#164 How to become a self-taught developer while supporting a family
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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this. So you can learn. It's going to take you time to get the fundamentals down. But...

Just the dedication is what's needed. Consistency is what's needed. If you have an hour a day to learn something, go to FreeCodeCamp, go to YouTube, go wherever, and learn something for an hour every day. And just keep learning. That is my advice. Keep learning. Welcome back to the FreeCodeCamp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. This week, we're talking with Jesse Hall, a.k.a. Codestacker.com.

He's a software engineer and a developer advocate at MongoDB. He taught himself how to code using Free Code Camp while he was raising his kids and working on the Best Buy Geek Squad, fixing people's computers.

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You can join these chill human beings and help our mission by going to freecodecamp.org slash donate. For this week's musical intro, with yours truly on drums, guitar, bass, and keys, we're going back to 1983 with Elevator Action. Elevator Action

Jesse, great to have you on the podcast, man. How's everything going with you? It's going great. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, and I'm hyped to have you here because you're somebody whom I've known and admired for many years. I've enjoyed reading your tutorials and watching your videos on YouTube. And you are pretty emblematic of somebody who has taught themselves how to code while juggling realistic, like, everyday problems. Like, how do I keep the kids fed? How do I pay the rent? Those things. Yeah. It's hard sometimes. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Well, before we get into your backstory, which we are going to go deep into because you've got a really interesting one, I am excited to hear a little bit about what kind of tools you're working with these days. Yeah. So, um, uh,

I really love all of the AI stuff, honestly. So that has really helped me in my, my everyday job, but like, you know, a cursor windsurf, um, get up copilot, et cetera. Like all the things I go back and forth between all of them, new models come out. And, uh, those are the, those are the, really the tools that have been helping me so much lately. Yeah. So you have like fully embraced, uh, leveraging AI to get more done. Exactly. Um, yeah, I, yeah, we'll get into that later. I don't think AI is really going to take your job. Yeah.

Okay. So that is the – everyone can rest assured this is like guest number 170 or something that has said AI is not going to take your job for those of you who are still freaking out about that. I like to say AI is not going to take your job, but that won't necessarily stop the AI salesperson from convincing your boss that AI is going to take your job. Yeah.

Yeah, that is very true. That is very true. Yeah. So dust off those communication skills and continue to advocate for yourself within the organization and the value you provide as a dev would be my humble advice there. So Jesse, you're at MongoDB. I just want to say like MongoDB frequently provides grants to Freecode Camp to develop courses around some of their tools. This is not like a sponsored video or anything like that. The fact that you work at MongoDB is just a coincidence. You and I have known one another for many years.

So, yeah, you're working as a dev and as a developer advocate at MongoDB. What is that like day-to-day like? It's teaching developers. That's the basic definition of developer advocacy is teaching and helping developers. And that's what I love to do. So I create content to help.

help developers understand how to use MongoDB along with various technologies. That's the key part that I really like to focus on is not necessarily MongoDB, but how do you use these other technologies alongside it? How do they work their way into the tech stack that you use, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well...

You are a little bit older, even slightly older than me, and I'm 44. But you look really young. You do have a little bit of gray in the beard like I do. Yeah.

And you came up like kind of in a different time. I want to dive back into your past and talk about your journey into coding because it's an interesting one. And I think it's one that a lot of people can relate to. You're a self-taught dev. You do not have a four-year computer science degree. You don't even have a four-year degree. You studied like a kind of esoteric field that's

outside of software development, which we can talk a little bit about. Maybe you can tell me just a little bit about your, uh, your upbringing in Louisiana, uh, which is a state in the American South. Uh, yeah. Like, like what was your childhood like? So, so I grew up in a very small town. Uh, it had one red light. Uh, I grew up on a dirt road in a trailer park, uh,

Very modest upbringing. And when it came to going to college, there was no money to go to college or anything like that. So in my senior year of high school, I actually got a grant to go to a community college.

And I really wanted to take something computer. I always knew growing up I wanted to do something with computers. I'm always tinkering with things. We had a Packard Bell growing up. And so I was always like, I remember I upgraded the RAM in it from, oh, I don't even remember, like 16 to 32 megabytes, something like that. I can't remember exactly, maybe 64 megabytes. Anyway, so always tinkering with things. Knew I wanted to do something with computers. But at the community college, there was no computer course. There was zero courses.

there was one class that had computers in it, but the only thing closest to that was electronics technology. And so that's what I went to community college for. So I graduated, um, high school in 97 and graduated community college with an associate's degree in 98. So did that pretty quickly. Um,

And then did not do anything with that degree in electronics at all. From there, I kind of got into computer hardware and worked for some mom and pop shops building clone computers. Okay, what is a clone computer? Yeah, this is basically... I mean, the kids do it these days as well. They build computers from scratch, right? Just build...

a blank case, build a computer from scratch. That was kind of the thing back then because there was no Dell. This is before Dell. Like there is, there's really no mainstream computers. Um, and if you really, uh, wanted to, it was actually cheaper to build your own as well because nobody really knew how to do it at the time. There was a very, it was a new niche, right? So there was these mom and pop shops popping up and they're building computers and they're selling them. Um, clone computers, basically a no name computer.

And so that's what I started out doing, building clones. And then it kind of got into repair work, computer repair, and then moving on into some business-related, like enterprise servers and networking, et cetera. And that took me a few years to go. I think that was about a 10-year span. Yeah, so when you say repairing computers, you're talking like Best Buy, Geek Squad-type stuff where somebody comes and fixes your computer, right?

Exactly. I actually did work for Best Buy for Geek Squad. What was that like? I'm curious because that's like a time capsule. Everything is like you have to take it to the Genius Bar if you have a Mac and then they send it in and you get it back. The whole thing is kind of like an opaque experience. Whereas back in the day, you'd be like, all right, well, your sound card was dislodged.

I don't know what kind of stuff came up, but like, like what, maybe you can describe the difference in how like support is handled today to the extent that it is. I mean, like it seems like people just want you to buy a new computer at some point and there's kind of like planned obsolescence in the computers and, and there's like an active, you know, fight for right to repair and stuff like that. But like, like,

Take me back to the 90s working as a Geek Squad. Yeah, so there are tons of... So like, you know, defragment your hard drive. Like there's all these different terms and things that you don't really think about today that maybe the computers just have it built in where it does these...

self-sustaining tasks by themselves but anyway uh there was a lot of um manual repair work being done and so you know i drove the the the beetle the the volkswagen bug right with the i don't know if you've ever seen one of those with the black and white kind of like looking exactly yep so i drove that around to people's houses fixing their computers uh fixing their wi-fi etc um

And like you would go in and we had a disc where you put the disc in and it would analyze, it would look for viruses, would analyze all the hardware, see if there's any issues, et cetera. And yeah, you, you'd have some parts back in the, in the bug and go fix it, pull it apart, fix it. Yeah. Um, we also did warranty repair work. So if you had a computer computer under warranty, we'd fix it and it'd be all for free.

Yeah. So people would essentially subscribe to the service of being able to have the geek squad on, on tap as exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's kind of where it evolved into the business side of things because a little known fact, Geek Squad actually has a business side where they only deal with – instead of consumers at their houses, they only deal with businesses. Like corporate internet and stuff like that? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I would do – like for instance, I'd go to a hotel and I'd install Wi-Fi throughout the entire hotel.

