalized. Like, you know, it's not rare for you to go out to like a bar and put money in a machine because they're just the bars are all lined up with video poker machines and ways to gamble or like go bet on sporting events because it's just accessible to you everywhere. We're like,

now I remember when I first moved out of Vegas, there was like some UFC fights and I was like, Oh man, I wish I could bet on this fight. And I'm calling my buddy, like, like, like if he was a bookie and I'm like, Hey man, go put some money on this fight for me. And I was just like, what am I doing? You know? But it's just like something that just comes very normalized. Yeah. Like the act of gambling, which,

Gambling is probably like I've seen, you know, a lot of drug addiction, a lot of addiction to other bad things. But gambling is the thing that is just probably the most ruinous of all because it destroys entire families like financially. And I don't know if you want to talk about that, if you got any more stories. So personally, I luckily have never gotten like.

gambling was just something that I mean, I've lost some money, you know, but I've never gotten into like financial troubles because of it. It's always been like a few hundred bucks here or some extra money that I had that I probably shouldn't have gambled. And I always have the same feeling afterwards. It's that why did I do that? I lost a hundred bucks. I lost 200 bucks. I could have bought this thing that I wanted to buy that I've been saying I can't afford that. But then I go and gamble this away and

And it always had, like, I never, like, there was only a couple times ever where I intentionally went out of my way to go gamble. But since it's just everywhere, anywhere you go, if you go out to go bowling, you walk through a casino. So then you end up like, all right, I'll play a little blackjack. I'll play some craps. And then it's like, ah, crap. Yeah.

Yeah. Pun intended. Or unintended. But yeah, you know, like one birthday, I was just like, oh, I'm going to have some fun. And then I gambled away like 500 bucks. And I remember just being like, oh, that was so stupid. I really could have used that money. And I've known people that...

you know, friends of friends, you know, acquaintances where you hear those stories where it's just like, yeah, they, they had to leave because they couldn't continue living here because they just had such a bad gambling problem. And then there's different types of jobs that you'll see like, uh,

Like bartenders, they tend to really – it's probably one of the hardest jobs to have, especially if you work as a bartender in a bar that has gambling because there's a very common thing for you to like clock out of your shift and then walk around to the other side of the bar, sit down, order a drink, and start gambling like right then and there.

Also, a lot of bartenders will also drink with their customers. At the big hotels, you won't see that, but you'll see that more in smaller little bars, which it's just so weird because thinking about it, I'm like, gosh, that really isn't normal, but it just becomes kind of normal in Vegas. It becomes normalized just by virtue of it being pervasive everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

You wouldn't walk like... There have been lots of studies of human beings. You're walking through a parking lot and you've got some trash in your hand and you're like, oh, there's a trash can over there or I need to find a trash can for this and you see a big pile of trash

And like human beings, like at least according to like, you know, they always do these psychological studies with like a bunch of university students and stuff, whoever they have on hand. And it's debatable whether these results are reproducible, but there are lots of studies I think that have shown that like if people see a bunch of trash lying around, they'll be less inclined to go find a trash can somewhere and just to throw their trash onto the pile of existing trash. And like little things like that, when you're constantly, you know, swimming through slot machines and things like that that are designed to like,

Take your money, basically, and give you... It's always like a net zero or a net negative expected value whenever you're gambling, basically. The only skill-intensive games in Vegas, like poker and blackjack, I guess, if you use... There are some great videos. I'll share a video about advantage games.

or whatever. But keep in mind, I have never gambled. I've never gambled with my money and I'm too scared to even try it because I'm somewhat compulsive and I'm deathly afraid that next thing you know, I'm running some sort of crypto scam or something like that to try to get money so that I can gamble more. Because it seems like a lot of scammers and a lot of things, it goes back to they got addicted to gambling and that's why they need these incredible amounts of money to

to be able to survive because they're just hemorrhaging money everywhere they go because they're like, you know, degenerately betting on sports. And I've watched some crazy movies about this. You know, Casino, of course, Martin Scorsese movie. There's like a TV series called Lucky from like 2010 or something. It was only like 13 episodes. You can find it on YouTube, but it's about like this gambling addict that lives in...

Las Vegas and it started starring the guy from Sex and the City, the tall guy, Aiden, the Aiden character from Sex and the City. My wife watched that show when she was in college, so that's how I know that. But I don't want you to think I'm like unwinding at the end of the day and watching Sex and the City. It's not my cup of tea. But that guy, he's like a World Series of Poker champion and stuff and he proceeds to just gamble around.

like destroy his life over and over again. Well, you know, like, like, and I'm not, obviously that's a work of fiction, but there are plenty of works of, you know, like essays and stuff about like the corrosive,

effect of gambling. And yet, you know, people are going to gamble, right? Like that's, that's just how it is. And the fact that there's like this legally sanctioned place where it can be regulated, uh, you know, some people may argue that's a good thing. Uh, but, but you were like right there in the belly of the beast and seeing bartenders who were, you know, clocking out and going straight to the video poker and stuff like that. Um, and then you ultimately worked for one of the biggest, you know, gambling conglomerates, I guess, as a software engineer, uh,

Can you talk about like, was that one of your first? Okay. That was my first job. Yeah. As a dad. Well, let's, let's talk. I want to talk about your learn to code journey and I don't want people to think like, Oh, you know, Quincy's just going to spend the entire podcast, like expounding upon vice and how gambling is bad and things like that. Like, like, uh, you do you, but like,

it's not a net positive expected value. Like the house always wins, right? Like otherwise there wouldn't be these giant buildings that cost millions and millions of dollars to build. Like they were built for a reason. It's a business for a reason. It's not like a charity. It's not like you're going to a food bank and getting free money or something. Right. Um, like they, and, and it is,

studied, you know, they've got PhDs in, you know, human behavior, like basically figuring out more ways that they can get you in a Skinner box and like part you with, with your money. Right. Uh, and they've got financial engineers figuring out new legal ways that they can get you to like sign over more and more of your future, uh, and go further into debt. And yeah, like it's, it's terrifying that this stuff exists, but it exists. Um,

But what we're here to talk about is your journey into coding. And not every single job you've done has been at a casino company. You've done a lot of other work and stuff like that. But because you were in Vegas and those were the employers there, let's talk about your journey. Sorry, I'm really trying to tee this up for you.

Yeah, no worries. Okay, so my learn-to-code journey was interesting. So it didn't start with coding, actually. It started with me trying to get into networking. The

What happened was my wife had a friend who came to visit for DEF CON, which if you're familiar with DEF CON, they actually hosted DEF CON at the hotel that I worked at as a valet bellman from the inception of DEF CON up until they moved to the Rio where they first went to. I don't know where they're holding it now. But DEF CON is this hacker convention.

And they come in there and they rent the place out and they hack. They try to break in the stuff. I remember when I worked at that hotel, they would hack the TV system and they would hack everything. And it was just like there was this one rule that it was just like you are not allowed to hack our financial stuff. You can't hack our actual computer system. But other than that, they allowed them free reign.

And one year there was actually... Sorry, one famous thing about DEF CON, if you want to go to DEF CON, if you can figure out how to sneak into the event or print, fabricate something, they have really good security, as you can imagine. If you can figure out a way to get into the event without paying, they will just let you in.

But you have to disclose how you got in so that they can patch that to other people. So next year, somebody will have to find some new vulnerability to attack, right? That's fun. That's fun. Yeah. I would watch what they did. It's funny because from the time that I was familiar with what DEF CON was because I worked the event or I worked at the hotel that held the event to the time that I actually...

decided to learn something about software was like, I hadn't been at that hotel for a long time. And I only knew of DEF CON because I had worked it. And then my wife's friend who came to visit was there visiting for it. I'm like, oh, I remember DEF CON. And they have a game they call Spot the Fed because they have actual FBI goes there

to kind of like see what they're talking about and they're undercover for the most part. So they'll play this game called spot the fed, where if you're able to spot out the FBI agent or guess who might be an FBI agent, like they give away prizes and stuff like that. Like one year I wasn't working there, but I heard from security, they actually busted this like big hacker who was, uh,

there for the event and he had hacked into some banking systems and in europe and like they the fbi busted him at defcon um so it's just it's wild so my my my wife's friend is um is visiting for defcon he's not a hacker but he goes there to party with all his buddies that all work

In some form of hacking. And he kept saying, man, you got to learn Linux. Which is like, looking back now, that is the most vague thing that you can tell someone. While you could tell someone, hey, yeah, learn Linux. When you actually start learning Linux, you're like, the operating system? What do you mean learn Linux? Yeah.

But that's the advice he gave me because all of his friends from DEF CON, they had some knowledge of Linux. And he just, I guess from that secondhand information, he's like, I just keep hearing them say that they know Linux, so you should learn Linux.

which that eventually led me down like this rabbit hole of like, let me look into this stuff. And then I had another friend who was actually, he, he worked cybersecurity and he, um, he had a background in that. He was ex military and he worked for the department of energy. And he's the one that kind of gave me a little bit better of a roadmap. And he was like, you need to go get your comp T asserts. He's like, if you want to like work your way into this stuff, you need to start with the a plus, get your net plus and get your security plus. And then like,

then you can kind of like figure out where you're going to go from there. So I end up starting to study for the A plus and I, I, I study, I brained them for like, gosh, like six months. I overstudied. I, I, like I passed, I was worried because it costs like 250 bucks per test. And the CompTIA is like two tests. So it would have been like close to like $500. It might, it might've been a little less than that, but

I didn't want to fail it. So I'm, I got, I'm, I'm at the strip club where I park cars. And at this point in time, I'm like, I'm watching videos. I have a flashcards of the questions that I might get asked. And I'm like studying flashcards in between cars that I'm parking. And, um,

And I eventually get my CompTIA Plus and then I start looking for, like, I try to start looking for jobs in the process of me going and starting to learn my Net Plus for the next cert. And then I start, like, going down the rabbit hole of, like, possibly learning Cisco certifications and the CCNA and, like, the different certs that could eventually get me to, like, a network engineer job eventually.

And at this point, I'm just getting really bored of it. I start studying IP addresses and subnet mask and how different packets are transferred over the internet. And I'm just like, this is so boring. And I'm just studying the pass or test, which nobody really likes to. Maybe there are some people out there that might enjoy that, but studying the pass or test is not fun. Andrew Brown on the FreeCodeCamp channel, he's passed more than 50...

certification exams. He's like a former CTO who just like loves taking tests. And if you, if you're familiar with the free cocaine YouTube channel, you'll see like every month or two, we'll have a new Andrew Brown course where he's got like a comprehensive, like 10, 15 hour video that basically teaches you everything you need to know to pass the

X, Y, Z cert. Now, I don't know if he has them for like, we, I think we do maybe have some CompTIA specific ones, but the CompTIA is like a huge certification with huge corpus of knowledge that you need to learn. Uh, whereas he, he most, uh, Andrew Brown mostly covers like, uh,

focused on like, you know, Azure cloud certifications or AWS cloud certification. Sorry, I didn't mean to disrupt your flow, but I did want to point out there's at least one human being on earth who really likes taking tests and earning certifications. He's got to catch them all.

He's got to be like the only one. Actually, my brother-in-law, who's an electrician, he's actually a licensed master electrician in like almost 40 states. And he's going for every state. That's crazy. Why? So there's like – he's able to like get work –

by basically being the licensed electrician on staff. So there's like companies that will pay him to, to consult for them basically because they need to have a licensed electrician on staff. Um,

And, um, so he, he's, it's like a whole side hustle. I don't, I don't know how much of a gray area it is. So I don't want to like let out too much, but he, uh, he's been doing it for a while and it's like his retirement plan. And even my, so that, you know, my wife's family, they come from a long line of electricians. Like, uh, their dad was an electrician. That's how they became electricians. So, um,

Her dad has even completed a few of the certifications to be a master electrician in different states. And I think he's actually on the payroll for a couple of companies that kind of send them some money every month just to be on their list of electricians because they need to have a master electrician and not – it's kind of hard to find master electricians. Yeah.

Yeah. He studies certs all the time and he's familiar with like the process because I was kind of telling him my story a little bit and he was like, oh yeah. He's like, that's kind of how I have to do my tests where you go and you show your ID and they kind of have a camera on you and you have to be at the computer to make sure you're not cheating. And that's how they do it for like the CompTIA certs too. I forget what the, what the name of that company that kind of runs those testing things. It's called CompTIA.

