#151 Automating a coffee shop chain using self-taught coding skills with Eamonn Cottrell
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I hope I will always be a lifelong learner. And we throw that term around very loosely, but I really sincerely mean it because I freaking love learning how to improve my professional self and how to go into coding and different skills and level up technically and then how to just do things smarter by nature of how I can stitch things together in my business and in my personal life. There was a guy, an underwater guy who controlled the sea.

This Monk is gone to heaven. This Monk is gone to heaven. This Monk is gone to heaven. This Monk is gone to heaven.

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 in tech. This week we're talking with Eamon Cottrell. He's a software engineer who also runs a local chain of coffee shops in Knoxville, Tennessee. Eamon, how are you doing?

Eamon taught himself to code using Free Code Camp, and he's since published 37 Free Code Camp tutorials on using spreadsheets for productivity and automation.

I also want to point out that support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com. And support also comes from the 11,113 kind folks who support Free Code Camp through a monthly donation.

Join these kind folks and get involved in our mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org. Eamon, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Good to see you, Quincy. Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk with you. You are one of my big inspirations, somebody that I often look to in terms of just like how much you get done. It's remarkable. I'm just going to rattle off a few interesting facts about you. You are the father of four kids, four young kids, right?

All under eight years old. Yes. No big deal. You run several coffee shops, like an entire chain, basically. And you work as a developer and create all these tutorials on...

Google Sheets, Excel Sheets, like leveraging these tools that people completely underestimate how much you can get done. But you can write Python, you can write JavaScript, you can put these right in there and you can write, you know, Google Scripts, you can write Visual Basic. You can do all kinds of stuff within the context of a spreadsheet to automate and simplify your day-to-day workflow. And you do all that. So it's super, super chill. And I'm proud to kind of like

Cast a spotlight on you and let the world learn a little bit more about you and how you do what you do. For sure. I'm happy to be a part of this. Thanks for inviting me on to the show. I've listened to tons of these over the time that you've done them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's start off by just diving into what you're working on right now.

So where to start? One of the probably bad things that I do is starting a lot of things, and I have my hands in a lot of things at any one time. Present day, though, my primary focus, I have my day job, and we can talk about that here in a minute, is operating this and running a coffee chain. I've been with them for over a couple decades now, so I've got a lot of time into that.

But in terms of online coding content and, uh, YouTube and articles, I, I operate a newsletter that I started last year, uh, that I started before I felt like it was time to start a newsletter, uh, called got sheet. And it's more of what you just mentioned. I write coding tutorials, uh, much, uh, inspired by how free code camp has done project based learning over the years. Uh,

to where I have little bite-sized projects or pieces of automation and just walk people through doing that. So I have that as a newsletter that goes out weekly, and I pretty well have been able to hold to that.

And I have a YouTube channel that sort of is paired up with the articles. And I'll typically, if I have an article, I'll have a YouTube video going over that. YouTube's the thing that I got into, I guess, about a year and a half ago. I've had a channel for like a decade probably, but I actually started putting dedicated time into it for the purpose of teaching others last year.

And then I've got another newsletter about addiction and recovery. So totally left field in another realm. That's actually a daily newsletter this year that I put a lot of time into and a couple other YouTube channels. So I love creating things. And like yourself, I love teaching other people how to do these things that, you know, the year ago me or the five year ago me was clueless about. And I can kind of walk people through that just because I've been through those experiences. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to talk about some of those experiences and the background that brought you through this because you are relatively young to have so much experience running coffee chains, have so much experience, like just life experience, pushing through addiction. And then, of course, one thing that I didn't mention is you

are an ultra marathoner, which I don't even know if a lot of people know what that is. But basically, you know that like, you know, a half marathon is like 13 miles of a whole marathon is like 26 miles. And then like, there's like entire categories of races that go like way into like, I don't know, like... Ridiculous distances. Hundreds, hundred plus miles. And by the way, when I say miles, this is a very like, we're both North Americans, but a mile is like approximately like two kilometers, like...