Um, or I would go to, to a building that had a hundred, uh, like a law firm and they had like a hundred employees there. And so we'd go set up all the, all the computers and the servers for them and, and the networking equipment and all of that. Yeah. Um,

So yeah, that, and, and, and I don't know if that's around the time when I transitioned into software, because there was, there was, like I said, there was tons of software that we used to kind of keep track of things on the backend, uh, internal pieces of software. And there was this, a lot of manual effort, a lot of manual entry of things and pieces of software that we had here and there that didn't communicate together. And I'm like, man, I'm wasting so much time doing all this paperwork and this mundane, these mundane tasks, uh,

and how can I automate this? And I always thought that software development was like rocket science. You had to be super smart for this kind of thing. But of course, I just went to Google and did a quick search and found Python. I could write this little script and it would do these things for me. And anyway, I wrote this little script that shaved an hour off my day every day. It just did all these things for me. And that's kind of what hooked me into software development.

Yeah. And my journey is very similar in the sense that like I also presuppose that programming was beyond my mere mortal mind. And it turns out that it's actually totally learnable and that it's just like building any skill like –

You get some incremental value. It's incredible, actually, how much incremental value you get from just learning a little bit of programming. And there are diminishing returns as you become more and more of an expert. But you're still getting gains as long as you invest the time and energy in learning and be intrepid and don't be daunted and let technology intimidate you. So it sounds like you kind of overcame your apprehension and just dug in and were able to make your life better.

measurably better not doing an hour of paperwork every day that sounds fantastic exactly exactly and even before that like I always knew what was it Adobe Dreamweaver yes so like I had played around with Dreamweaver for a while and

and uh did some what was it called um before was it flash or just before flash it was called something else anyway these animations and stuff like that yeah yeah yeah so i was like playing around with these animations and stuff like this is so cool but you know i could never get a job doing this there's no way this is like i'm this is just hobby just like playing around kind of thing you know um but yeah it's it's really turned into the opposite yeah and so uh

the backdrop for all this is you've got kids at this point. Like you had kids pretty early in life. Uh, you had two of them, uh, and, you were focused on trying to provide for your family. Can you talk about like home life during this period?

Yeah. So, so, um, I had my daughter when I think I was 24, somewhere around there. Um, trying to think. Yeah. Yeah. Somewhere around there. And that was right around the time when I was working for geek squad. And, uh,

and then the transition into software, that was, that was a bit of an interesting thing because I had no like formal background. And at that time they really did want formal backgrounds. It self-taught developers at that time were very minimal in the industry. Like all the other developers that I was working with, they, they had all gone to college. They all had degrees. And so I,

That was an interesting experience because a lot of imposter syndrome happened then. But it was an interesting transition just trying to keep up with technology. But it's something that everyone has to do. Even after college, you constantly have to keep up with technology. So I didn't really find...

at a detriment because of not having that college background because the things that I'm doing that I was doing as an everyday developer were the things that I had already taught myself. There weren't things that

The other developers were also teaching themselves these certain things because there were a lot of things that they didn't get taught in college. So I found out that college maybe gives you the fundamentals, right? But when it comes to the on-the-job kind of training, that's the more important thing. What are you actually going to do in your job?

Those are the things that you kind of learn on the go and that most people learn on the go. Yeah. Yeah. That's certainly what I've experienced. Like I often am envious of people that went and got a computer science degree and were able to go straight into industry and learn. And I've got lots of friends who have CS degrees and work at like, you know, hardcore engineering firms and stuff doing like software to like, you know, make sure trucks work.

Don't like have like problems with their engines and stuff like that while they're hauling all this weight on like a highway. Mission critical stuff. Code that's going on satellites. Code that's controlling military stuff. I definitely think that – oh, go ahead.

No, no. I think I got off topic because you were asking me about my kids. Yeah. Well, I just want to close out this thought real quick that it is certainly beneficial to have that foundation. And it's not anything you can't learn. I mean, these are just books you can grab off the bookshelf and get some computer science textbooks. Free Code Camp has plenty of free courses, including from places...

like Harvard or University of Michigan professor, Dr. Chuck, you can learn computer science. You can learn everything you would learn at a CS degree, but you won't necessarily have the structure and the camaraderie and all the extrinsic pressure to perform and to turn in your assignments and pass the exams and all that stuff. So to some extent, you don't get the exact same experience, self-teaching that you would get if you went through a formal education system. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And then...

So I had my daughter around 24, and then when I married my wife, she also had a son. And they happened to be two months apart. So they're both the same age. And so then again, going through this whole transition between hardware to software, and then I guess I was an engineer for close to...

12 years. So I was still working for Best Buy. I transitioned from Geek Squad to Best Buy Corporate as an engineer. And so I did that for 12 years and then just kind of got bored, I guess, and started creating content and really found out that I...

I like to teach developers, like to help developers. I did that there, you know, with, with colleagues, like helping, helping them, but like, how can I do this on a larger scale? How can I like transition into another, another, I guess, career within tech. Right. Yeah. And so that was another like scary, scary moment because, you know, another transition at that point, I guess my kids were like mid teens and, and that was a scary moment because I,

you know, it's just something new, obviously. Is this going to pay off? Like, should I change? Did you have money saved for college? Like, would you paid off the house? It was everything like just gravy over there. Or was there still a lot of uncertainty in your life? Yeah, no, no, of course not. Nobody plans ahead like that. Who does that? Yeah.

No, you just jump. You just, you just leap. So, yeah. So, so I, like I had, so I created, I decided, well, actually let me, let me back up. Let me tell the actual story. So, so my kids are in their teens at summertime and, and, and they're like, you know, playing video games and they're, they're, um, you know, just watching TV, just wasting time. Right. So I'm like, how, what can I do to get them to like, at least be somewhat productive even, even during the summertime. Yeah.

And so I had them like come up with like, what, what is something that like a business idea, like something that you could do, um, to, to like create something over this, the course of the summer. And so they both actually came up with the idea of creating YouTube channels. Now this is before I created my YouTube channel. This is, this is, you know, before all that. And, and I'm still an engineer at Best Buy at this time.

And so my son wanted to create a YouTube channel for gaming, of course. And then my daughter, some like makeup fashion sort of channel. And I said, okay, let's do it. And my son, he never recorded anything. My daughter recorded a video, but she never posted it. And so I decided, okay, let me like prove a point here. Like if you set your mind to it, you can do anything. So I decided, okay, I'm going to create a YouTube channel.

And this is like a crazy idea because I really considered myself, I consider myself an introvert, like getting, like being here on the podcast with you. Like this is not something that I ever dreamed that I would ever do. So created a video, put it on YouTube and it did really well. Like, okay, this is kind of weird. I created another video. It did really well. And, and I said, I'm not going to even tell my family about this and I'm just going to wait and see what happens. And if I get to like 300 subscribers, I'm,

Maybe I'll, I'll, I'll tell them. And, you know, so within a month I got 300 subscribers. I'm like, what is, what is, how is this? You know, anyway, so I tell them and they laugh at me. Like they, they like what? No, you're, you cannot be a YouTuber. You're my dad. You can't do that. Yeah. Um,

But the point is, you set your mind to it, you can do anything. And I just continued. I continued the consistency. That's really the point where I found out I really like to teach. I really like to help developers. And so the channel took off and then wrote some stuff for Free Code Camp. And then...

Oh, and then I met James Q quick, very, very good friend of ours. And he told me about developer, developer advocacy. And I said, what is, what is this? This is the thing. This is like basically what I'm doing now for, but somebody is going to pay me to do that. That's kind of strange. Um,

Um, anyway, that's like the, maybe the condensed version of, of that portion of the journey. So going and transitioning from an engineer to a developer advocate and teaching developers. Yeah. And, uh, James can quick episode number one 53. If you want to learn more about him.

There you go. I had no idea that he had such a profound influence on your decision to go into developer advocacy, which is really just, you know, developer teaching devs how to use different tools and creating tools around that to like, uh, make it easier for people to adopt a company's technology, such as MongoDB as like a backend as a service or a database. So, um, yeah,

Did your kids find inspiration in what you did and start posting their own videos? Did that work? Of course not. Of course not. No. No. And they're pretty old. They're 22. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my kids are really young by comparison. So I'm trying to imagine how far out, extrapolate out all the different life experiences and stuff you've had that I haven't had yet. Oh, yeah.