No, but there's like a – is it Pearson Vue? Oh, you're talking about the actual like test proctoring. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think Pearson Vue, Longman, like – There's a few of them. I'm trying to remember some of the other names, but it doesn't matter. But basically there are these companies that do like proctoring, and a lot of those like – the way Free Code Camp is developing proctoring is it's human proctored, but we just have like –

AI watch the video and then flag it for like a human to look like, Oh, it's really weird. But like there, there've been a lot of, uh, just total side note. There've been a lot of people on like Reddit on Twitter were like, I got failed for this exam and I did not cheat. Like why did it, why, why did they, you know, fail me on this exam? Now I'm going to retake it. It's humiliating. And like, I spent,

I spent all this time, I spent all this money, and they think I cheated. But I didn't actually cheat. I was just like a false positive in their system. And I will say that Free Code Camp, when we roll out those kinds of exams, which we're going to announce probably around our 10th birthday, which might have actually already passed by the time this goes live. But I want to emphasize there will always be a human in the loop. And yeah, since these certifications are free, you don't lose any money even if you did get...

If we did get a false positive, but we should never get a false positive because we're going to err on the side of caution. Anyway. Nice. So, sorry. No. Yeah. There's a huge industry of professional kind of like test proctoring. So you can sit on your computer. You don't have to report to a test center like you used to have to. A lot of this was accelerated by COVID. Yeah. Yeah. But...

Yeah. Back to your story. Sorry. Oh, yeah. You're good. I can't help myself. I feel like I could easily digress too because I'm like, oh, he does a lot of continuous education where he has it like – as he's on his phone watching videos, occasionally it will ask him for a picture just to show that he's actually there and made me think of like the different process that they try to do for like these remote learning platforms. To just –

go back to what we were talking about. Prometric is the thing that I couldn't, couldn't say earlier, but, but that's another big company. Sorry. Gotcha. Gotcha. No, no worries. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Um, so yeah, so then I'm just, I find myself, I, if you ever seen the CCNA book for Cisco, it's like this thick. I,

I mean, it's like, and it's like, just for those listening to the audio, it's like your full grip, like your thumb to your, your index finger. If you were to stretch out your hand, it's like, yeah, it's like my personal Instagram, uh, which I don't, I don't share. And I don't think anyone knows. There's actually a picture of when I was studying from like 2016 where I'm like sitting on my hammock and I have that book on my lap and it just, it looks like a phone book and anyone,

Anyone who's not over 35 probably doesn't know what a phone book is anymore. But it's just massive. And I'm watching videos. I'm studying for this thing. And I'm just like...

I don't want to do this anymore. I just started to get super bored of it. And then a buddy of mine that I worked with at the time at the strip club at the Spearmint Rhino, which if you're familiar with Vegas, it's like the most famous strip club in the world. And we're parking cars there. And he's kind of a tech guy. His cousin owned a computer repair company.

you know, uh, to your door kind of service. And, uh, you know, I was trying to get a job with him and, and I had my eight plus and like the only person that called me back was geek squad and, you know, not to down talk. It was like best buys it support. Yes. But at the time, like I'm making really good money working three, four days a week, parking cars and like,

Geek Squad would have been such a downgrade in pay for me that I couldn't, like, it just made no sense for me to take that job. Like I, I could not say like, Oh yeah, I'm going to quit my valet job and go work at Geek Squad even if it was part time, but I couldn't get any work with the A plus. So I was like kind of forced to keep studying and I, I,

I didn't want to do it. And I'm talking to my buddy, who's the tech guy who kind of was, uh, not, not the guy that came from DEF CON, but the guy that I worked with that was just into tech. And he saw me studying for these certs and, and he was just like, why don't you learn how to code, man? He's like, you love it. Like I, you know, me and him were like, we work together almost every day. So he kind of knew my personality. He saw how hard I was studying. He saw me there with flashcards in between like parking cars. And, um, he's like, dude, you'd love it. He's like, I, you know, I,

I've, I've got a, a Udemy course that I've started and this and that. And the whole time I'm like, no, no, I'm going to do this. No, no, I'm going to do this. And then finally, like one day I, I, I,

I'm starting to think like either this is what actually happened or I can't remember now. Cause it was so long ago. He was like, he's like, dude, here's my login information for my Udemy. He's like, you don't have to pay for it. Like it's your Friday, go and just watch a few videos. And it was a Ruby on rails bootcamp on Udemy. Um, and I started with the HTML and CSS stuff on there. And, and that like that, like one thing led to another, um,

And then I got to like the JavaScript portion. I was like, oh, this got, it got too complicated for me, but I liked it. I saw like, I was like, oh, this is, this is actually kind of cool. And then I ended up buying a few other unit V courses. I eventually found free code camp, which became like a, like one of my primary learning resources throughout my, my learning process because you know, it took me like a

almost a year worth of studying, like almost every day of learning how to code to get there. I remember right before the interview for my first dev job, I remember the night before I was doing the whole beginner portion of the JavaScript on FreeCodeCamp, which it's funny talking to you now, but that was in 2017, and I was just...

I just was about to turn 33. My son was born. My daughter was already born because I started learning about the NetPlus and all the CompTIA stuff as my wife was pregnant with our firstborn. And then when I switched over to learning how to code, my next baby was born and we had our first kid that was already like six months old. And it's funny because

As a disclaimer, don't go thinking that having kids is the solution to you getting your life together, but it really made me want to do better. Because now I felt like I had human beings that I needed to take care of and I couldn't keep goofing around. And if it wasn't for my wife getting pregnant and thinking I need to be able to support my family...

I don't think I would have ever gone down the path of trying to learn how to code. So yeah, I could talk a little bit about my actual learning the code process because it wasn't as simple as like, oh, I got a couple Udemy courses and then I did free code camp because it was a big grind.

Um, so when I went after doing like the, the, you know, the Udemy course and then like picking up a couple of different courses, you kind of, anyone who's self taught and has successfully like gotten a job as a developer will know that like early in your learning, um, if you don't have like good mentorship or you don't have like a solid, like, like

Back then it was harder too. There was very little resources that really gave you the path laid out. And I think FreeCodeCamp did a really good job of that. And there was other paid resources that I used, but I refused to pay too much money for anything. So I did do...

team tree house at the time. And I did do like code, code Academy. And I did like other, like, you know, I even tried the Odin project for a little bit and I have videos where I'm like, you know, which one's better Odin project or free code camp. And I think, I think like they're both very good resources. And I often recommend free resources because it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to pay for

like be successful as someone who's learning how to code. And, you know, we, we, we have that idea that if we pay for something, it has more value than something that's free, but there are some amazing free things out there. And I, I usually try to recommend things that are free or affordable. I, I try to stay away from really expensive learning products,

curriculums and programs because I feel that it's not very necessary. So my process took about 10 months. The first three months was really just fumbling around. At that point, I started with that Ruby on Rails course, and then I jumped into PHP at one point. And then I was trying to find the glass slipper. There's another Cinderella reference. But I was trying to find what...

like what I like to learn with. And then, you know, after a little while I started to realize like, Oh, I don't need to find like one thing to learn from because after you do, after you do five HTML courses, you kind of start seeing that they're all really teaching you a lot of the same things. And the same is true for CSS or JavaScript or react. Like, like once you realize that they just keep kind of teaching you a lot of the fundamentals and the basics, and then you can get into more advanced stuff that could teach you new things. Um,

when you start going back and you get into that tutorial hell loop where you're, where you're going back and you're relearning stuff that you've kind of already learned, but you feel that you have to know it better in order for you to move forward and to really understand it. And you don't realize that like the learning actually happens from the building part. And you only see that in hindsight. And I see that now, but eventually I did a bunch of courses. I finally started like building stuff. And then it,

And I started watching YouTubers. There wasn't a lot of YouTubers at the time that kind of talked about this stuff, but a lot of people would say like, Oh, go network, go network, go network. So I found like a meetup in my area and it was crazy because I remember I worked some crazy shifts at the, at the club.

I would work what we called the morning shift, which was you go in at 2 a.m. and you'd either get out early at 10 a.m. or you'd be the late guy that stayed till noon until the day shift guy came in and replaced you. So...

I would on, on Friday nights, I would go in at 2 AM, which was technically Saturday morning. And I would stay there until noon. And then the meetup was like right at noon in downtown, which was fairly close to where the club that I was at, um, where I worked at. So I would just like have a change of clothes and be completely sleep deprived. And every other Saturday there would be a meetup and I would go there and

jacked up on red bull and coffee and like go into these, these, uh, these meetups for coding. And the, the, the one that I would go to often was called demo day. I eventually went to react meetup, which kind of like led me to my first job, but I would go to demo day. And I remember going there the first time and having like my free code camp portfolio or that, that I,

I think you guys still have it, but it's like one of the very first things that you build that it's just like a picture, a blurb, and then like a couple sections. At the time, this was like 2017, so it was a while ago. I know the curriculum's changed a lot and the projects that you guys have have changed a lot. And that's kind of what I show... I got there and the coordinator was like, hey, what are you going to show us today? I'm like, I'm not showing you guys nothing. I am sitting right back here. And he's like, no, it'd be fine. Just...

show us what you'd be working on. And I'm super embarrassed and like, I shouldn't even be here. It's kind of like the way I was thinking, right? Like your first night at fight club, you have to fight. Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly what it felt like. And, uh, and I, you know, I'm, I'm like, all right, I guess so. And it's just like, it's just a portfolio HTML CSS thing I've been working on. Like nothing cool, uh,

And I was like one of the first people that went up to. And there was, I don't know, like 30 people there. So it wasn't like two people I was presenting to. It was quite a few people. And I had this old...

I don't want to cuss. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I had this really crappy laptop. I mean, it was so bad I had installed Linux on it. And the only reason I installed Linux on it was because of my wife's friend who told me I needed to learn Linux. And it was good because it actually made that laptop run again. But I remember I had to use it with a big cooling tray.

because I was just like too cheap to buy a new one. I probably could have bought anything else but that, but I was like, this is going to be like, I'm going to hold this as a thing of pride. And I kept there for a really long time. I actually have a video that I recorded where I was like, this is the laptop I learned to code on. And when I open it, one of the keys falls off. And that wasn't like something I did for that video. That key was really, it was like the W key. I think it was that key was really busted. And, and I, I,

I just kept it on there. And anytime I lifted it up or flipped it upside down, that key would fall off. So that's the laptop I have that I'm trying to present on. And the guy that's running the show, he's a professional developer at the time. He was also self-taught. He ended up becoming like a pseudo mentor, but he lets me use his MacBook. And it's like the first time I touched like a brand new MacBook.

Pro and it was like all silvery and smooth and I have like this monster of a laptop that I sit the MacBook Pro on top of and it's just it's like this 17 inch laptop that I used to have. I know how they are. It's probably got like the plastic exterior and the fans are like super loud. It was awful. Yeah, it was an HP. It was just terrible and it was like, you know, I think of it as a badge of honor now because

man, I was embarrassed to be there. And like, not only did I not feel like I shouldn't be there just because I'm like, I'm just some dude. I literally got off of work from parking cars and like, there's all these real developers here. There were people that were learning too, but like I had, I felt like I had no, no right being there and do a super nice. And then like, I always tell people you'll be surprised because that's kind of like the experience that a lot of people have whenever they go to a meetup. It's like, everybody's really nice. And we developers, we love the talk about

tech and stuff that people are working on. So even if you feel like your portfolio is this crappy little HTML, CSS website, I guarantee you, like, like, like I'll geek out and I'll be like, Oh, you should use this or you should fix this. And then like, I have design chops now. So I would like give you pointers on like how you could redesign it. And I've had a few one-on-one calls where, uh,

I have done that where we open up the code. One of the guys that I'm helping and mentoring and meeting up with, Izzy, he's been learning and he's crushing it. He's doing it almost like a full-time job. I love geeking out over that stuff. If you go to a meetup and you feel like how I felt that you just don't belong there, you'll be surprised how quick people are really nice and helpful. If

I get up on the stage, I show off my crappy little portfolio website that I'm probably a little too proud of but also ashamed of at the same time because I was like, "I built this with my bare hands." This was a blank HTML page. Afterwards, I got some feedback. And I remember, I think it was that very first meetup, there was this startup that was based out of Vegas. They were doing stuff with the IBM Watson.