That's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to do the exact calculation, but running a half marathon, which is the longest distance I've ever run, I think was like...

20 kilometers or something like that. I can't remember exactly. But yeah, like what you're doing, it sounds... Maybe you can give us some insight into that just because that's totally novel. I think you're the first ultra marathoner we've ever had on the Free Code Camp podcast. Although I have met some other people that do it. It's just like this very select hardcore few that want to go out and spend like an entire day just running. Yeah.

And it's literally days at a time. I ran, it's coincidence, last weekend I ran a 100K race and it took 15 hours. And run is a generous term because what you end up doing, or I do, is walking a lot of it. And so it's a lot of hiking, jogging, running, back and forth. But yeah, it's a ridiculous sport to get into. Definitely not...

Not a good one if your schedule is tight and mine should be, but I love doing it. I guess I'm eight years into something like that. I started ultras about eight years ago.

Yeah. Maybe you can give us some more context. So, I mean, I have all kinds of questions about the kind of person who wants to do that because it just sounds absolutely grueling. Like me running half a marathon was just – it felt brutal on my knees. And I actually changed the entire way I run to run on the forefoot just so I wouldn't have the same shock in my knees and stuff like that. And I got my heart rate down into the 50s and I was just like –

And then since then, I've like, I just do like vigorous walking. I would describe it like mall walking in air conditioned. I'm a softie now. I can't go out in the, the, the, you know, the Texas sun and just run a half marathon. That would be brutal. But, but maybe you can talk a little bit about what, what that entails. And, and,

For everybody listening, I promise we're going to talk a lot about software development. We're going to talk a lot about automation, productivity, things like that. But I just want to peel back some of these layers on the ultra-marathoning thing.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. It started, I have always had a lifelong goal. I think we'll call it a lifelong goal of running a marathon. So like rewind 10 years ago, I think I ran my first marathon about 10 years ago and I just had gotten it in my head. Hey, I know I want to do this at some point in my life on earth. So why don't I just start training for it?

So I got a training buddy, downloaded one of these zillion plans on the Internet and just did whatever it said to do. You know, step one, day one, week one, do this, run a certain amount per day. Did that, got to the end. And I guess it was 12 years ago because I was newly I think I was newly married at that time. Yeah. To my to my wife.

And got to the end of it and I was like, man, that was kind of fun. I guess I'll just keep doing it. And so from then to present day, it hasn't been a total linear progression where it's just like more and more and more every year. But the boundary started to get pushed further. And so I'll do another marathon the next year. And then when we moved to Tennessee, which we'll talk about all that in a minute, maybe two.

Uh, I got curious about the ultra distance, like, okay, people hold up. People run more than a marathon because it was a novel thing to me. And it came to find out I had one friend, my good buddy, John, who lives here now as well. And he ran ultras and had been doing so for like 10 years. And we're talking, this guy's a machine. He runs a hundred milers left and right stuff like that. And so I started talking to him. I was like,

Tell me more. How do you, do you have to be a superhuman to do this? What's the appeal? All the things you're probably curious about. Yeah. Uh, unfortunately for me, my curiosity turned into more curiosity and then into, Oh, can I do this? And then I ran my first 50 K 50 kilometer race. Uh, when we moved here, which would have been 2017, I think the fall of 2017, you know, seven years ago or so.

And then from then on, I just, I love doing it. It, it requires a lot of time with kids. It requires an early wake up time more than anything.

If I'm not running in the morning, it's probably not going to happen. So like 4 a.m. is not an unheard of out the door and running through the streets, the suburbs where I live, and basically getting back showered before other people are waking up. Yeah. So you're an early morning runner. Yeah. Most of the people I talk to who run, run in the morning because you don't have to worry as much about sun exposure and you don't have to worry about it's not as hot.

Right. And there are fewer cars out, too, which is a nice thing if you're running through suburbs and stuff.