Well, a new one coming up in two weeks. One of my daughters is getting married in two weeks, and the other one is planning a marriage in like two months. So yeah, it's crazy times right now at this household. And you mentioned your other daughter. So you have a daughter and a son, but you mentioned this that I'd never heard of before, but I thought it was really cool, and I thought it was worth pointing out, sharing, and commending.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so I have another daughter. I call her my daughter. We, we came into our life when she was around 14 and,

And, uh, and she just didn't have a really great upbringing, great family life. And so we just kind of took her in. Um, we, we couldn't officially adopt her, but you know, we, we call her our, our daughter. So, uh, yeah. So, and again, like we're, we're planning her marriage, uh, coming up in a couple of months as well. And, and she's a part of the family. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. And you all are based here in Texas, uh, where I'm based. I moved to Texas from San Francisco before the pandemic and you moved here like, uh, a little earlier than that from Louisiana, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I've been in Texas maybe close to 20 years, 18 to 20 years, somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, um, I'm, I'm curious to see, like, hear kind of like what life is like and how it differs, like living in, you know, um, midsize Texas city, as opposed to, you know, what you described as like a dirt road with a single stoplight town. And like, like a lot of people listening might be in that proverbial dirt road, single stoplight town. And, um, would you encourage them to try to make a break for the city?

Well, okay. So yeah, for sure. Yes. I'll say yes. As soon as I could get out of that little town, I went. So I was, uh,

Let's see. It was in 98. As soon as I graduated that community college, I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Yeah. I lived there for a while. And then I moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. And then I moved to Houston. So I did live in Houston for about four or five years. Mm-hmm.

And then now I live in a small, yeah, very, very, very large. It's like the fourth largest city in the U S yes, for sure. Uh, and, and the, the one thing that I, that I truly miss about Houston is the food.

such a diversity of food there. It's amazing. Um, and then we, um, we decided to move to a smaller town. It's not, it's not a very small, I mean, it's maybe 50, 60,000 is the population here. So it's not, and there's a mall, there's, there's all the conveniences here. So it's, it's a nice town. Um, but, but Texas is, is like the size of some countries. So it's like twice the size of Japan. Yeah, exactly. Just in terms of landmass and population wise, it's,

It's not nearly as high. So the population density would probably be like a quarter of Japan or something, an eighth or something like that. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. And so the west side of Texas is all desert. The east side is all forest. And that's where I live in the forest. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I want to talk a little bit about...

How you think getting into software development has changed? Because a lot of people listening to this are interested in becoming a developer. I'd say our audience is like one-third working developers, one-third university students, high school students, and one-third people trying to transition into software development. And that describes me. I am a career changer. Of course, you can read my book. Just Google, learn to code book, and it'll be the top non-

promoted response in Google probably. And you can read my journey of course. And you can also listen to many episodes of the free cocaine podcast where we've talked with people like Jesse who have transitioned into software development through unconventional means that don't involve necessarily going back to school or going and getting a master's degree in computer science or going to some intensive program.

Just teaching themselves. Uh, like what, first I want to dig into your methodology a little bit more and then we'll kind of like talk about how things may have changed since you taught yourself. But like, what were the main tools that you used to learn early on? So YouTube, YouTube is, is the main tool. And, and, um, the main, honestly, I want to say the main tool is digging in and, and, and doing it.

So like a lot of times, um, and you, you've maybe probably heard this term tutorial hell where you just like tutorial after tutorial after tutorial, you just keep watching and consuming and consuming, but you never actually do anything. So the, really the way that I learned was I had this thing again back. This is the, before I transitioned from engineer to software developer, I had this thing that I wanted to build this idea, um,

And I just dove in and started building it. And as I came across an issue, I would Google, YouTube, et cetera, like figure this thing out. Right. So it was the learn by doing experience that really got me.

I guess that's how I got started anyway. I think that answers your question. Yeah. And when you say YouTube, how were you approaching YouTube? Because obviously YouTube is this vast library of... Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know where to start. Free Code Camp alone has nearly 2,000 full-length courses online.

On YouTube. So it is a proverbial C that you can absolutely drown in if you don't know how to swim or know kind of which direction you're heading and things like that. Take us back to that moment where you're watching technical tutorials on YouTube and you've got a project that you're working alongside. Was it just the project that drove the entire thing, the immediate needs of the project and just-in-time learning? Yeah, for sure.

For sure. Yeah, it is that simple. Seriously. I come across, I get this error or whatever error. Maybe I'm trying to figure out how to set up my environment, for instance. How do you even get started? Set up your environment. So I go find a video. How do you set up your environment for this? What tools do I need to install, et cetera? Watch a video on how to do all of that. And then I guess the other...

thing alongside that at the time, especially was Stack Overflow. So you have an error pops up, whatever. Okay. Go to Stack Overflow, type in the error. Somebody else had that error and then here's the solution. Right. So just a lot of Googling, Stack Overflowing, YouTubing, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's interesting you mentioned setting up a development environment because one of your most popular courses is how to configure VS Code, which is, I guess, an open source editor maintained by Microsoft. But it is essentially kind of like an IDE in many respects with all the extensibility and the libraries and everything. I kind of consider that an IDE environment.

in the realm of like Eclipse or, you know, JetBrains tools or Emacs or something like that. Like, you can go really deep and you can add a bunch of functionality with VS Code. And I'll just, like, this is not sponsored by VS Code or Microsoft, but like almost everybody on the FreeCodeCamp engineering team uses VS Code. And it's a tool. So,

You wrote this course and you learned early on how to really hyper-customize VS Code to do exactly what you wanted it to do. Would you consider that optimizer mindset of, oh, I need a tool that handles this? Were you just constantly trying to refine your workflow as you were learning the code? Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

You're constantly reaching for tools, and a lot of times they might be in other areas. So how can you put all these tools together? So VS Code can be as lightweight as you want, or it can go as heavy as coding in Java. It could be a full IDE, like you said. And so because there's so many extensions, so much customization available, there's so many options out there. So it really depends on what is your use case. Are you a web developer? Are you a Python developer, et cetera? And there's...

tools for everything, for testing, for the whole range of software development. All of that can be in VS Code and it can make your life so much simpler with it just being there and easy to access.

And VS Code, like you said, being open source, a lot of other tools are based on VS Code. Like Cursor is a VS Code fork, and Windsurf is a VS Code fork. So VS Code, I would say the majority of developers use VS Code to some degree. Yeah. Just like you may not use Chrome, but you may be using some sort of Chrome type browser, like Edge or something like that. Arc. Arc, yeah. So one question I have for you is...

You talked about using a lot of Stack Overflow, a lot of Google, a lot of YouTube videos to kind of fill conceptual gaps and things like that. How has learning new things changed for you now that we have more AI-powered tools just over the past two or three years? I still...

I still think you need to understand the fundamentals. You still need the basis. And really, the way to do that, well, my approach to this is the docs.

especially if a, if a, a tool that you're a library that you're trying to use, whatever has really good docs. That's where I learned the most just by reading, reading the docs again by doing. So a lot of times they'll have like a quick start tutorial and like, you know, here, let me just get this going real quick and just do it, like try it out and then refer to the docs. And then if there's something like, you know, further down that you need more explanation for that, that's kind of when I reached to YouTube now and, and AI related things, um,

I use AI after I already know the fundamentals because if AI is writing my code, I need to be able to read that code and understand what that code is doing. So I don't just allow AI to spit out some code that I don't know how it works. So I still think that you need those fundamentals. You need to understand what the AI is doing for you. And once you get to that point, that's when the AI can really help you because it's writing code faster than you can write code. But you're also able to read it and understand what it's doing.