Yeah, the old AI, the original kind of like OG, overhyped. Yeah, way overhyped. But they were a startup and they were like known for being like the startup because eventually Zappos ended up like headquartering in downtown Las Vegas. And I mean, you know, the tragic story about the founder of Zappos. He had a pretty wild life and it goes back to like the stuff we talked about with how Vegas can be. And it's just an example of that. It's a shame, but like...

there was a little bit of a tech scene in Vegas that started to happen. And, um, the C the CFO or not the CTO, um, of that startup, I believe he was there. He might've been at the second one that I went to, but he gave me like a card and he was like,

When you're ready, email this assistant of mine, and maybe we can get you an interview. And I was like, what? I got an interview off of that? Your first meetup? Yeah. But the thing is, I was not qualified for that job at all. It was actually, they had a pre-vetting process. They worked in Haskell, which is a very like,

kind of an obscure functional programming language that not too many people know about unless you're like a real geek or you just know you've heard of it. And it's using like telecommunications or something like that. Yeah. It's also, it's also the, I believe Cardano, which is a crypto that I, I, I kind of, I kind of like is written in Haskell. If I'm not mistaken, I hope I didn't misspeak on that,

But it's a pretty... So the thing about Haskell, they tell you, like, it's got such a good compiler. Like, if it passes compile, then your code is safe because it's just, like, a very...

safe programming language with a lot of like, you can't really make a mistake if it's, if it's compiling, like your code's probably solid if, if it passes. Um, uh, but I, again, I didn't know much about Haskell. I still don't know much about Haskell, but I went down this, uh, sidetrack again, it happens when you're first learning how to code because I have this opportunity to like interview for a real company with a real job. And it's like, looking back now, I realized what some of the questions were, but at the time I had

no idea. I was in over my head. It was actually one of the first ones was fizzbuzz. And if you're familiar with fizzbuzz, it's just a very simple algorithm. It's hard to even call it an algorithm because it really is just like a couple if-else statements for where like if it's divisible by three, you print fizz. If it's divisible by five, you print buzz. If it's divisible by both, you print fizzbuzz, right?

It's actually really simple once you have an okay understanding of programming. But at the time, I didn't know what I was doing. I ended up going on one of those freelancing websites. It might have been Freelancer. And I found a tutor to try to help me pass this thing. And for two weeks, I tried to pass this interview prereq thing.

coding test with three different algorithm challenges. That was kind of disheartening and I felt like, oh, I'm not going to get this. It kind of...

Luckily, I stuck with it because I realized that there's going to be more opportunities there. And that happened through going to more meetups and continuing to learn. I got sidetracked and started learning Haskell for a little bit. But then when I realized that I wasn't ready, I kept going back to FreeCodeCamp. I kept going back to web development. And I kept going back to the stuff that I was learning. And then I started learning React. It's still a very similar path now. Yeah.

You learn your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then you start learning your front-end library or framework. And then you can start learning a little bit more about CRUD, and you start learning about backend, and you start learning about databases. And it's very overwhelming when you start. And as you continue to progress through your learnings, you start to feel a little bit better about it because you start retaining some of the information and things start to make sense. And

I remember going to my first React meetup and they did that one like every two weeks and it was all real cool, real developers that I was around and another place that I felt completely out of place because I had just started learning React and I saw that meetup and I was like, I had already been going to that other demo day meetup so I was just like, I felt comfortable enough to just show up and it was like they had free pizza there and it was just like, why not?

And I met with the coordinator and he was super cool. And he starts telling me about react and I'm like, Hey, what's a, you know, I'm just learning. And I know a little bit of this, a little bit of the basics. And I want to like start really learning react. And I've been watching a few videos, but I haven't started yet. And he starts telling me that I should do a, uh,

a messenger clone, like a Facebook messenger clone. And, and he starts just talking tech. And I'm like, my eyes glazed over and everything he's saying is just like, I'm overwhelmed. I'm like, I don't know any, like, it felt like he was speaking another language. He's showing me code and he's like, just getting into the weeds of it. And I know that I do that now with, with,

like people who are newer, but like he was still super nice and I kept showing up to that React meetup. Eventually that React meetup was the meetup that led me to meet the recruiter that got me my first job and the first meetup at demo day

The guy that became kind of my pseudo mentor that was the coordinator that made me kind of go up on stage the first day, you know, I became such a familiar face that, that like they knew that I was serious about learning. And it worked out very interestingly because I had a, I had an interview for the job at a smaller insurance startup of the coordinator for demo day, right?

His name was Mike Zethlo. He's, uh, I think he's still like involved in the community too. And I had a interview for, for a job at his, um, company that he set up for me at this point, I had already been learning for like 10 months. And at that Friday, so that, that interview would have been on Monday that Friday, I got a call from the recruiter saying that like Caesar's entertainment wanted to follow through with me after I had interviewed twice with them. And that interview process was like,

after working there, I realized that it was just kind of like they take forever to hire, but it was very nerve wracking for me because the recruiter kept telling me that they liked me from the interviews, but from the first interview to the last interview to getting the offer was like a three week process. And I was just like, I don't know what to do. I've got this other job. In hindsight, I wish I would have still gone and interviewed that Monday for the other job, because I don't know if I would have, that would have been a better path in. But nonetheless, I ended up

from meetups getting a job. And it was at the react meetup where I met that recruiter randomly. She had bought pizza for everybody and gave out our business cards. And it was so funny because I remember now all the experienced developers where they're like, Oh, headhunters, damn recruiters. They're like, Oh yeah, at least we got free pizza. And I'm like, yeah, I'll take your business card. Yeah. I'm going to email you. And I did. And she, it just happened to be like just the

Perfect timing when preparation meets opportunity, right? Like I, they were hiring for a junior developer. I had just learned just enough. I really crushed it on the first interview. After I got hired, I talked to the, to the people that hired me and like the lead dev was a self-taught developer. So he kind of like, he took a liking to me because of that. And then like, they told me, they were like, dude, you, you,

you interviewed better than other people that had experience. And I don't know, I think it was just, I studied enough and I was probably over-prepared. I was, like I said, the night before I'm redoing free code camp curriculum and like trying to make sure I know everything I need to know. And there were still things that in the interview process, I messed up. And then after like becoming friends with the people that hired me and, you know, going out for, for a couple of beers back when I used to like still drink and like talking it out with them and being like, why did

you guys hire me? Do you realize you made a mistake? And they're like, no, dude, you were, you're good. You're like, you're, you know, that having that insecurity of just like being a dropout and like,

I shouldn't be a programmer. I shouldn't, I like, this isn't something like this was not in my cards. I still have very bad imposter syndrome and still believing that I'm not good enough to do the job. And I still struggle with that now after I've done it professionally. And I know that I know how to do the job and I know like what a bad developer looks like. And I know what a great developer looks like. And I know that I'm somewhere in between there, but I still struggle with believing that this is something that I was able to accomplish. And that first six months was,

at the job was rough because I, there was so much imposter syndrome and there was a lot of politics going on in that office. And there was just a lot of stuff where like my lead that hired me couldn't, he couldn't devote as much time to me as he wanted to because he was overworked and, and it was really hard. But I learned so much because there was a bit of a, an overworked culture there. And as bad as it sounds, I almost think that that's good for people who are just getting started and it's toxic. It's not really good, but man, I,

You sure do learn a lot when you're in a work environment that is like pushing you to learn. And we can get into that too. I feel like, yeah, I mean like the military, the military, right? Like,

It's hard to think of something more toxic than having a drill sergeant barking orders at you while you're like, you barely slept and you probably smell terrible. And, and you know, you're out in some strange camp in the wilderness doing all these grueling physical things. But like the U S government has hit upon that. And probably most other governments have hit on like putting people through this brutal rite of passage. They can learn a lot. Right. So, um,

Yeah, if you have the luxury of putting yourself into the frying pan, so to speak, I imagine you can forge quite a bit of knowledge and experience very quickly. But...

It's not for everybody. And yeah, like, yeah, it's not the only way. But no, it's hardening to hear that, that like, even though you're in like a toxic kind of high pressure, you know, long hour type work culture that would be, you know, totally not out of place in places like Asia, but would be very out of place in Europe and to an extent maybe in North America. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, like I'm glad you were able to make the most of it and get the most out of it. And I'm also glad you look back with kind of mixed feelings, but you can see the good and not just the bad.

For sure. For sure. And that's kind of what I take from it because I do think that there was, like you said, trial by fire into the frying pan. I did learn a ton. And at that point, I had already... So you got to imagine, right? Learning to code for me was something that I took with a bit of...

my extreme personality that I applied to a lot of things in my life that weren't good until I applied it to something that was like programming. And I was learning, like when I say I learned how to code in 10 months, like you hear stories of people that do it in three months or six months. And like, I still think 10 months was an impressively short amount of time, but I was like, I was waking up in the morning on my days off and I would open my laptop and I would close it at night after being on there for hours.

16 hours sometimes. And that whole time I was on my laptop, I was watching videos, following along with tutorials, building, coding. And like every waking moment of my life for those 10 months was like,

learning how to code. And that's not healthy. Like I said, that's a bit of an extreme personality type on my end. But I stopped hanging out with people. I stopped going to jujitsu. I stopped going to the gym. I basically just consumed my entire life with like, I am going to get a job.

doing this thing and the only way for me to do that is that I have to prove myself that I am capable of doing this against people who have college degrees against people who have experience against people who have a boot camp under their belt and

And there was many times through that process where I was doubtful that it was going to happen. And I remember along with like telling my wife where like, Hey man, one day we're going to, we're going to be able to travel the world if I can do this. And also telling her, like, I remember being like, look, like just kind of like,

Give me a chance to do this. You know, it was, it was a stressful time. Like we had a newborn, eventually she was expecting another kid and I'm, and I'm sitting on my computer all day and I'm like, just give me some time to do this. I'm going to work as hard as I can. If, if I can't do it by X amount of time, like we'll reconsider our options. Um,

And I was like, there was something that I told myself. I was like, I am going to get so good at this that somebody is going to come across me and be like, I have to hire that guy. I can't let this guy get away from me because I was willing to work for cheap. And I knew that I would be willing to work as hard as I could to do the job. So with that mindset, it was a bit of a pitfall.

of my own when I got the job eventually and realized that I shouldn't have continued to be like that because what I was doing was that I felt like I didn't know enough. I went into a stack that I had no idea of. We were using Kotlin at the time, but it was a Java slash Kotlin backend. It was AEM, which is a weird CMS that there's no information about on the internet because it's proprietary through Adobe, and they probably have more info now, but back then there was even less.

And then there was a bit of a toxic work culture, not because of the developers, but because of the management, which then affected the developers. And I saw how hard my lead was working. And I saw how hard other devs were working that I was like, I got to go home and I got to, I got to get better. Like I have to be as good as these guys were, which is,

As a junior developer, you shouldn't think like that because as long as you're putting in the time and the whole idea is like you spend all this time studying so then you can do it as a job because then that's when you'll really learn because now you'll do it eight hours a day and you'll be paid to do it and it'll be easier. But for my own personal reasons and my personality type and my imposter syndrome, I was like, I got to get better faster because I'm going to get fired. And I didn't feel like I belong there in the first place. And I thought they made a mistake when they hired me. And

But man, did I learn a lot, you know, by, by my second year of, so by my, by the end of my first year of being a,

a dev professionally and having almost two years from when I started learning how to code, like I could tell, like looking back now, I was like, you know, I might not know algorithms. I might not know some things that might make me a better developer or what people would think of as like a really like a great developer. But for like someone who didn't go to school and, and like felt like they had no,

no excuse doing this job. Like I am, uh, I feel like, yeah, like there was a point in time where I kind of looked back and I was like, yeah, and I kind of know a lot of stuff financially, which is crazy because everybody knew where I had worked at previously when they hired me as a developer for almost a year. I kept one night at the club and I kept it secret from my, my managers and like the, the developers I worked with because I didn't want them to think that I couldn't do the job. But,

I wanted to try to like catch up money wise. We had some debt and like that extra night at the club was good money. And I was just like, so I'm working a nine to five working after hours on development tasks from work and

And then Friday night comes, I go home at five o'clock. I take a nap. I wake up at 1am and then I go work at two in the morning till, till 10am or noon on Saturday morning. And I did that for like, God, it was like eight or nine months. It was, it was the better part of a year until I was finally like, I can't do this anymore. And I started giving away the shift, but I didn't want to get rid of it. Cause it was like, I still had like, I was like, if all else fails, I can always go back to parking cars. And I was scared because I felt like,

If I get fired, at least I can go back to the job at the club. But then I finally realized that they weren't going to fire me and I was there to stay. But that almost took a year. So it was just funny. And I don't know. It's just something there. They found out. Eventually, I told them like...

Five months in, after I felt comfortable with all the guys I was working with, or the devs I was working with, I was like, you guys know I still work there, right? They're like, what? What are you doing? And then they started letting me out early on Fridays so I can go to work. And, you know, it's kind of nice.