Yeah, let's say hypothetically that you were teaching yourself, but you were teaching yourself with the hindsight of somebody like yourself mentoring you. Yeah, yeah. So let's say hypothetically we've got like some – I don't know if you've ever seen like Primer or any of these weird time travel movies. But basically you can send like messages back to yourself and you can say like, hey –

okay, now do this. Don't do this. You know, like, like how would you coach yourself? If let's say hypothetically, we had like Jesse Jr, which was like, you know, a multiplicity style clone of, of Jesse. And you had to help your clone, uh, be able to like pay the bills and raise a family and stuff like that. And like some parallel universe, uh, he, the,

the other Jesse's in jeopardy and we need to take the successful Jeff for this and, and, uh, put him in touch with like the less successful Jesse, help him get on his feet. Right. Like how would you advise that Jesse, uh, if that Jesse were, you know, learning to code in 2025? Yeah.

So, very similar. At one point, my son asked, like, how can I learn how to code? I want to do what you do. And I'm not just saying this, like literally what the thing that I told him to do was go to free code camp. And I said, start here. I'm not just saying that. Honestly, that is what I told him.

Because again, you need those fundamentals. And so I said, start here, HTML, like do this, and then go over here to a little bit of CSS and then learn this JavaScript stuff. That's what I told him. And that is what I think to even today, that is what I would say would be a great start for everyone to learn those at least fundamentals. And then you could also, again, you know, use cursor or, or, you know, some sort of AI to,

to then help you write things. And if you don't understand something that it wrote, you can highlight that and ask it questions. What is this doing? Why is it doing this? Et cetera. Um, but again, like,

Something like FreeCodeCamp that gives you those fundamentals and then the docs of the tools that you're using, use those docs. And then Google or asking AI questions, et cetera. I don't think it has changed that much. I think AI is helping us. Maybe it's becoming the new Google. It's becoming the new, like, let me ask a question, et cetera. But we still have to be careful. We can't let it do too much work.

Too many things that we don't understand. You still have to have that basic knowledge.

Yeah, and this isn't really anything new if you think about the old copy-paste keyboard for Stack Overflow. I met with Joel Spolsky, Stack Overflow co-founder in New York, and he had that little copy, like Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V Stack Overflow keyboard. And this has always been a problem with people including code that they themselves don't really understand into a code base. Like, please...

For the love of all that is holy, do not open pull requests with code that you just copy-pasted from Stack Overflow or from an LLM that you yourself do not understand. How much time do you think it really saves using a tool like Cursor when you already know what it's doing? And what are the kind of example tasks where it really shines as opposed to where it's not super useful? Yeah.

Um, you know, honestly it has changed so much, even in just like the past six months, every new model that comes out is getting better and better. So my answer to this would have been different six months ago, but right now, um,

especially like the boilerplate code of like setting up a basic CRUD or, or like, especially now that it can really understand your entire code base in the repo that you have open, it has really gotten significantly better. You still have to tell it specific things. Like if you're using a certain version of, of react or, or felt or whatever the case might be, it might try to use an older version. So you still have to like be on top of it, make sure it's using the,

the version that you want and it's writing it in the way that you want. Like for instance, if it's using react, if it's using next JS pages router versus app router, and sometimes it might go back and forth using two different things. So you kind of have to stay on top of it. Again, you have to know what code is writing to make sure it's doing it the

proper way. Sometimes it'll pull in extra packages that you don't need. Like it'll pull Axios in for instance. And like, I don't want Axios. So I'll have to like specifically, this kind of comes back to prompt engineering. That is another thing to get really good at. Um,

I would say just before this, Googling was an art to find your answers. Now prompt engineering is an art to find your answers and to make sure that it's giving you the proper output, the proper code, etc. So I have to say, don't use Axios, just use Fetch.

Yeah. So a lot of just specifying and reining in the kind of tendencies of these LLMs is just grab stuff willy-nilly and just like, okay, this does the trick, right? And a lot of times they're based on the frequency with which they observe a certain data structure or approach to a design pattern or the use of a tool. So they might just gravitate toward...

like the most common types of tools and libraries that may not necessarily be best practice because there are a lot of lazy developers out there.

That are just using tools for stuff that they don't necessarily need to use and introducing a lot of additional complexity and potentially future breakage and stuff like that into their code base. Exactly. And these LLMs, they've been trained on who knows what repositories out there, right? And so some of these repos are old and are using older technologies, outdated technologies. So again, you just kind of have to prompt engineer, give it some guidelines, give it some just...

details of how you want it to build. And then once you do that, it really does speed up the process. Um, but it does take, it takes some getting used to. Yeah. And like how much faster would you say, like, let's say hypothetically you got a new project at work and you have to sit down and you have to build like some new tool that demonstrates some new aspect of MongoDB, like a practice project or something like that. Um, how much, I guess, additional, um,

like, like multiplier do you get to your velocity as a dev? Uh, when you incorporate these tools, when you incorporate, when you also include like the time that you have to spend kind of like babysitting the AI and crafting a prompt and doing stuff like that, like how much more productive, I guess, if you had to assign a percentage, uh,

Do you think you are with these tools? Yeah, this is something that I do all the time. We have to build small demos, right? And then from those demos, we create tutorials and videos, et cetera. And so building these demos, it could take, depending on what we're trying to demonstrate, it could take anywhere from one to two days maybe to build this small demo out. But with AI, I could do it. I could just pull up V0 and do it in like two hours.

Okay, so assuming a day is like eight hours, you're going from eight hours to two hours in terms of being able to build this demo product, which again is not designed to withstand the rigors of the real world. It's a demo. But that is work that you would have had to do that is now much faster. Much faster, yes. Okay, awesome. And let's say hypothetically that you're working on some code that's actually going to go into production. What are the limits of this kind of like –

gain when you really need to consider like readability, testability, and like, uh, all, like all the people in QA are going to come back. All the people from security who are going to say, Hey, what's this? You can't include this. Like all that stuff. When you really have to like put it in the context of a code base where you've got a lot of different competing interests, um, that are like trying to ensure that that code is as objectively good as possible, I guess, uh, but like meets the central, uh,

kind of tendency of a team's code, I guess. Yeah. I mean, again, if you've got the right prompt engineering and the right constraints on the AI and it's writing the way that you would normally write using all the syntax, then it's just going to require that extra bit of

reading over it again you have to know what it's doing you have to make sure that you know what this code is doing right and and uh and then within a production environment you've got um your your your code testing you've got all these other you know things that you're going to run it through um in especially through ci to make sure that everything meets all those requirements for production so if it wrote something that is not quite right it should come up in your testing and

And then you've got your format or et cetera to make sure it's all, you know, meets all the production guidelines. So it doesn't, it definitely still speeds it up. And especially when you have all those constraints in line, again, back to AI is not going to take your job. AI is going to help you with your job.

It's just, you have to learn how to, I mean, that's another course right there. You could take a course on how to use AI to help you be more productive, but that is, that is, I think what the ultimate goal of AI is to make us all more productive. Awesome. And yeah, free cocaine has lots of courses on topics similar to that. And several people have been asking if I would be interested in creating like a course, I personally on how I use AI cause I do use it a lot. But again, like it's, it's,

just an accelerant, it doesn't necessarily help me do anything novel. Um, have you found instances where it has like done something novel where it like taught you something without you specifically prompting like, Hey, what does this mean? Or something where you saw some pattern and you're like, Oh wow, I never even knew that this existed. Have there been surprises like that? I can't think of any, honestly. Okay. So, so,

If you were learning to code, let's go back to, you've got the parallel universe, Jesse, who's, you know, in his forties and he's got kids and he's just been working as a, you know, a technician, like an engineer, uh, fixing people's hardware for the past 20 years. And he never like deviated and went on the fork in the road where you went, where you like learn like software engineering and stuff like that and started creating tutorials and all that. Um,

Let's say, hypothetically, you're communicating with that Jesse, and he's still stuck working at Geek Squad, if it still exists. I might. I think it's... I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably a diminished form of what it used to be. But he's going in, and he's setting up corporate networks and configuring machines for local offices and stuff like that. And he wants to get into software engineering. How would you advise him to approach Geek Squad?

that endeavor considering that now there are AI tools that can dramatically speed up software development? And at what point would you encourage that Jesse to start, um, incorporating AI tools to his workflows? So, so people learn differently. Um, I'm a very visual learner and that's why I kind of default to videos. So like, like watch, watch, um, one of the, the eight hour long

videos on free code camp that gives you like the fundamentals right that's that's the visual learning that i am you can learn from ai like you could say uh you know ai you know teach teach me html and it will like you can spend your time going back and forth with ai and asking it questions and like you could learn that way if that's how you want to learn sure i would just be very hesitant of

of writing code with AI when you don't understand the code that it's writing. Right. So you really need those fundamentals. So if you're a very, um, uh, if you like, like to learn by reading, find, find a, uh, uh, you know, reading content, like on free code camp to, to learn something. If you're a visual learner, there's, there's YouTube. Um, just, I would suggest there's so much free content out there.

I hesitate on telling people to buy a course, go, go, go buy this thing and do, do, you know, this is going to be the end all be all. You're going to learn everything you need from this thing, right? That that's, that's, that's not my approach really. It would just be like, you know, find the thing that you want to build and build it. When you come across hurdles, find the answer to those hurdles. Yeah. Learn by doing is, is, is my motto.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that that kind of project-oriented learning where your own

Kind of like adventure in terms of building something that you want is steering what you need to do next. And you're really responding to the project itself. And the project kind of becomes your boss. I love that kind of learning. And that's a big part of how I learn different things too. Like I'll bite off more than I can chew with like some –

you know, musical piece that I'm, I'm trying to, you know, do, I do these covers of video game musics and stuff. And like, Oh no, now I have to learn how to reharmonize all this stuff because it was only two voices, but they do all this weird skipping to make it sound like it's six voices or something like that. Now I've got to figure out how to like do that on instruments instead of just programming like the, the sequence, uh, the step sequence, uh, music, the way that they do it for videos. Anyway, I digress. But like, like I'll often let those types of projects, uh,

boss me around. And it's like, okay, this project that I started is now my boss. I'm no longer the boss of the project. And now I have to go and learn this thing because the project demands it. And I, you know, set this machine in motion, but now I'm ultimately beholden to it.

And I kind of think that's a cool thing because it's not like anybody else is in charge of this machine. It's just his own thing that you got going and you started building a momentum. And to an extent, like a legacy code base can be a great, uh, similar boss in the sense that you've got this giant legacy code base and the, the software engineers operating on the best, uh,

and best practices of their time using the contemporary tools. They built it this way, and now you need to figure out how to maintain it. And at what point does it make sense to rip stuff out rather than just maintain? Usually it makes sense to just maintain the existing stuff. And there's this famous, like, a total rewrite of the code base is usually the last thing a company does before it goes out of business. But the project becomes...

You're boss. And I love that. Um, and, and do you find that often happens, uh, when you're, when you're building something that, that you're just still to this day, like learning just in time based on the needs of the project?

Yeah, for sure. I think that's, that's the tip. I mean, that's the norm for me. I don't know if it's the norm for everyone, everyone else, but for me, it's like, nobody knows everything. And, and especially a lot of students will say, well, I don't remember all of the JavaScript syntax. I don't remember all of the commands. I don't remember all the, all the methods, et cetera. Right. So like, nobody knows everything. You have to look stuff up. I have to look stuff up.

Every day. I can't remember everything either. And that's kind of where the AI comes into play. Especially as you're manually typing out code, you've got the auto-completion to help you there, especially if you're using TypeScript. That's very helpful. I'm a web developer, obviously, so that's the tech I'm talking about. So TypeScript and unalloyed good? TypeScript is amazing. I love TypeScript. Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. It's so beneficial when you're writing code. It almost writes the code for you without even the AI. Just because of the way it's designed and the constraints that are imposed there, it's like creatively... You know all the methods that you have on this. It's going to tell you if you did something wrong right away. Yeah, and just a quick note for anybody who's not familiar with TypeScript, it's a superset of JavaScript. It's essentially, if you already know JavaScript, you learn a little bit extra and you know some TypeScript and it...

Exactly. Compiles into JavaScript transpiles into JavaScript. And then, uh, essentially you've got like the same performance and everything you get with, with JavaScript, but you have less, uh, errors because it turns out like, uh, duck typing or, um, what do they call it? Like a dynamic typing of variables and things like that. That's, that's a common source of error. Like you created an array and then you try to use that array to do something you would do with the string, uh,

Boom, error or worse than an error. It actually does what it thinks you want it to do, but that's not what you want to do. And you have some like thing way down the stack that is like failing and you don't know why it's like selling, selling, failing. Right. Uh, because you didn't use TypeScript. So free code game has migrated our code base almost entirely to TypeScript from JavaScript over the past few years. Yeah. It's just type type safe dot JavaScript. Um, other than TypeScript, like what are some other tools that you've just like really been

blown over by, uh, bowled over by over the past few years that you've like, you're like really anything you want to hype up or advocate for, uh, in terms of making your life easier. So like, like Kevin Powell, I am also love CSS. I love writing CSS. And, um, I have, I have kind of gone to the dark side maybe according to Kevin is, um, I really loved Hellwind. It's

Tailwind is amazing. It is really like, like writing regular, just plain CSS. That's, that's totally fine. I still love doing that, but Tailwind just makes it so much faster to me.

And then another one I want to call is V0. I've just been using V0 a lot. It just really helps just ideate and build things really fast, and it uses the tech stack that I like. It uses all of the technologies that I like. So that also has sped things up for me. Yeah, V0, I'm not super familiar with this. It's by Vercel, who developed Next.js, and they've got their own kind of like...

hosting as a service, like a serverless type platform, I guess would be a way to describe it. Exactly. I can't remember his last name. Ray. Yeah. Roch. Chill dude. Innovator in the space. And Kevin Powell, just the king of CSS episode 154. If you want to hear me talk with Kevin Powell about CSS and why you need not fear it.

But you're a Tailwind guy now, and you're also using vZero. It's just like a rapid prototyping tool. What do you do with it? Yeah, exactly. You just give it a prompt, and it builds an app for you. And the first version, the vZero of it, it's not going to be perfect, but you keep iterating. And you can select portions of the app that you want to change and do things, and you just iterate, iterate, iterate. And then it gets you like 90% there, and then you can pull it out and just...

You have the entire code base. It writes in various different tech stacks, but what I like is Next.js, Tailwind, ShadCN UI. ShadCN, yeah, this is a newer one. Yeah, so ShadCN is just basically like components, like pre-built components, and they're based on Tailwind as well. You can customize them however you want. It's just very unopinionated components.

Um, so I, I just like building with that stack and then I can just pull it out of these zero into my environment and just keep, keep iterating after that. Yeah. And I think, uh, these tools are really exciting because, you know, developers like,

In the movie, the person just opens up the blank code editor and just starts coding really quick and everything comes together really quickly. In practice, if you look at architecture, you look at music production, you look at anything, there's usually some sort of scaffold there, some sort of extremely rough draft, like a demo. And then

you use that to like think about more structurally like, okay, I kind of like where this is going or I don't like where this is going. This, it needs more of this. It needs more cowbell X, Y, Z. And then next thing you know, you've got like an extremely rough prototype. And then you use that as kind of like a V zero, like a version zero of what you're ultimately going to build. And so like even in agile software development, they have the notion of like a spike, right?