All right. Well, that's a lot to unpack. Let me just kind of quickly recap a lot of the insights here. I mean, you are an incredibly – I can just sit back. You're like the easiest person I've ever had to interview. And I've done, I think, like 100 interviews or something like that. I've never talked with somebody who could just so effortlessly –

bring forth so many interesting insights in such rapid succession without any prompting at all for me. It's almost as if you're like a YouTuber who has like a quarter million subscribers and like all this, you know? So a couple of observations first. Uh, it sounds like you used your external pressure as kind of like a motivating force. Like you had, uh,

extreme extrinsic pressure that like gave rise to intrinsic pressure to perform, to continue to expand your skills, to not let your team down, to get as good as they are. So, so what started off as, um, just you maniacally like learning the code and thinking that getting the job was the end point. Then you realize, Oh no, I just went like, I just went up to the next level right now. Things are going to be even harder. And, um,

Kudos to you for finding it within yourself to do that because that sounds like a hellish two or three years of your life. Like just...

Constantly do it and then working the crazy graveyard shift at the club on Friday night. That's wild. Yeah, my condolences to your family because you were probably not super present during that time. But seriously, some observations. First, building your network. Going to those meetups, even though you felt like a total fish out of water, and putting yourself out there and not just shrinking. A lot of people, when they face that kind of like,

almost traumatic experience of like having to go on the stage and plug in their laptop and talk in front of a bunch of people that knew way more about them. I've been there. Uh, by the way, a lot of Dorians for those listening, a lot of Dorians, uh, during,

journey points kind of mirror similar things that I did when I learned to code, you know, I, I left my, my day job of being a school director. Again, we come from very different backgrounds, but like the process was the same. You have to learn this stuff. Like everybody ultimately has to learn the skill. Everybody ultimately has to build their network and their reputation as a developer and how you and I went about it, despite the fact that we did have like a little different, like academic background, certainly, um,

We went about basically the exact same way. So it's incredibly heartening to hear that you leverage recruiters instead of listening to the people that poo-poo recruiters. First of all, I never understood the hate for recruiters. I think recruiters are a huge asset to you as you're looking for a job. And if you can find a recruiter that will advocate for you,

Don't give them any money. That's probably a scam. But if they're just taking, you know, a finder's fee from the company that you ultimately get employed at, that is like very much a positive expected value for you. And so you leverage the recruiter. You,

met the people and you earnestly followed up with them and you actually made up like, Oh, this person's offered me a job. Once I feel ready, I'm or an offer me an interview. Once I feel ready, I'm going to go and interview. And you didn't let those, those setbacks push you down. You just kept redoubling your effort to study. It's like incredibly motivating. And I can see why so many people have watched your videos, uh,

over the years to fire themselves up about learning the code. So, yeah, like, everybody, be sure, like, I've got links to everything in the show notes. Check those out. But let's talk about, like,

the next few years of your life. Cause I want to be sure we touched on that. And we do want to, like, I do have another thing that I want to talk about. I'll go ahead and tease it. Uh, but, but you know, your own struggles with addiction that I think a lot of people in the audience can probably relate to. We are going to talk to talk about that in a little bit, but I, I want to go ahead and go through, uh, maybe just quickly go through the next few years. Like, because at this point we're maybe like 2021, uh,

2019, actually. I got my first job at... 2017 was my first job in July. And then I left there almost after two years in 2019. And then I guess we can go right into it. Yeah, go for it. So yeah, so then I did that job for about two years. You know, there was...

with, with toxic work environments, um, it's, it's funny because sometimes the management doesn't realize the stress that they're putting on certain, um, developers. And I think everybody deals with their own stresses and everybody's got like, when you're dealing with a big corporation and you've like, everyone is like that, that, uh,

where it's like the birds on different sticks and then there's like the bird at the top that poops on the birds under there and then they poop under there, you know, and then the people at the bottom get the most pooped on. And there's kind of a bit of that too. So I don't want to like...

I don't want to talk poorly about any of the management. I think that everybody was dealing with their own pressures, but I think that there was also a big mystery to what the developers did there because we worked in a marketing department. We weren't part of IT because since we were responsible for the websites of the entire corporation, we used AEM as a content management system, and I was responsible for 50-plus websites.

websites for every casino that was under the Caesars, um, entertainment umbrella. So you had, we had a lot of people that were a part of marketing that didn't know what we were doing and they, they had good intentions. And what, what happened was that they, uh,

There was eventually an employee survey, and our department got the worst rating. And it was us. It was the devs. There was like six of us. They had just hired two new guys. They hired a senior guy and a junior guy, and I was the junior guy. And the senior guy ended up becoming a really good friend of mine, and I ended up working with him again in the future, again, building your network at a different job. But he eventually became the lead after everybody started

quitting, right? Like the guy that hired me, he stayed for about another year, got overworked and then realized that he had so much experience that he could just double his salary and get half of the stress immediately. And they tried to like revamp and like,

you know, that we, we, we all, there was eight of us in like one small office that was supposed to be for like one executive, but we just, it was very much like the startup vibe in there. Right. It was just like eight sweaty developers in a small room. And we all, our laptops are on top of books and we were like, you know, we're sharing desks and it was very, it was very fun and it was a really good learning environment for us. But then

After they got the bad reviews saying that there was a lot of us that were unhappy, they wanted to bring us out into the open and they wanted to give us a new office, which was nice. But at the same time, I think there was a mix of like, we got to micromanage these guys more because we don't know what they're doing in that office. And I think that they felt like we weren't actually contributing when the truth was that we were all overworked, ironically enough. Yeah.

We just like people started getting sick of it. And eventually I got sick of it. They, they gave me an insultingly low raise. And then everybody will tell you the best way to get a raise is to find a new job. So I eventually started interviewing for other places, uh,

And I got an interview and an offer from Allegiant Airline. And it's funny because when it rains, it pours. I started applying and it was like, I think I applied for almost three months and heard nothing. And I was like, oh man, maybe I don't have enough experience yet. I was approaching the two-year mark, which...

Like people tell you like that's a sweet spot. Now, I don't know. The job market's a little different. Two years might not be the same. But but at that point in time, if you had two years of experience, you were like junior to mid level and you were more marketable when it came to recruiters. And, you know, I've I've I've got a mixed feeling for recruiters. And I made a video like talking poorly about recruiters a while back. And I kind of made it private because I feel like I spoke out of personal experience.

I hate my inbox getting emails and then texts and then phone calls and then they don't know what they're actually hiring for, but there are some very competent and good recruiters. So I took that video down. But nonetheless, I started meeting with recruiters and then I found the Allegiant job and I interviewed for that. And it was funny because the first interview...

I was just like, you know, I interviewed with the team. There was a manager, a developer, and like another like human resources person there. And they started asking me questions and like my opinion on stuff. And they were using like weird tech. I can't remember at the time, but something was just like, they were like, oh, how would you do this? And I was like, well, I wouldn't do that. Like, that's not like, that's like, you shouldn't use that for that. It was, it was something, God, I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but it,

I might have sounded arrogant, but I was just basically like, hey, that's a really outdated way of doing things, and you shouldn't do that in a modern... If you're building for IE10, maybe, but you guys aren't supporting those older browsers, it was something along those lines where I was just like, that's a weird way of doing it. And I think the manager didn't like it, but he wasn't the technical guy. And then I felt like I bombed that interview, and then two weeks later, I actually...

Got a call back from them because the person that they wanted to hire fell through. And they wanted me to go do a technical interview on site. And it was just, it was like for a UI developer job. So it wasn't like JavaScript. It was more like HTML. And they basically, they connected, I got there, they connected my laptop to a projector. And I had to like build an HTML page from scratch, right?

Which, like, if you haven't done that in a while and you've been working in a framework, it's kind of like... I just did a video on it, so I remember, like, the structure of it now. But I'm just kind of like, oh, that's weird. But for some reason, I had, like, just been... Like, for... I don't remember, but it just worked out where I was just like, I aced it. Like, I just... I nailed it. They basically...

On the spot, they were like, hey, we want to introduce you to one of the higher-ups that has the final call because we want to eliminate you having to come back. And then I met a VP, shook his hand. They were like, oh, yeah. And then eventually I got a phone call, negotiated a salary. But at the same time, I had interviewed for Washington State. And it was a...

That job would have been more UI with like email templates and it paid well and it was for Allegiant. And I probably could have eventually moved into a more a position that I would have been happier with as a developer. But at the time, I didn't want to do email templates because it felt like a step back for me because I had already been doing kind of like full stack development. And I had already been doing TypeScript and like Java and like understanding more of like

software development. I don't want to say that email templating is not, but it's really, it's kind of just HTML and CSS. And I was going beyond that. And then the Washington state job was like,

It was a UI UX developer, but it was in Angular. It was in Spring Boot. It was in a more modern stack. And there was potential. I asked during the interview process, hey, I don't want to just do HTML and CSS. I want to make sure that I'm going to have opportunities to grow. And they reassured me that there would be. And they did. And so I ended up having two offers there.

Allegiant, like I did the drug test. I did all of this stuff to like get the job and I was ready to start. And I had to call them and be like, sorry, uh, I went with another job. So they weren't happy about that. And then eventually moved to Washington for that second job. And I did that job for almost two years and I, and I learned a lot on that job, but then that's when COVID happened. That's when I started my YouTube channel and that's when I started, uh,

like I went more full-time remote and there was a lot of like, what are we doing? Like, like COVID I think made a lot of people start thinking a little bit outside of the box. And like the pandemic really like hit like my wife hard because she's a very social extrovert type person who just can't be in the house and needs to do stuff. And then when we started really thinking about like, like, what are we doing? Like, like,

you know, like what's life going to be like, like our kids are going to grow up too fast. And is this really what we want? Like, do we want to just kind of like do the same routine day in and day out? And, you know, we eventually then sold our, our, our second home at that point. And like, you know, um, hit the road for a little bit. And that eventually led to the travels. Um, but,

But in between that, I did some contracting work. And my resume, looking back now, there's a couple gaps in my resume. And there's a couple job hopping, six months, three months, and then contract work. And I'm looking back and I'm like, I hope I didn't damage my resume. But when I look at those gaps, I think like, well, that one gap was Europe. And now this new gap is Asia. So it's just like...

At the end of my life, am I going to look back and be like, I wish I really didn't have those gaps in my resume? Or am I like, you know what? I'm glad that I tried to make YouTube a full-time thing and travel the world with my family because that's a story. At least if I'm broke and can't get a job, at least I'll be like, you know what I did back in my day. Yeah. Wow. So...

I mean, obviously the pandemic like adjusted a lot of people's perception of like how much they could actually get done remotely. I like to think that the pandemic put remote work ahead like a decade in terms of like,

Like all those experiments that like, I remember cause pre-co camp is all remote. We've never had an office and I would often like people would be like, well, how do you get things done without an office? And, and I mean, that's a, that's a good question. Cause like a lot of managers will advocate for like, well, you can get so much more done if you just have everybody on top of each other and like some developer bullpen and they're having to hear each other's phone conversations and smell each other's body odor and stuff like that. But like,

Like at the time there was like a single big study on remote work from like C trip in China and like,

It was basically that people were more productive, but they were less likely to get promoted because they weren't in the manager's face all day, so at the top of mind. So they were doing more work, but the perception was they were doing less work, even though they were actually getting more done because they weren't commuting and stuff like that. Anyway, that was the big study, and I think I answered some questions on Quora about it and stuff like that because I've always believed in remote work, and I've thought it's a lot more sane than getting on the freeway and sucking tailpipe exhaust and risking...

destroying your car and spending a whole bunch of time like commuting and parking and dressing up like, uh, you know, all the different things that you have to worry about when you work in an office. And, uh, you know, it sounds like you kind of figured out during this process, like, Hey, we, you know, I can work as a developer wherever, and I want to take my kids and explore the world. And I just want to like compliment you. First of all, you know, on,

doing all that work to put yourself in a position to where you could do that. Cause I imagine a lot of people listening to this dream of just grabbing their kids that are, how old are you? My, my, uh, seven and nine years or just a couple of years. Seven and eight. Yeah. Okay. Wow. So yeah. Taking those kids and showing them the world. I like, like that is huge.