Right. You're not trying to write like robust code. You're not trying to adopt best practices. You're just trying to like feel your way through the dark and figure out, okay, this direction we want to be heading. We want to do you doing something roughly this way. And then that saves so much time because otherwise you're going to just develop a whole bunch of software and you're going to like be typing your HTML editor and stuff like that at the top of the document and spending so much time doing stuff that ultimately you're probably going to throw out.

So that is the argument for using these kind of like fast prototyping tools. It's also an argument for using tools like

You know, Figma is the one we use a lot with Free Code Camp. So you can just kind of mock things out and you can even mock the functionality and stuff. But it's just being able to communicate. And this is one of the things that if I can get on my soapbox for a little bit, like people don't understand about software development is they think like we're writing code or something like that. And like, that's what a dev does. They turn coffee into code, right? The code is the output usually, but the actual process of making those tiny decisions, like

Sometimes, you know, maybe millions of tiny little decisions through the course of building, you know, a version one of an app or a feature or a library or something like that. Those decisions are essentially taking taking all those decisions and codifying them in code, similar to like how you would make decisions about how you want a society to be. And you'd write the code.

for the society, like the code of Hammurabi, right? The giant, you know, Poneglyph thing, whatever it's called, in the middle of the town square that everybody, like the eye for the eye, you know, like basically the rules through which you expect the software to operate and, you know, all that stuff. And so...

I will start to ease off my soapbox by saying that that is why I don't think developers are going anywhere, even if we have Star Trek-level tooling, which we will hopefully have, and maybe much faster than the 24th century. But yeah. So...

And I'm thrilled to hear that you're so hyped about these new tools and that you're quickly adopting these tools. You're not just clinging to the comfortable and the familiar. And that's something I've always liked about you is that you never rest. You're never at like the apex of the hill. You're like halfway up, you know, and then you're like looking around to see like, am I actually going up the right hill or should I climb a different one? Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's really the, um, I don't know. That's that I feel like that's the key to being a developer is that love of learning and that love of just like, you know, continuing to, to find new, new ways and not getting stuck in, in old methods because you could be stuck somewhere in a rut. And, and I was stuck in a rut for a while and just in, in, in, in life, I guess, engineering. And then I feel like I've kind of, um,

I don't know, reborn. I don't know. But just that love of learning, that's what you can't lose. You can't get stuck in a rut. You have to just continue to see what's out there, learn new things, learn new methods, learn from others around you, et cetera. Like just continue consuming and innovating. That's what we need. We need innovation. We don't need AI's boilerplate dullness. We still need humans to help it innovate.

Yeah. I want to go back to that stuck in a rut, Jesse, and kind of look at what your life was like then. Because I imagine a lot of people listening to this have been stuck in a rut. I've been stuck in ruts before. As a school director, I just kind of let myself go, and I was just checking out video games from Blockbuster. If anybody remembers Blockbuster, I just kind of like Batman, you know, that.

What was the one? Arkham City or something like that. That was a good one. And I'd just check out a different game every weekend and I was like, all right, I'm done with work. I'm going to go home and just game. And that was like several years. I just basically stopped moving and I stood still. I mean, I was still making little incremental progress as a school director and learning new things and

related to my job, but like, I feel like I started to ride that kind of like diminishing returns curve. And I was going to, maybe if I kept doing what I was doing for 20 years, I'd be like a 10% better, you know, school director or 20% better school director or something like that. Right. Um, and like most of the gains that you get, like the dramatic gains you get at the beginning of something like I already done that. And I hadn't forked off into a new path as a software developer. You know, there's no,

There is no like limit to like the different frontiers. You're going to go explore the field is so deep and rich. Yeah. But let's talk about you. When you, when you identified you were in a rut, like what that was like and how you felt. Yeah. So that was, so initially learning,

and then transitioning into the developer role. That was exciting. That was an exciting time learning, learning tons of things. And then doing that for several years, that's kind of when I was in that same situation, same rut of, okay, I'm just going to do my, my day job, go home. And the same thing for me, it was gaming. I was like, wasted so much time on games. Um,

Um, and so honestly, I didn't know that I was in that rut until that story of creating the YouTube channel, like that really like reignited something in me. So I was in a rut for quite a while and didn't even know it. Um, and then just learning this, just this new thing and transitioning into a new role, et cetera, that that's really what sparked it for me.

How would you compare the rate at which you're learning now to the rate at which you were learning when you were fresh out of community college, working, building computers and things like that? I would say it's like 100x more now because I think mostly because of the fact that it's so –

Learning material is so easy to gain. Like back then, I'd have to go to Barnes and Nobles to get a book and I'd have to sit there and read the book, right? And now I can sit on YouTube. Nobody wants to pay it. You just sit there and you're like, maybe you pay for a copy and then you just sit and read the book in the bookshop because the book's like 50 bucks. Exactly. And maybe you, you know, like...

You have to imagine what's on the CD-ROM that's glued in the back of the book. Exactly. Because you're never going to actually be able to afford to own the book, right? Right. That was what it was like when I was learning. Exactly. And so now you can sit on... I could pull up a YouTube video and watch it at 2x and I'm learning. I'm just constantly consuming new ideas, new content, learning new things as fast as my brain can allow me to. Yeah. I mean...

Is that a, is that a good feeling? Like, like, are you happy that you went on this learning journey and you didn't stay in that rut?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I love learning new things. Technology has always been like the thing that I enjoy. And so that's the thing is you want, you need to be able to enjoy what you do, enjoy your job, et cetera. Enjoy the things that you're learning. If you're just forcing yourself to learn something that's not appealing to you, that's not going to be fun at all. So I enjoy these things. And one thing that I've always told all of my bosses, when I stop having fun at work, that's when I'm going to start looking for another job.

and I'm having fun at what I'm doing. So, so we're good right now. So you just can just keep having fun. Just make sure that the things that you're doing are enjoyable to you. Like this is actually my side, my side gig and my hobby. Everything that I do all day long is, is enjoyable to me. So, yeah. And I want to talk about side gigs and the evolution of your side gig. Obviously you, you created this YouTube channel and you had some like videos just completely blow up like your VS code one. And, um,

How have you approached those side gigs? And I guess to an extent, have you explained to your significant other the amount of time and energy you're splitting into those things that you could, in theory, be spending with the kids and all that stuff? Because I think that is a struggle that many of us are dealing with, like myself to an extent. Time management. Time management is definitely a thing. You have to make sure that you take...

First of all, you have to make sure you have enough time for yourself and for your family. Those have to come first. And so I've always done that. I make sure that I'm not working too late at night. I'm pretty good at time management. So the majority of my day obviously encompasses my day job. And then I'll spend an extra hour or two on my side gigs. And so...

And then, and that also includes some time on the weekends when, when, when I can. But now that the kids are out of the, out of the house, it's a little bit easier. I don't have, you know, as much to deal with right now, but you know, at the time it was much harder to find that time. But yeah, I just...

Did you have anything that you'd tell yourself when it was really late? And I know you said maybe you're waking up early to work. I started waking up super duper early and going to bed early. And that's not like some hustle bro type thing. I genuinely just think that that works better because you've got the sun. If you have kids, your kids are going to wake up at...

We call them little roosters. I mean they're basically up before the sun comes up and there's nothing you can do about it. You cannot change your kids. They're just going to wake up that early. So it makes sense if you have young kids to adapt your schedule to go into sleep early. But let's say you're waking up early and you're rising and you're grinding the coffee if you drink coffee and you're like –

trying to get some stuff in before you have to go to your day job. Like, is there anything you tell yourself when you feel like, oh man, I could just, I'd love to just lie here for another hour and hit the proverbial snooze button. Like, is there anything you tell yourself to get yourself fired up or to keep yourself pushing forward? I wish that was the case. I wish I had something good to say here. This is, but generally I just, I think about

my goals in life, I guess my, my family, like, et cetera. Like, like I have to have a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of people to take care of. A lot of people depend on me. And so, yeah, I just, I just get up and do it. But it also, again, kind of goes back to,

I'm not, this is not a grind for me. This is not something that is, um, that is like something I have to do. Like I could literally just stop the side stuff. If I, if I wanted to, I could just do the day job. I could just go about my life, uh, you know, as a zombie in my day job and not worry about any of this stuff. I could stop learning if I wanted to, but I enjoy doing this stuff. So I just get up and do it. Let me ask, like how long do you realistically think you could stop learning and just coast? Uh,

you know, before it comes back to really start to bite you in the field is competitive software engineering.

Yeah. And then Phil, yeah. I mean, you do have to, you do have to adapt, but when it comes down to like, if you were a software engineer and you're at a corporation of some sort, most like, like you mentioned earlier, most companies are, they might have legacy technology. They, most companies are not keeping up with the, with the new updates, the new tech that's coming out every day, right? They have a set technology and they might upgrade once every five years. Right. So you,

You really could coast for quite a while in a day job like that. In a day job like I have, no, I have to learn new stuff every day. I have to keep up with technology. I have to make sure that I understand anything that updates with the products that I'm working with in my day job, et cetera, right? So with the job that I have right now, I guess, yeah, you're right. I would have to keep learning. Yeah.

Well, I have some fast questions for you. I want to be mindful of your time because you're a busy dad and juggling some side projects, which we've talked about, along with a rich day job in terms of responsibility and diversity of tasks that need to be tackled. One thing that you did early on, my understanding is when you were learning to code, you did seek some professional certifications, right?

Can you talk about those certifications? Did you get Linux certifications, CompTIA, anything like that? Yeah, yeah. It was more along the lines of CompTIA and most of the certifications were around actually the hardware side of things like networking and servers. So I had Microsoft certifications, et cetera, but actually have no software certifications besides the ones I've gotten from FreeCodeCamp. Yeah.

Okay. Well, uh, I'm thrilled that you own, uh, that you have some free cocaine certifications and I will encourage everybody to check out the new certification, the certified full stack developer certification, which is essentially all the old certifications combined. And it's much more rigorous. Uh,

you may have like an older certification. You may be like, Oh yeah, I got like the responsive web design from like six years ago or something like that. Believe me, it's working very hard to continue to renew and refresh that. And Jesse, I would love it if you ever have time and you drop in there and you, uh, shoot me some thoughts on how we're introducing different concepts. Cause I love to hear from engineers in the field, but, um,

So those certifications that you got, would you say that they were worthwhile like at the time? And would you encourage people to consider getting those types of certifications? Yeah, I think so at the time, the employee that I worked for, they would actually give me a raise based on how many certifications I got. Like every time I got a certification, I got a raise.

Um, and so I'm not saying that's going to happen everywhere, but that's just, that was the case that I had. Right. And, um, it definitely, uh, is beneficial because you're again, learning specific things that you need for your day job, um, or, or, you know, whatever it is you're trying to learn, et cetera.

it really gives you also a little bit of validity to your knowledge, right? So you've completed this thing, you've got the certification. So you have this thing to prove that you know X, Y, Z.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the biggest roles of certifications is proof of learning. Exactly. Not only have you learned it, but you've met the evaluation criteria, whether that's a certification exam, whether it's building a bunch of projects that qualified you to hold that certification. And thus, an employer can kind of check that box. Like they probably know a little bit about networking because they've got the network plus plus, right?

So Network Plus or Plus Plus? Plus Plus. Wait, it was N Plus? Yeah, N Plus Plus, I think. Okay, okay. Yeah, so like...

That was so long ago. Yeah. But, okay. So using those as a tool of proof of learning. Just shout out to Andrew Brown from ExamPro. Free Code Camp publishes a ton of his courses. It'll help you pursue any of those certification exams if you want to get some vendor-specific certs and things like that. So...

Another question I have for you is just in terms of consistency, like you've done such a good job of not kind of falling back into the kind of lull that you talked about earlier where you're like, ah, it's good enough. I can take it easy. I can play video games. Do you still play video games at all? Just Candy Crush. I would tell on myself. Well, only the S tier top shelf like hardcore gamer approved games. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. But like, let's say hypothetically you had some downtime and your kids were like doing like grown kid stuff. And what would you do with that time? I would probably read an article. I would like probably something tech related, honestly. That is my hobby. That is my, it's just everything. Like I'm just constantly consuming. Yeah. Yeah.

So everybody who's like not as passionate about technology, this is what you have to compete with. Jesse Hall, who's like, well, I can be doing anything. I could go like on a hike or something. Let's read some technology articles. And if I'm going on a hike, I'm probably listening to a tech podcast. I mean, touche. Like I listen to tremendous amount of podcasts and when I'm in Asia over the summer, I like to go to Asia because my family is based like a lot of my in-laws and stuff are in Asia. And like I'll go and I'll hike up the mountains.

Um, and, and like they, you know, I'll listen to like tons of tech podcasts while I'm exercising and stuff like that. I can't listen to podcasts while I swim, but I can listen to them while I run or jog or something like that. So I'm like constantly taking that stuff. Yeah. Well, maintaining my body and doing the important, uh, obligatory physical activity, you know, like there's the old joke that like a program, what is a body to a program where it's the thing that keeps your brain from falling on the ground? Exactly. Um, yeah. Take care of yourself, please drink lots of water.

Get up every hour at least, et cetera. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But don't stop listening to the podcast. Regardless of what you're doing with those things, you can multitask, right? So it's only partially in jest. So what I want to talk to you about now, and for everybody who's listening who's like, Jesse's a great guy. I love this guy. I can't wait to check out his channel. We're going to talk about the dark side of getting extremely popular in a field that becomes popular.

After you get extremely popular at it, we're going to talk about web three. So, uh, caveat like free code camp. Uh, you know, I have a very measured approach on this. Um, we're not going to be trying to encourage you to like buy a meme coin or something like that. But what we're going to be talking about is this fascinating story of how you got really interested in web three during like a more innocent era. Yeah.

And how you became one of the most prolific teachers of these tools. Yeah. Are you ready to dive into that? Let's do it, I guess. As far as I can tell, you've never talked about this anywhere. Never. So this is legit, brand new, Jesse Hall, the new mixtape dropping. Jesse Hall's Web 3 Excursion. Excursion. Okay. We'll go with that. So set the scene. Yeah.

Web3 is getting really big. There's tons of VC money flowing into it. And you are a dev working. I think you were probably already working at MongoDB at this point, like doing a lot of... Yeah, it was actually just before I transitioned to MongoDB. So I was still an engineer and I was working on my YouTube channel on the side. So I started the YouTube channel when I was working for Best Buy as an engineer. Okay.

And then, so yeah, Web3 is getting popular, blockchain, et cetera. So I'm like, again, I love learning. I love consuming content. So I'm like, okay, what is this thing about? And so the underlying technology, great, fantastic, great use cases, et cetera. So learning about it. Okay, so let's, like I'm creating content at the time. So let's create some content around this. Let's see what it does. And so I wanted to like go through the process of like,

Explaining the blockchain, explaining Web3 and doing that through creating NFTs. And it was very just educational. Like here's the technology. Here's how you go about it, etc. And that video ended up doing really well and like millions of views everywhere.

exponentially better than all of the other videos on my channel. And so very quickly, my channel grew from that specifically, and I kind of became known as the NFT guy. I'm getting these pings on Twitter, and I'm getting every... It got way out of control. And then after that, it took me almost a year to kind of dig myself out of that grave of being known as that

that had that persona and very negative connotations comes with that, especially going from that innocent phase of just learning and like trying to understand the technology. And it's really great. It is really great technology to, okay, now there's these rug pulls and these scams and all these other things going on and having all that negative connotation then associated with, with me and my channel. So that was not good. Yeah. Yeah. And just to be clear, there is a lot of technological innovation and,

blockchain distributed ledgers and stuff like that. You read the original, like a white paper or the yellow paper, like, like the, uh, actual innovations that make Bitcoin possible and stuff like that. Uh,

innocently enough, if it hadn't gotten swirled up and everything, it might've been like a super useful technology and maybe it will be useful in the future. But what is useful right now for, I don't think this is a controversial take is mostly for money laundering and defrauding people. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

But let's talk about the process of digging out of the grave because I genuinely believe you're an innocent party here. You did launch an NFT collection that I think did like three ETH in volume, which is, I don't know, like $6,000 or $7,000 or something like that, according to... I don't know how much it was at the time. Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the whole process was how do you create digital art?