For them. They're always going to be able to look back and say, yeah, my dad was so cool. He like did what he needed to do so we could go and explore the world and like having photos of them, you know, very young going to like anchor what and stuff like that. Right. Like that is really cool. They're going to be like the coolest kids in school. If they go to school, like when they've got these, like this, this worldly knowledge and stuff and appreciation for other cultures and they, they don't run the risk of being ugly Americans abroad. Right. Because they've, they've kind of like steeped themselves in like, okay,

America is not the only way to do things, right? Like things like that. So, so you've given your family something invaluable, even though, you know, you've kind of sacrificed your resume to an extent with like gaps and things like that. And, and there are going to be times of, um, you know, like one of the things about YouTube is if you get off the YouTube treadmill, then your engagement starts to crater and, and YouTube, just like Tik TOK, I think it's like learning from Tik TOK in the sense that like,

It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. That does give you a little bit of an edge. But basically, you put the video out there, and if people aren't watching it, it's not going to recommend it to anybody. It doesn't care who you are. If Mr. Beast put out a video that was just him sitting there eating a sandwich or something like that, and it was really boring, nothing happened, that wouldn't necessarily be a multi-million view video, even though they're like,

I don't know how many, like a hundred thousand, a hundred million subscribers there. Right. So, um, because of this, you kind of like sacrifice, not only your resume to an extent, but, but the momentum you had on YouTube and all this stuff just to go out. Right. And do things. And, um, so I was looking through your YouTube last night and, uh,

And I'd been watching a lot, but YouTube hadn't been recommending your videos to me because like I'm of course subscribed. I've engaged on a lot of your videos, commented, liked, and like all that stuff that you're, you know, YouTube is supposed to recommend stuff based on your behavior. But like it hadn't been recommending you me your videos when they opened it up. It was just a bunch of video essays on like, you know, the fighting game community and like, you know, just obscure like business history and stuff like that. Random stuff that I watched on YouTube. But, um,

I went and I was like, I wonder what Dorian's top video of all time is. And I just went and I sorted by popular. And okay, you're a programming channel, right? Yeah. A programming channel. And your top video of all time has 3 million views. And I click it and it's just you sitting there. There's no change. You barely even move. There's like nothing visually interesting about the video. But it's so resonant and so compelling because...

And the title of the video is like, I quit smoking marijuana for like six months or something like that. Which is like, first of all, I didn't even know that you smoke marijuana. You're like the most high functioning, like constantly previously constantly stoned person I've ever talked to. Yeah. But maybe you could talk about that.

that video and like what inspired you to, you know, quit and maybe you can talk a little bit about your addiction and then what inspired you to be so candid and tell everybody? Cause I had no idea. And like you took a big reputational risk by, you know, admitting like, like making yourself vulnerable in that way. Yeah. Um, yeah,

I don't know. I guess it's the best answer that I can give. I had shared quite a few different things on my YouTube channel in the past. And some of them would get viewed, but I didn't really do it for views. Like...

I've made videos that are overly produced, B-roll, custom B-roll, paid people to edit, and they don't get any views, right? Where I really want them to do well. And then I've made a lot of videos that are more for, I don't know, maybe myself. It's almost like a bit of a therapy session. And I think about there's a lot of...

People that I've watched a lot of podcasts that I've listened to that have helped me in my journey and like having other people that I felt like I could relate to share their stories has helped me a lot in my process of like trying to like get sober. And, and yeah, like, man, I've been like, I've been drinking and smoking weed for as long as I can remember. Like I started very young as a teenager, early teens, and then like weed and alcohol are just something that has followed me throughout my whole life.

And in my early twenties, I drank a lot. I smoked a lot. And I just like, it just, it, it's just something that has always been there. And there have been times when I have stopped, but I've never like really tried to quit except for a handful of times. And I was also unsuccessful in those times. And then when I made that video, I had, I had hit like the six month mark. It had been a, a, a

fairly hard struggle, right? Like I, I, like I said, I never really stopped before. And the time before that, while there was a bit of a, like I wanted to quit, I didn't really want to, I felt like I had to. And of course there's some of that too. And I think with like anybody who's like dealing with any kind of like addiction, like there's, it's very rare that somebody just stops cold Turkey and then it's just like, Oh, my life is perfect now. It's, it's, it's a struggle. And addiction is, is something that I feel that maybe not enough of us talk about and

and I just said, you know what? I'm going to make this video. I have talked about those things in the past and there have been times when I made the videos private and tried to hide them because I was either looking for a job or felt like, oh, I don't want this to get out there and I was just like, whatever. I'm just putting this one out in the wild. I don't care. And it kind of...

you know, got a few views at first and then, gosh, if I went into the analytics, I could probably tell you like a month or two later, I'm like, man, this video is getting a lot of views. And then like all of a sudden I'm like, man, this video is getting the most views I've ever got on a video. And then at one point in time, like,

I was sharing it on Twitter and I was just like, this video has gotten 200,000 views in a 48 hour period. I've never gotten that many views in a 48 hour period. And I had videos at the time that were already over a million views. And it was just like, what the hell is going on? I'm like, Oh great. This is what everybody's like. Like I sort channels by popular often because I kind of like try to like, see, like I love being,

being a YouTuber, I love going and seeing like, what is this person talking about now? And what did they start talking about? And like, what's their most viewed video? And like, it, it's interesting because a lot of people, even in the coding world, like you'll see some people will have like a one-off video where they're not talking about like their main topic. And that ends up being their most popular video. And now, um, I'm, I've had a lot of back and forth with my YouTube and what I want from it. And after like doing one-on-ones and kind of,

Seeing that, I felt it was a bit selfish of me to change my content because my early videos, I mean, I probably did over 100 videos about learning how to code, struggles as a programmer, and different topics that would help developers. And I built quite a big audience around that. And then at one point, what happened was a personal thing. I kind of became burnt out. I didn't really like it as a job. I started making videos that were...

not fair to my audience. Some of them were me lashing out against programming because I was just kind of burnt out and others were just like me kind of talking about random things that maybe some people wouldn't be interested in. Like, like I got into an ice bath phase. So I'm like, I'm going to make videos about ice baths. And then I've got like, I've got a lot of random stuff on there now that I'm actually, it's just recently, it's so funny that we're doing this interview. I just recently, like, I'm like, I'm going to reel it back in.

And I'm going to kind of focus on the audience that I was trying to serve originally. And even though there are some personal things, because like one of my old videos that I remember you commenting on, it was where I'm just like, it's like motivation for somebody who wants to learn how to code. And I'm like, I'm like, Hey, like, look, I'm like, I'm a juvenile delinquent ex addict, you

single mother, first language was Spanish and I grew up like this and I was still able to do it. That video actually got a lot of views but I have to remember that was who I was trying to

really like appeal to and like like talk to because i remember even in this video we're talking now how like i felt like i didn't belong in this industry i still don't feel like i do and and like somewhere along the lines i kind of got lost in like my ultimate like purpose for youtube and i i made selfish content where you'll hear a lot of people tell you not to do that but

But the irony is that some of that content is my best performing content. But I have now decided that I got to split the two. So I've created a second channel where I'm going to be talking more about that personal stuff so that I don't want to stop talking about that stuff. But I also feel that not every single person that needs to learn about code is coming from a tough background and dealing with addiction. Right.

It's good to separate the two, I think. Sorry to interrupt you. To be fair, though, a lot of those people...

Like, you can give advice that I can't give. Like, I grew up middle class. Like, my dad went to university. My granddad went to university, right? So I'm like a third generation, like, college graduate, right? And most people in tech probably are. Or they have some relative privilege. They, like, grew up in, you know, at least a place where they weren't stealing cars and things like that, right? So because of that, I...

And that is not representative of America in general. Only about 35% of Americans get a university degree.

But like if you were to, you know, look at like learn to code stuff and if you were to look at like YouTube influencers and stuff like you could just take as a foregoing conclusion, most of them have a university degree or, you know, some other thing that helped like vault them to being hireable. And you do not. And I feel like that's like kind of your superpower is that you've succeeded in spite of all of this additional layers of challenge that

uh, things that you had to overcome. And so, so like, I would encourage you to like, first of all, you publish like a comprehensive, you know, video tutorial, like, uh, just a few weeks ago, I think that is like 45 minutes of like building a project and stuff like that. And that's amazing. Keep doing that. But, but, uh, my humble advice is don't lose sight of the fact that one of the reasons people love you is because you're

You are kind of like an everyman. Like you're much more representative of the typical American than I am. And I think that that's like a huge asset that you have in terms of being able to affect change and inspire people and educate people. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. No, no. And I, I, I appreciate you saying that because I think sometimes I need to hear that because I don't, again, I think it goes back to insecurities and imposter syndrome where I don't feel that way. Again, I'm still surprised that I've, I've even been able to do what I've been able to do. And like looking back at like where I'm at and like how I started, it's, I don't know. I guess I have a hard time giving myself credit where credits do. And then I feel that,

I don't want to become that guy that's humble bragging all the time. And I feel that sometimes...

some of my videos come across as that and and then i struggle too because i've gotten to the point where i'm kind of a a creator that sometimes i will release content on emotion rather than like thinking through because i'll say this like there's a large portion of youtubers now because youtuber is like a big marketing platform for a lot of people to like build a brand and sell their products and like i don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that but i feel like there's a a

something missing where people are just more honest. And I end up making honest, emotional content sometimes that, you know, sometimes it's not good to speak out of emotion. Like I did a video and I didn't think about like how it would have impacted people, but it was probably a year ago now. And it was just like the title was kind of clickbaity. And I was just like, everything about learning how to code is just effed. Right. And the video did very well.

And I felt like I did a disservice to the people because I was kind of ranting about, like, the economy sucks. The learn-to-code sphere is a mess. Everybody's trying to make a buck. Nobody's really being honest anymore about, like, teaching you and how hard it is to get a job. And, like, I just went on this –

20 minute rant and, and told, you know, kind of spoke like, yes, while you may go on Reddit and see that there's a hundred posts that get pushed to the top about how bad, uh,

tech jobs are, there's also a lot of posts that don't make it to the top because bad news sells where people are still getting jobs and people are still hiring. And like AI isn't as big and scary as like all of these clickbait videos are making it seem. But when you're new and coming to the scene, you don't know that. So you take the word of the most viewed video. And then when you see someone who's just kind of ranting about how bad things are at the end of that video, which the thing is, most people don't make it to the end of your video. I say like,

even though it's the worst time to learn to code, I think it's one of the best times to learn how to code. There are so many resources. There is tools like AI that can help us learn faster, and there's still a lot of opportunity out there. But I remember talking with someone who...

set up one of the calls with me and they were like, Hey man, like I saw that video and I was kind of like bummed out. And I was just like, Oh, this is why when you get a larger following, you got to be careful with the stuff that you put out there. Because to me, I'm just the dude in the wooden box right now making a video. And I'm not really thinking about all the people that it could potentially impact. And I realize now that like some of my most impactful videos are the ones where I'm just talking, but

When I put out the, I don't want to say the wrong information or emotional information that may not be a hundred percent fact, it could potentially lead people into making decisions based off of my opinion, which I always try to tell people like have your own opinion. But the reality of it is there is a lot of influence in things like social media and people do take what you say to heart. And then like, I just don't want somebody to screw up their opportunity because I had a bad day and made a video because I was just kind of

Yeah. And unfortunately – I needed to make a video and I got upset. Yeah. YouTube definitely incentivizes doom and gloom. Just like the airport bestseller books encourage toxic positivity and pull yourself by the bootstraps. Everything will be fine. You're not working hard enough, which there's truth to it.

to there's some truth to that and there's also some truth to the doom and gloom right but the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle right not in the extremes and yet the extremes extreme toxic positivity or extreme doom and gloom those are what sell those would get people to click through and watch and keep watching and keep reassuring this oh I like I'm screwed whether I commit my life to learning the code or not it's not really going to make a big difference so I'm fine just where I am you know

Doing whatever it is. I worked at Taco Bell. Just working at Taco Bell. I can imagine if I were learning the code today, working at Taco Bell or working as a grocery store, facing shelves and stocking shelves and being the first person there to mop the floor every morning. I'd watch that video and like, well, gee, if...

what's the point in like learning the code and putting all this time and energy if I'm not going to be able to get a good developer job or if the whole thing is going to be automated, it can become kind of like this copium type thing, right? Where, where people are like, well, yeah, I guess it's all just a big scam anyway. So I'm glad I didn't bother investing my time and energy into that. And then they would lose all the opportunity to go out and get a developer job. And, you know, spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't like heard the free cocaine podcast before, or, um, you know, my interviews with like many, many, uh,

super duper senior, you know, founder engineer, CTO types and stuff that are way better at, uh, software development than I am. Uh,

they don't believe that coding is over and that it's going to solve everything, right? They believe that decades from now we'll still have software engineers and they'll still need to learn data structures and scripting languages and, uh, you know, how to use databases, all those things that you were learning both on your own as you self taught and on the job when you were working with Kotlin or when you're working with, you know, Java spring boot and like all these other tools you're getting the opportunity to work with. So I, I certainly don't fault you for creating the doom and gloom that you

YouTube inspires that it basically economically incentivizes. And I'll say something about YouTube. You can actually make money on YouTube, right? It's not like Twitter. I don't know. Maybe you can make money on Twitter. Like Elon Musk pretends that you can make money, but like FreeCookCamp.com,

I think we get barely enough to cover our verified check mark. We did it just because it ostensibly increases the distribution within Twitter. They open sourced the algorithm ostensibly, and it says you get twice as much impressions if you pay the $8 a month or whatever. So we're like, okay, fine. We'll pay $8 because it's important for us to reach as many people and tell them about these free courses we're making. But you can't make money on Twitter, I don't think.