And this also came from... I have an artistic background as well. My brother is an artist. We've

I love to create things and draw, et cetera. So like, how do you create digital art and sell it, et cetera. And so, uh, the point was like, how do you build this, this app and the app? Like, um, uh, you can, you can buy it and then you, and then it like, you don't know exactly which, which one you're going to get. It's like this whole, like open the gift and see what you get kind of thing. Right. So anyway, so the whole video was how do you build this thing? And, uh,

And then when I put it on and actually deploying it to the blockchain, everything. So I deployed a collection to the blockchain throughout this video.

And, and when I, I put it up for like something very, very cheap, cheap, like I'm not trying to, again, not trying to rug pull, not trying to make money off of this. It's just like, here's how you do the thing. And, um, and it did end up selling. I think I only released, um, I can't even remember how many, I think I only released like a thousand. It was like coder cats or something like that. So you did the art and then you just use software to like basically, um,

Take this original art and like swap out colors, swap out textures. Yeah. And essentially create like different layers, 28 different versions of this or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So there's different layers. And so, um, it would just randomize and put different layers with, with different things in it creates unique, uh,

I kind of associate it to like playing cards, like unique playing cards. So you're recombining different elements. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's what it did. A very, I mean, the video is still up. It's, it's very, very educational. Shows you that a lot of great concepts, but the intent, the intent behind it was educative, but it's,

of it was a bunch of people learning how to do this thing and then trying to scam people and just get rich quick sort of things as well, right? And to this day, there's still comments of... We get these spam comments on YouTube all the time of just random things and they're just trying to get information out of you, like get into your wallet and et cetera, right? So...

Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the big problems with owning NFTs is if it's stored in a wallet like that's in your browser extension or something like that.

one malicious link clicked and suddenly, you know, the contents of your wallet can be lost. And, uh, you know, a lot of times people like it's, it's like the Schadenfreude thing, like, Oh, the rich, you know, um, tech bro lost his, uh, you know, crypto kitty or something like that. Let's laugh at, let's have a laugh at that. But, but I mean, that is a usability issue with the technology. If,

It's so easy to get the tool stolen, whatever the asset is that is of value. But again, we have the benefit of hindsight. A lot of the hype has died down over the past couple years. And now all the people that were pitching NFTs are pitching AI. Pretty much.

But, and, you know, like I would argue that AI has a lot more, I guess, immediate utility than being able to create a whole bunch of programmatically created art and then, you know, have people have like a unique experience.

identifier of owning such art. Um, yeah. And that's, that's kind of the innovation that was there. And you could argue it was kind of like a solution in search for a problem. And NFTs have always been that way. But, um, you know, there may be some legit use cases that emerge. So again, I don't want to paint us as like total true crypto skeptics here, but would you say on a balance that like, how would you weigh like being infamous for creating something that was well-intentioned?

Yeah. Was it a net positive or a net negative for you personally? Well, for me personally, I still think that the technology is great. I think that because... Well, for instance, an NFT does not have to be...

art it doesn't have to be that it could be anything like for instance an nft could be your driver's license driver's license could be an nft and that is something like on the blockchain that nobody can well i mean i guess they could steal it from you we talked about yeah how it could you know but anyway it's it's like it's a unique thing on the blockchain that is personal to you right so it could be anything so the technology behind it is is amazing so like i don't regret i

like learning the technology and like trying to teach like, uh,

you know, how it could be used, et cetera, um, in, in a beneficial way. So, but then like the, the process of everything that happened after that, yeah, it doesn't look great. So like spent about a year trying to like just double down on other content, like double down on my channel on, on VS code content and JavaScript and web dev and all that sort of stuff that started my channel and like trying to bury this NFT stuff. Yeah. Like spatula city. We don't just sell spatulas. Exactly. Exactly.

So I think I'm back to the point where it's all back to web dev and not doing any blockchain content again. Yeah. Okay, cool. And then what advice would you have for people who are trying to chase the Promethean fire? This is the latest, greatest thing. Mm-hmm.

Do you have any words of caution or for people that are creating tutorials on like things that might they might be, you know, teaching people how to, you know, harness like, you know, enrich nuclear fissile material or something like that? Just inadvertently not realizing how much harm can come from it. Like, is there some responsibility that people bear or how much of this do you think can be even anticipated?

Yeah, no, a lot of it can't be anticipated, I don't think. But obviously, if you know something is going to – could be possibly potentially misused, be very careful with teaching that, obviously. But yeah, some of it just – don't constantly chase the hype train. Like just –

Again, I like learning new things. The hype wave comes on AI and there's all kinds of things involved there. I like learning about them, but I'm not going to then teach everything. When I learn something new that's going to benefit me in my everyday life, that's when I teach it. And that's kind of the concept that I have had throughout my life.

um, you know, teaching journey, I guess if you want to call it that is, is I like to learn something and then teach it. Um, so I'm not necessarily like a lot of the things that I am, that I teach are things that I have known for a long time, but then there's also brand new things and it's, it's very, it's much easier to teach something when you have just learned it. Um, so that's kind of my, my things like I'm constantly consuming content and as I come across something that's really beneficial to me, that's when I teach it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I just want to close by asking, what is one piece of advice that you have for people who are mid-career? Maybe they're in their mid-20s, early 30s. They have kids, lots of other responsibilities, maybe aging parents. They want to get into software engineering, and they want to have the kind of career that you have where you've got lots of optionality and you get to do fun, exciting stuff. And if you don't find it fun, you have the luxury, the privilege of going and doing something different.

tangentially related to that at a different company potentially or even changing within the company to a different department or something like what is the one big piece of advice that you would give to help people get to where you are today? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this. So you can learn. It's going to take you time to get the fundamentals down. But

Just the dedication is what's needed. Consistency is what's needed. If you have an hour a day to learn something, go to Free Code Camp, go to YouTube, go wherever and learn something for an hour every day and just keep learning. That is my advice. Keep learning just as much as you can. Analyze your day.

And I'm sure you can find an hour, 30 minutes maybe, but try to find an hour every day to consume some content that will help you continue your career. One other thing that I have found is that a lot of people are kind of stuck in a rut as far as they think that they don't know enough to go to that next level.

when you're looking at job, um, when you're looking at job postings and you meet at least fifth, I would say around 50% of the things that they're asking for apply, apply for that position, that new, that up-level position or that new position or whatever. If you have at least 50% because they're never going to find somebody that knows a hundred percent of what they're asking for. Um, and, and if you are willing to learn and you've got that, that desire and that, that, that motivation, um,

You never know what will happen. Just apply. Wonderful advice. And I want to thank you again, Jesse, for joining us. I've got links to some of Jesse's writing, some of Jesse's courses, like his VS Code course. It's three years old, but I don't think it's fundamentally out of date. Like a lot of this stuff is still the same. I'd encourage you all to check it out. And Jesse, it's been an absolute pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you. Until next week, everybody. Happy coding. Bye.