You definitely can't make money on like, you know, Tik TOK or these other channels. Like the only places that I know of that you can make money, of course would be like, you know, creating courses and selling them or creating, you know, content and like creating albums and selling it on band camp or, you know, something like that, writing books and selling them on a gum road or something like that. Or YouTube, YouTube actually has an extremely effective, very well laid out, very transparent platform through which you can make money. And,

And I know lots of people who supplement their income by creating courses. And there are even some people who are able to work full time just creating videos for YouTube, right? And you get to keep 55% of the advertising revenue and then YouTube keeps 45%. So it's, they're still collecting a lot of, uh, fee for basically platforming you and being your source of distribution, but it's totally viable. So sorry for that long aside, but I just want to emphasize like, like,

YouTube kind of pushed you in that direction of diversifying your content. And if you see a lot of people, they start off doing programming tutorials. The next thing you know, they're doing very broad assessments. They very quickly get out of their depth and start creating videos that they don't know what they're talking about. One of the reasons this podcast is so long and it's totally unedited is because I like increasing the amount of

honesty in the world and candor in, in the world. And, and, uh, you know, like we don't use like click baity kind of things on free code camp because we don't want to go down that road. We want people who are genuinely interested to watch the videos and learn or to, to watch the podcast and, and hear the insights. So, you know, I, I definitely admire you trying to get back to where you are, uh, where you were originally. Yeah.

creating a second channel for the, for the, uh, things. But, but here's the thing I want to underscore that video about how you quit smoking marijuana, uh, which, you know, I know so many people when I, when I grew up, of course, like everybody at school smoked marijuana, you know, like, I'm not going to lie and say I haven't smoked marijuana before, right? Like I think most American kids in like the eighties, nineties, um, maybe even the 2010s, although I would already grown up by then, um,

would do it. And, and the, the, the narrative around it is, Oh, it's not addictive. Oh, it's, it's just like, you know, alcohol, it's better than alcohol because you know, it doesn't damage your liver or like, like, like I heard so many kind of like things, people saying like marijuana wasn't a big deal and things like that. And then to watch that video that 3 million other people have watched and

where you talk about how you were essentially constantly in some, you know, on some spectrum of like just smoke marijuana to like, kind of like,

Uh, coming down off marijuana. And then you would just throughout the day, like vape to, to get back up constantly every single waking day of your life, that it was the first thing you did in the morning, uh, that, uh, you would do it to help you go to sleep, that you're constantly in the state of being affected by this psychoactive chemical. Uh, I mean, it was just incredibly refreshing, uh,

to see you do that. And I'm very grateful that you published that video on your main channel to maximize the number of people who saw it. Because when I read through the comments, all I saw were people like, I've been sober for six months, best decision I ever made. Or how many people are high right now thinking about quitting? And all these different things in the comment section. And I was just like, wow, you really opened up, you really touched a nerve and opened up a discourse of

Uh, because if somebody who like the, the highest functioning marijuana addict I've ever met can, uh, can basically work as a software engineer can, um, you know, take his family abroad and do all these things and be a high functioning addict. Like, I think that just shows like the, the degree to which people can kind of warp their being around a chemical or a substance. And, um,

It takes great courage to just get rid of it now, I think. But you talk a lot about it in the video, and I'm going to link the video to it, even though it's not related to learning the code. Check out all Dorian's videos about learning the code. But I just want to emphasize that this is a profound video. And if you have a moment to maybe talk about it,

What you know like what your journey has been like what your your year of being sober has been like following that because I I suspect That you know, the free code camp podcast has a big enough audience that maybe some people in the audience Are on a substance right now or they're struggling to try to quit And maybe maybe you can make a case for like how much better your life has become now that you've managed to like break the chains Yeah, yeah, um

I'll be honest. It's still weird to be like, I'm sober. Because I went so long where it was just like, yeah, if it wasn't weed, I was drinking. If I wasn't drinking, it was weed. It was both for a very long time. And then the harder stuff when I was younger that I'm glad that I kind of had my experience with. I guess I'm not glad that I had it, but I'm glad that I didn't get stuck with that experience.

into my adult life or too far into my adult life. But then the things that stayed, like, you know, you mentioned like a lot of people, there's the stigma around weed is not what it maybe was, you know, 50 years ago where it's just very normalized. It's very available in a lot of places. If it's not completely recreational, there's medicinal resources to get it. And I think that it's become more, um,

accepted in our society, especially in the US. I think it's, like you said, growing up, everybody I knew, pretty much everybody has smoked at some point or tried it or known someone that has. But what ends up happening or what happened to me was that I carried that into my adult life and I was probably using it to cope with childhood trauma. And then also I was just

exposed to substances at a very very very young age that like it just became a part of who i was and then like culturally and like the people that i grew up with like it was always just like everybody smoked weed and that kind of stayed true into my adult life but then i found myself being like

a father and a husband and then also a stoner or a weed addict, essentially. I'd still drink and there was...

like I would drink a few times a week. Right. Um, and I got that under control, even though that was like really out of control when I was younger. But then it was just like, the weed was just like every moment of the day. Like I had to be exactly at a certain level. If not, I'd start getting cranky or start craving it. And like, I was just walking around with that cart. I, you know, I referred it to, to it as a vape in the, uh,

the video. And I don't know if people were getting confused that they thought I was talking about a nicotine vape, but no, it was like a cartridge. And, um, it was just, and the only reason I did that was because it was discreet. So my kids wouldn't smell it because they started getting older and like, they started becoming aware. And like, I would, I remember I would leave my vape carts or on like my table sometimes. And my kids would walk in the room and I'd be hiding it. Cause they'd be asking like, Hey, what is that? Like, I always see you with that. And

I just started feeling like that. Like, I don't want to be the stoner dad. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be the guy that has a closet problem of like addiction. And I, I, there was, you know, there was a lot of other process going on. Like I had gone to therapy a few times and I had been trying to work out some of these things and like really trying to be analytical of like what has led me to this point to being like this. And, you know, like I said, it's a combination of just habit and, and,

it being in my life for so long and then also using it as a coping mechanism and self-medicating. And then like, I was always one of those people that was like, you know, herb is medicine. And like, as, and, and while there may be some medicinal properties to it and there are people that, that do benefit from it, I was 100% an addict. Like, like I, there's no doubt about it. Like it was like,

my eyes opened. I like on the way to the bathroom to like start my day, it was like I would hit my cartridge and it was just in my hand all day long. And

I think I saw it for what it was and started saying, I had gone many times where I tried to quit drinking. There were a few times when I tried to quit smoking. And then finally, I think I just said, all right, enough's enough. I realized how much it was impacting my mood. I saw it was affecting my relationships. I started feeling like I was always distant and never in the moment. And I was always in this fog because I just didn't feel clear. And then I started questioning like,

you know, like what has this done to me, uh, you know, from a, from a developmental standpoint, since I had started at such a young age, if you start doing research, you start seeing that there's, there's a lot of problems that happen from when your brain is developing, developing and people who use marijuana from adolescence into adulthood. And like,

I was just like, am I limiting my potential? Am I causing more problems for myself by doing this? And I also started feeling very anxious and I started feeling depressed. And I was just like, I need to eliminate these other things in order for me to see...

Like what's the root cause? Like, like start by, by a process of elimination. I start getting rid of other things that I feel might be causing me to feel a certain way or be a certain way. And I can only know if in fact it's something that is within me or if it's something that I am putting in my body that is making me feel this way.

And then like the first few months was really hard. And by the time I made that video, I feel like I was just starting to come out of it. Funny enough, it was like six months later. And I, I felt that, you know, you know, full disclaimer, because I got a little bit of crap in some of the other videos where like in that first six months, the first three months, there was a few times where I did, um,

I tried to do psychedelic therapy and I did things to try to... Man, I was trying to figure it out. And I heard Tim Ferriss talk about it and I heard Huberman did a podcast on psilocybin and I was just like, maybe that could help me. And I did it a couple times so then I'll get comments like, oh, well, you weren't really sober or on my update videos where I'm like, I've been sober.

But here's the thing, right? Like since then, like I have not touched alcohol. I've not touched weed and I haven't done psychedelics since, you know, almost a year ago now. So it's just like, I am sober and maybe that did help me get here. I also did ice baths daily. I've been doing them now that we're back for this time. And that was helpful too. I was just trying to figure out how I can like,

get like get a grip on myself again. And I finally like at that six month mark of that video, what I was saying was that like that felt like when I was finally starting to come out of the haze and I just wanted to kind of share how I felt about it because I felt personally that I'd been lied to a bit of the, you know, Oh, it's medicine, it's therapeutical, it's all this stuff. And like I said, yeah, there are some properties to that, but when you become addicted and you're using it every single day, um,

you know, just with, with any other pharmaceuticals that could be, you know, used for pain relief and stuff like that. Like, yeah, like, like, like when I came out of surgery, I remember telling the doctor, like, give me just enough for, for what I need because I, I have, and this was before I quit smoking weed, but I knew how I am. I was like, don't give me any more than I need because I know that I'll start,

I'll start using that recreationally. So it was just like, I went through more pain recovering from my knee surgery than I needed to, because I tried to use ibuprofen instead of the, um,

I don't even remember what it was that they prescribed to me, but it was the hard stuff. And I think it was more painful for me because I was just scared. I was like, no, I can't do that. And this is all like years of me realizing this stuff has led to me finally deciding to get sober. And I guess just being able to be real enough with myself about that stuff and

And, um, and now looking back feeling like, man, great. I can't believe I'm where I'm at, but I realized how easy I can slip up. So I, I just, I, I, I have gotten to the point where I'm like, I don't drink, I don't smoke. And that is it. Because if I allow myself to do it once, I've done it too many times. And a year is not a lot of time when I compare it to like the last,

25 years of my life where I have been on that cycle of addiction and drug use and even video game addiction. Like I was hugely addicted to video games and, um, when I was younger too. So yeah, just, yeah. Again, I'm just glad you never got addicted to gambling because that would, yeah. Even when you start gambling, you still have the shadow of that. I hated losing money.

Like, like it, it was, it was just, I did not like the feeling of losing money. I think maybe because I grew up not having a lot of money that it just felt like the, I don't know, it sounds terrible, but at least with like,

you have something to show for it. Even with gambling, you just don't, you just have that in the moment dopamine hit that you're getting, uh, you know, when the machine lights up and then you, uh, you walk out of there just feeling like crap. So I'm glad I didn't get addicted to that too. Cause that would have really sucked. Well, thank you so much for sharing kind of your thoughts on that. Like congratulations on being one year sober. Um, I often tell people like in the audience, like,

I think alcohol is also extremely corrosive to your mental health, to your social health. I mean, it causes people to do dumb things that they're going to regret. Obviously, you know, getting in a car and driving, but also just saying dumb things or getting themselves injured for other reasons.

silly reasons, potentially injuring family members. When my daughter was born nine years ago, I basically said, I'm never going to drink again. Like, and I haven't drank in, in, in nine years, not even a single sip of alcohol. Um, and, uh, you know, I'm, I'm really proud of, uh, alongside you that you, you've managed to also abstain from alcohol. Uh, there's,

you know, like lots of studies put out by the alcohol industry. And I'm sure there will be lots of studies put out by the, by big marijuana. Now that marijuana is legal in a lot of parts of the United States. And I'm not going to comment on, you know, the politics of any of that, but I will say that, uh, a lot of that research is nonsense. And I don't believe alcohol is illegal.

better for you in any way. And I think most of the research that you will still probably see quoted and stuff has been widely refuted about alcohol somehow being good for you. So, um, you know, congratulations for getting off that with the one psychoactive drug that you and I still drink, drinking my tea right now is caffeine. And, um,

The verdict is still out on that, but maybe that's just what big caffeine wants you to think. But I'm not planning on – I have gone for like a year and a half, two years without drinking caffeine. And I went back on caffeine and like I was more productive. So that is the one psychoactive substance that I will not bash. But anyway, like I'm not a total –

you know, abolitionist or what is the term? Uh, is that like for somebody who wants to get completely make things illegal, illegal? I don't think making things illegal is necessarily the answer, but anyway, this is not a political discussion. We will not talk about that. What I will say is I'm thrilled for you that, uh, I, can you talk about like the difference in your ability to get things done as a developer and as like a parent and all these other dimensions? Like, do you feel like you've unlocked, uh,

you know, a new 50% of your capabilities or something like that? So to an extent, yes. Uh, I, I realize how, how much, so, uh,

It's funny, right? Because I've actually had a lot of people comment and say, do you have ADHD? Have you been diagnosed? The way you sound sounds like someone who has ADHD. I've also had therapists ask me if I wanted to be assessed. I also did online assessments. Some of the official ones, one of them was like a 300-question questionnaire. And it all points to I might be on that spectrum. And

I would say I probably am just seeing how like,

I can just really get completely obsessed with one thing and consume my entire life around that where everything else kind of goes to shambles. And for so many years, I've focused it on bad things or things that weren't great, like my video game addiction. That was really bad. And I don't know whether or not I have ADHD, but I feel like I have some of those traits. And when I was constantly smoking all the time, I felt like

Like, it did feel... Like, I would question myself on, like, why is it taking me this long to learn something? Or, like, why is it taking me this long to, like, just process this thought? And, I mean, that's kind of what weed does. It kind of... Like, I...

Shout out to Andrew Huberman. His podcast really helped me out a lot because I know there's people that have different mixed feelings about him, but listening to his episode on cannabis and like the effects on the brain. And he talked about how, I think it was in that episode where like the creativity and how like the, the, the, the,

the mind on weed basically gives you like a whole bunch of different thoughts, but it doesn't let you be able to like focus on one thought. And I think that like, I felt like that a lot. Um, and then after not like smoking for a while, I realized that I really was impacting the way that I can clearly focus on things. And even though I still struggle with focus sometimes now, I don't know if that is a product of like, you know, still, um,

we have a lot of distractions and, or maybe it's just because like my whole life I've, I've been smoking weed and maybe it impacted my development of my brain like that. Or maybe I do have ADHD, but I, I still can tell a noticeable difference between

between now and how I was a year ago where it was just very hard for me to focus on like anything. And even if I was working on something, it was just like, like my mind would wander and I would just like be in a haze from just kind of being under the influence of, of cannabis. So it's just like, like,

Yes. Now I feel like I can focus better, but I still feel like I have struggles with that stuff. And I don't, again, I don't, I'm not officially diagnosed, but I, I try my best. Like I have like, you know, I have like little notebooks and I have like, you know, my, my notes app. And I, I'm, I'm actually going back to using Apple notes versus a notion, but I used to try to use notion and I try to like set myself reminders and I try to like, I try to do deep work. Right. And I try to like focus and,

stay off of like social media but then it's just like you know there's again we're in a very busy world I don't know if it was before the interview or like where we were talking before we started recording but you were you were kind of talking about how you don't answer emails until you know like only a couple times a week and you don't like the distractions and I'm trying to

start doing more of that. And I'm trying to limit distractions and I'm trying to be able to focus more on deep work and like get away from having so much going on in order to better focus my attention on things. But to answer your question, yeah, I can,

see a noticeable difference from when, you know, like this is your brain on drugs versus like, this is like sober. And, and it does feel a lot better. Yeah. The egg on the frying pan. And again, there, there's a millennial, um, Gen X reference that not many of the younger, uh, people watching might get that reference, but yeah, that's exactly what it kind of feels like. And, um, it, it is crazy, man, because like when, when I was learning how to code, um,

I remember I had, like I said, it was about 10 months, and when I was doing all the networking stuff, even studying for the exams for the CompTIA A+, I was smoking pretty much regularly, and I didn't stop smoking until...

I was like thinking I was getting job ready. And I was just like, if I get drug tested, I don't want to fail a drug test for a potential job. And I had stopped and I, you know, just as just something to talk about in that sense, the minute I got the job at Caesars, I like that day I went and I like got some weed and I, and I smoked and I remember having like

just like this breakdown of like, what am I doing? I just went like four months without doing this. The minute I get a job and I'm freaking out, I'm like, what if they do a random, what have you know, all this stuff. And like, there's been so many moments like that in my life where it's just like going back to the addiction. Like I did that the same thing for the Washington state job, uh,

you know, I kind of stopped smoking for a little bit beforehand because I was worried I was going to get drug tested. And then when I got the job, we moved to Washington. I waited to like officially start. And like the end of that first week on the job, when I was like, all right, I'm safe. Went right back to it. When we went to Europe, you know, there were, didn't have weed in Europe. And the,

like the minute we came back and I remember my wife just being so disappointed in me. I mean, we were at the airport, we picked up the car and I immediately stopped at a dispensary. Oh,

on the way to her parents' house. And that's just how addicted I was to that. Yeah, I could go a whole six months in Europe without it, but I was drinking every single day and feeling like that was normalized because I was trying to make up for not having the weed. I don't want to go too far into talking about addiction. No, no. I mean, this is really good. This is... Because...

Again, like you had the wherewithal and the discipline to like cut it out of your life when there was some extrinsic reason. Like I could get drug tested. This could cost me my job. But when left your own devices, you just went right back to old habits. Like the moment you could, you reverted.

And yeah, I mean, that does show that even as an addict, you had the conscientiousness to know when you couldn't get away with it. My biggest regret was, like you said, that you stopped drinking as soon as your kids were born. I wish I would have done it as soon as my kids were born. I am sad and disappointed with myself that I allowed such a long amount of their childhood for me to be...

under the influence of substances and that how that made me like just, you know, not be as present as I could have been or, you know, maybe put me in a bad mood when I shouldn't have been, you know, and then I, I just wish if I could go back and do one thing different, like I wish I would have just stopped sooner and I wish I would have stopped for them right away. And I, they're a big, they are a big reason why I stopped. But like you said, like,

I think an addict is never ready to stop until they're ready. I just wish I would have been ready a little bit sooner for the sake of my kids not having to deal with the stuff that they probably had to deal with that could have been avoided had I just stopped a little bit sooner. But that's another reason why I refuse to let myself go back to...

my old ways. And I finally, I get it now when addicts are like, no, I can't just have one sip. I like, I wish I could. And I have like, I have no problem with people drinking. Like, like if my wife wants to have a couple of drinks, like she's extremely supportive. And for a while she was, she like, she didn't drink. And like, she used to be like someone who would like smoke weed occasionally. Um, but like she, she didn't drink for the sake of me trying to stop. But even like,

like she went out with some friends. I was like, that's fine. You're able to have a drink. Like I don't look at people who are able to smoke a little bit on the weekend or able to have like a few beers while they're watching the game. Like I, that, that's fine. I just, I can't like I, and you know, some people will be like, oh, that's weak minded or like you don't have enough willpower. I was like, if you only knew how much willpower I actually do have to be able to say that I can't,

You know, like, yeah, that's a great, great way of thinking about it. Like just, yeah. So I really appreciate you sharing that so candidly. And this is like one of the prouder moments in the history of the free cocaine podcast that, that, um, you know, we have a guest who talks so openly about this,

Essentially, like you are weak for the substance that you've been exposed to and you've been doing it for so many years. But it's a victory of kind of the cerebrum over the cerebellum or whatever part of the body controls. It's like you are smart enough and you have the force of will to set aside this thing that you would love to just keep vegging out and doing for the rest of your life.

So, again, I'm like super duper proud alongside you with everything you're accomplishing. And here's to many, many more years of sobriety so you can really be there for your kids and so you can continue to do what is necessary to achieve your dreams and provide for your family. On that note.

If you're cool, I've got a lot more questions I want to fire, like kind of rapid fire. For everybody who's still listening, I hope this has been a really exciting journey into Dorian's life. And we're going to learn a lot more from him because there is an incredible amount that we stand to learn from this guy. So one of the things – a lot of it's going to be around personal finance and kind of like how you've managed to –

To put yourself in a position where you can travel abroad and do all these things. And yeah, I think it's like super cool and super inspiring and it'll be super useful for the audience. So one of the things that you talked about just very briefly in one of your episodes, you use this term and I immediately, it jumped out at me and I was like, wow, I need to ask him about this. What is lifestyle creep?

Oh, man. So lifestyle creep happens. It happens... I think the person I heard the best describe lifestyle creep was Naval Ravikant, or at least how...

how to not be affected by lifestyle creep. And it's usually like when you have a, um, like if you go from like making $30,000 a year to a hundred thousand dollars a year overnight, like it, it's probably less, it's probably going to be easier for you to still live. Like you make $30,000 a year. Right. But it's when you start going from like 50 to 70, um,

To 90. And then you basically, it's almost a Parkinson's law of finance, right? Where it's like Parkinson's law is where if you're given a certain amount of time to complete a task, you'll always find a way to fill that task with that exact amount of time. Like it'll always take you just as long as you have to get it done. And I think that with finances and lifestyle creep, it's like if given a certain amount of budget, you will always find a way to spend money to get to that goal.

allotted budget. And I started noticing that where you don't intentionally do it. And I think that my wife and I were really frugal. When we bought our first home, you might listen here and be younger and be like, oh, you were lucky you got to buy a house when you were a

a waiter and your wife was a blackjack dealer. But like the truth is like, man, we saved so much money. Like we saved every penny that we could. I went from like having a terrible credit score to like slowly building it up. And then in that year when we were really like, let's try to save up and see if we can get a down payment on a house and do the right thing. And, and like we, like we saved up, uh,

to the point where I was able to get my credit back, we paid off all of our debt, and then we had just enough to get an FHA loan, which is, I think it was like 7% at the time. And we also got a fairly affordable house. We bought a foreclosure. So there are things that kind of like, you didn't...

$180,000 loan back then was more than what $180,000 is now. But I think that with the money that we were making, we were still like, like, like lower middle class at the time. And then we were really like kind of cheap. Like we, we, we didn't spend a lot of money. And then slowly once, um,

we sold our house and we made some money from our home and we had some extra money and I started making more money. Little by little, you start, you start finding ways to spend that money. And then, um, on top of that, you had inflation and all of these things recently where now like the lifestyle has creeped up on you. And when we came back from Europe, you know, we were just like, Hey, like we want to live in a nice neighborhood. All right, well that's,

almost $3,000 in rent for, for, you know, a house in that neighborhood. Hey, we, we need the, a nicer minivan. Well, mind you, I'm not talking about driving a Tesla or like a really nice car, but like a $35,000 minivan that's financed, uh,

on top of like, you know, whatever, 14 or 15% interest and making $600 payments on that. Plus your rent, plus this, plus that next thing, you know, it's just like, you're, you're making $120,000 a year, but you're spending every dollar of it. And that's,

now you just, any extra money you make, you find a way to spend it. And it's really easy for you to let that lifestyle start creeping up on you because you make more money. You think you can spend more money and you don't realize how it just happens. Yeah, absolutely. Like I have discussions with my wife all the time. Like, like we're getting swimming lessons for the kids. I'm like, that's $35 for 30 minutes of swimming lessons. Like,

I remember when I used to work at the grocery store and $35 was like what I'd make after a shift basically. And like the notion that we're giving that to somebody who's, you know, lifeguarding it and it's teaching our kids, you know, so, so I'm like, do we really need to do this? You know? So we have like all this tension and discussion. And that brings me to the question about, by your, your wife, like a lot of people who are listening to this are married or who are in longterm relationships. And at one point you had to,

convince your wife that it was okay for you to quit your lucrative job or scale back your lucrative job, parking cars and doing the jobs you were doing so that you could focus on learning the code. And, you know, there's the saying like behind every great man, there's a woman. And it's probably more like,

accurately modernized to say, but behind every great person, there's, there's a partner. Can you tell me a little bit about that dynamic between you and your wife and how you were able to negotiate that so that she would continue doing her job, but you could focus on building your longterm skills. Yeah, man. You know, I think the best thing that someone can have for them is someone that believes in them. And, um,

I can't say I've had that my whole life. Many people who are raised in a good household might have that. And it's just something that I wasn't used to. And then I met my wife who, she's too good for me. I don't know how I got so lucky to get such a good partner.

And during the time when I was learning how to code, I think I mentioned it a little bit earlier where I was just like, you know, I, I talked with her and I was just like, just give me some time to do this. And, and, and,

And like, I'll make it worth your while. Like, hopefully like one day I can work and you can, you can stay at home if you choose to. And you can like focus on raising the kids and like that aspect. And like, let me do this now so that we can both like benefits from the fruits of our labor or, or the labor I was putting in. And I also think that like, she saw that I was working hard.

working hard like never once like when i said that i was learning how to code and i gave up everything like never once did she come out and she saw me playing video games you know like it was like she'd come out and i'm watching i don't know some youtube tutorial on the on the tv and i got my laptop on my lap and it was just constant and there was a lot of stressful moments too and

I had my own doubts, but she always kind of like, I believe in you. And I think just having someone who's able to say, I believe in you, it's a life changer. I think it's really important to have that for children as well. And I try to encourage my kids into doing anything that they can because I do think that to a certain extent, people could really accomplish anything they put their minds to with enough time and enough effort. I think that it is possible.

Um, just many of us stop believing in ourselves or don't have anyone that will be there to like, to help us along the way. And, um, and you know, the gosh, I remember, you know, um, she, she went on her medical leave for, for having the baby and then like she had to go back to work and, um,

there is that time between before I got the job and she was like back at work and, you know, she's like breastfeeding and she's working graveyard shifts. So she's away from the baby at night. And it was just like really hard for us to like balance things out. And she had the work days that I wasn't working. And then eventually it was just like, Hey, like, let's, let's get you away from your job. We'll, we'll,

we'll take on a little debt if we have to, but like, that'll give me more time to focus on this. And then like, it'll get you from having to like be at work and I'll try to like pick up an extra shift if, if I need to. And like, we'll figure it out. And like, we'd started taking on debt and it was, it was definitely a team effort. Like, yeah, I learned how to code on my own, but I think like nobody's, nobody's truly self-taught, right? Like, like if it wasn't for YouTube and Google and like the people that I met at meetups and, and like all of the different resources and, and like,

things that I used to learn how to code. Like, yeah, I'm the one that sat there and spent the time to do it. But there was a lot of things that taught me and helped me to learn. And I think that my wife allowing me to take all of that time to do the stuff that I did

is one of the main reasons why I was able to be successful in accomplishing it and being able to finally get a job. And it was also a big reason why I kept one night at the club because we did get into debt and we had to try to pay that stuff off. And by selling our first home, we were able to get out of our debt completely. And we're still kind of riding that

a little bit and we have savings and I feel like I try to be as responsible as possible, especially with like traveling and stuff and the money that comes in from YouTube. Like I don't want to dip into our life savings in order for us to, you know, live my dream. But at the same time, like my, this is part of my wife's dream and like she's very much involved in a lot of the decisions we make. And, uh,

I always have, I always say I have to be careful because whenever I say I want to do something, like if I'm like, Hey, we should really, you know, go to Asia. Next thing I know she's buying the tickets.

Cause she's like, you know, I'll, I'm the dreamer, but she's, she's got a lot of the follow through and a lot of things, especially when it comes to planning and being organized. Like I'm really not very good at that stuff. Right. And maybe it goes to like what we were talking about earlier with like being a little scatterbrained or maybe it is ADHD, but she's the one that like,

books all the flights. She books all the, the accommodations. She kind of plans out the itinerary. She figures out where we're going to go. And like, she's always been like that. Even like when, when I was learning how to coach, she would like try to figure out like how we can organize our day so that I would have more time to learn. And just like having that support, like, uh, you know, um, it, it definitely is like a, an advantage that I, I,

I don't want to say an advantage or took advantage of that, but I'm saying if I didn't have that, would I have been able to do it? Yes, but during those moments of doubt and those times that I felt like I wasn't going to be able to do this thing and then to have someone by my side to be like, no, you got this. That made all the difference. I say this joke often because it's not a joke. It's 100% true. When I first started my YouTube channel,

I would record the videos in the evening, like once the kids were asleep in the back room that we had, that was like a second living room. And then I eventually made an office out of this little like

thing that stretched out. That was kind of like a shed shop thing in that house that we bought. But I would stand there in that living room and I'd had things scripted or things I'd talk about. And I talk into the camera super loud and she'd be like, Oh, you're going to wake up the kids. But she said that like, she's like, I always knew that you were going to make it on YouTube, even though, even when I thought your videos were terrible.

because I would make her watch my videos, right? And she's like, that was like all about learning how to code. I'm like, look, watch this video. I'm talking about how I got a job as a developer. And she's like, I know how you got a job as a developer. Can I please go to sleep? I don't want to watch this. But she'd give me like brutally honest feedback and she'd be like, that doesn't make sense. That's kind of like long-winded.

I don't know about this. Like is if a beginner is watching this, like whatever you said, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And then like I would improve and like she would be extremely critical in the most constructive way. And I think that some of those early videos would get,

There was things that made those videos better because of her and her feedback. And yeah, I always think about that quote of like, even when your videos sucked, I knew you were going to make it. Because that just sums it up perfectly of our relationship. Brutally honest and super supportive at the same time.

Yeah. So one thing that strikes me about you and your wife is you all plan pretty long term. And a lot of people, they're so focused on the task at hand. They're focused on trying to pay the rent or trying to...

buy a new car to replace the clunker that's literally falling apart and they're spending more money on repairs than the value of the car. And so trying to keep up with health insurance and all these other different things, uh, at least here in the U S, um, that it's hard to look up from the, those tasks that are right in front of you and kind of see like the longer road ahead. But it sounds like you have planned pretty far ahead. And, um,

Can you talk about the role of planning?

I wish I could say that I plan more than I do, but I think that something that is a weird thing that I've been able to do like a lot of my life is that I, I kind of think about like the end goal first and then like just figure stuff out along the way. Like this is going to sound weird, but there was a lot of stuff that maybe it's funny because I've made fun of manifestation and I've made fun of those things before because I feel like they're a little bit too, uh,

Hocus Pocusy for me, but there is a bit of like when you start thinking about what it is you want to do and then just start taking steps in that direction, right? Like that's pretty much what I've done with everything. There was one point in time when I remember I was working as a, it was like one of my first jobs in Vegas and I heard people talk about like being a valet attendant and like how well they did and like how much money they made. And I was just like, I'm going to be a valet attendant. Um,

you could say it kind of just fell in my lap and I got that job, you know, through like, I got that job from another job from another, you know, like eventually I ended up working at like probably one of the better places to be a valet attendant at, um, you know, that, that club was like, we, we made good money working at that club. And I also worked at like some other like big places. And I, and I, and I, and I kind of accomplished that. And then I, I kind of did the same thing with learning how to code. It was just like,

you know, I, it was a bit of a rocky start and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do at first. And I was just like, Oh, I'm going to become a network engineer. I'm going to learn Linux. But then like that turned into like the other thing. But I eventually like the goal was to get a job making X amount of dollars that would allow me the freedom and potential to be able to like work remotely and like have like stability. And I accomplished that. And then like when I started the YouTube thing, um,

My goal was to just grow a channel, and I didn't know what I was doing when I first started. Back in early 20s, I did a little bit of acting, doing some student short films, and I did a couple other really low-budget movies and stuff like that. So like

Maybe I had a little bit of camera presence, but if you go back to my very first videos that are still uploaded on YouTube now, you'd be like, that guy had zero camera presence, right? But I just knew that to get to step Z, I need to start with A, but I don't know what B, C, D, E, F, G are, but I'm going to figure them out. After I start with A, I'm going to go to B. And I try to plan, but I'm not...

it's strange because I can't see too far out because if I start planning too far ahead, I get very stressed out. And that's something that happens to me very often because I started getting overwhelmed with everything that I would have to do to get to that point. And I've noticed that the thing that works best for me is just to kind of like set my mind on the goal that I want to accomplish and then just start figuring out like, how do I get to those things from where I'm at right now? And just, you know, we have, we have all the information we will ever need, uh,

right at our fingertips, right? We have Google, we have tools like ChatGPT. We have things that really make our processes easier. And I think that if you just kind of

those to your advantage. And if you are trying to accomplish something and want to get there, like that's the best way to do it. That's how I did it with learning how to code. That's how I did it with YouTube. Like I would stay up late, watch videos on like, I learned about lighting. I learned about cameras. I learned about angles. I learned about focal points. I learned about different types of, of, of like how,

Like, so much about, like, editing and putting... Making B-roll and... All of that stuff started from me making a video in a closet with a cell phone. You know? Super awkward with very bad lighting to, like, now, like...

maybe my most recent videos aren't the best example, but I have some videos where I put a lot of effort into that stuff. And you can see like, it looks like a highly produced video. And I'm talking about the ones I've edited personally where like, that's not the same guy, but it was just part of the journey and being able to see like super

far enough ahead to where I'm like, okay, these are the things I gotta learn. I'm not gonna worry about that big monster in the corner that I eventually have to get to because in order for me to get to the final boss, I gotta beat all these mobs first and then get through the mini bosses before I actually even get to that level of

And I know that that doesn't directly answer like, how do I plan? But the truth is, is that I don't really plan. I like, and like, I just think about like what it is I want to do. And then I just kind of start. There's some planning involved in between there, but yeah,

I wish I could tell you that I lay out every step, but I don't because I, again, it starts stressing me out because it's most of the stuff that you try to accomplish is a ton of work. And when you start breaking things down to, to like the smallest granular step possible, it becomes almost procrastination where I think that the truth is a lot of getting stuff done is just doing the thing. And if you sit there and I've done this and I know other people do it,

And you start like over researching stuff and like you, you consume all the content, you read all the books, you watch all the, all the videos, you, you, you read all the blogs, you plan out this big list and then you've spent all this time and you haven't even done the first thing where I think it's just better for you to do those things and like learn as you go and make your mistakes, learn from them and just try to get better and like keep repeating the process until you're eventually at the point where you want to be. Right.

Yeah. I guess. So will you hit on like a lot of times planning can be a form of procrastination and at the end of the day you just need to put your fingers on the keyboard and start planning.

Getting the code done or doing whatever task it is you seek to do. You talked about tutorial hell and how people get trapped into kind of preparing for building the projects rather than just starting building the projects, things like that. So, I mean, I just, I can't underscore how many actionable takeaways you've given us, how much...

context you've given us by spending so much time talking about your life story, especially the past few years, your learning to code journey, your journey into sobriety, the family dynamic,

you seem to really care about your kids and just making sure they have an amazing childhood. And, uh, yeah, it's like super inspiring. And, uh, I'm just going to encourage everybody who's made it this far. Be sure to check out Dorian's channel. And, uh, you know, I'm really hyped to see what you do over the next year or two. Like, uh, I'm optimistic that now that you've lifted this fog that, uh, you know, you said it took like six months just to kind of return to like a normal baseline. And, uh,

I feel like you're just getting started. Like you're younger than me. Uh, you're in great shape from doing Brazilian jujitsu for years. That's one thing we didn't even talk about is like, I encourage everybody to check out Dorian's video. Like, uh, I destroyed my body for Rose, but it saved me, you know, like, like it's such a cool video, man. So I'll, I'll link to that in the description too, if you all want to watch that. But, um,

It's just been a blast finally sitting down and talking to you. And I know we talked like a long time ago, like many, many years ago, but like actually talking to you at length and being able to record this and put this out there so everybody can learn from your insights and, you know, hopefully incorporate some of your, you know, advice, like take what seems to work, what seems relevant and leave the rest. But I'm sure that there's something here that pretty much everyone can take away just by

for their own coding journeys, for their journeys into adulthood, into parenthood, if people decide to go that route. I think it's super inspiring, and I just thank you for making so much

out of your busy Saturday morning that you could have spent hanging out with your kids, sitting here talking in front of a microphone to another guy talking in front of a microphone. All good, man. I really enjoyed having this talk. And yeah, I remember our first conversation way back when I first got started. I think it came from...

a Reddit post that I commented on. And then you let me into that secret society discord of, of, uh, programming YouTubers. And, uh, I'm no longer in there cause I've had so many, you know, existential crises where I decide I'm not a programming YouTuber, but I, I still remember how much that impacted me early throughout my journey. And I remember you telling me like, you know, just be careful. Don't burn out a lot of, a lot of people who make YouTube videos and try to do this stuff, burn out. And I, I burnt out a few times, not, not because of,

you know, that you gave me good advice. I think it just kind of happens within like taking, you know, all of that and then coming back and being able to like chit chat and like be on the free code cast, uh, free, free code camp podcast. Um, from like, you know, just remembering how I was using this platform to learn how to code, to be able to actually interview or be interviewed by the creator of the platform is kind of very serendipitous. And like, it,

I would have never thought that I would end up here talking to you, and it's been a blast, and I really appreciate you having me on. Awesome, man. Well, everybody tune in. I hope you've enjoyed this. Until next week, happy coding.