For almost every aspect of it that I enjoy, it's better. Now, the only downside is if you're a trail runner, too, which I enjoy trail running, and that's what a lot of ultras are fixated on trails. You know, you got to go get a headlamp, and you're running, stumbling through tree roots and everything. It's a little bit more technical. But I do most of my training on the roads, even though I run trail races, just because of that. Yeah. So...

First of all, just some quick math for people that are curious, like that are unfamiliar with either kilometers or miles. I'm going to do so 50 kilometers or yeah, 50 kilometers is 31 miles. So it's like 31 point something. Yeah. It's like five miles longer than a regular marathon. And then obviously a hundred kilometers is 62 miles, which is a lot of running. Like how long does it take you to run 62 miles? Yeah.

So I've done both my fastest 100K and my slowest 100K this year. And the fastest was on roads earlier in the year at just under 12 hours. And that was a personal milestone as well as one of my goals. Like, can I hit sub 12? The slowest was last weekend.

15 hours, right under 15 hours on a trail race that I'd done a few times before. And I'd set out to run that one in 12 hours, but things did not transpire as planned. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about like what it's like to actually run. Like, so when I run, like I would always listen to like the, like podcasts, um, and just, you know, double speed my podcast or I'd find, like I built an entire playlist of music that was exactly 180 BPM or 90 BPM. So like, you know, that is like a nice steady pace and that way you can kind of run with the beat of the music.

And that was like a comfortable pace for me to run at. Maybe people listen to music at 200 BPM or 240. Obviously, you need to cut it in half or else the music is just like a humming effect. I think at like six... And you're a musician...

you're a musician as well. So you're probably aware of this effect that like the brain can't even like differentiate between beats. Once you get up to like hummingbird rate of like 400 plus BPM or something, 500, it just sounds like a stable tone. So anyway, sorry, we're, this isn't like a psychoacoustics podcast, but, um, well,

I guess, what do you do? Do you like, I've talked to some runners who just don't do anything. They just run and they just get like in the zone and they don't think about anything. Their mind goes blank and it's a great release for them from the stress of, you know, being an executive or being a software engineer or whatever it is they do. Uh, but like, what is your routine? Let's talk, let's just like, what would a daily training routine? Do you train like how many days a week do you go out and run?

I try to do four or five days a week. And that's, you know, it depends on family commitments and, you know, my willingness level to wake up at the butt crack of dawn. But yeah, four is probably a guarantee where I'm out there running anywhere from eight to 12, 13 miles on a, you know, that's like a healthy training run for me, just keeping the legs warm. And it's a little bit of everything to answer the what do you do question? Because that's what most people ask me first. It's like,

Can't imagine being out there four or five, six, seven, eight hours. And I go through the gamut. Like I've got the podcast playlist, just like you mentioned. I've got audio books, which I know that you've mentioned the Libby service that local libraries are hooked up to. Yes.

I've heard you talk about that before, and I may have started getting interested in it when I heard you years ago talk about it. But I've been using that and my kids use it for for books and audio books alike. So I'll queue up an audio book a lot of times and listen to, you know, if it's a multi hour run, I'll listen to a couple hours of that at a time. And then I've got music and silence. So I kind of rotate between all four things because I do like music.

I do like the meditative aspect of it. And, uh, and I do like getting out there and just, okay, this is my time to decompress, get centered before the day starts, get some exercise, get the blood flow and all that stuff, and then start the day. Yeah. Um, but I'm not one that will like, I'm not going to listen to an entire audio book usually for a eight hour run and just knock it out. I've got to break it up into, you know, change it up into different sections. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and since you mentioned Libby and audiobooks, I'm a big proponent of listening to audiobooks just because reading books is great because you can be completely focused in the book. But audiobooks, you can actually do other things because most people are busy. They're driving their kids to school. They're doing washing dishes or cleaning the floor, any number of things. They're at the gym. And audiobook just fits in very nicely. And I consider podcasts and audiobooks to be kind of like –

in terms of the level of engagement. Very parallel in a lot of ways. Yeah. And Libby is this app. It's kind of like the Audible app or like Apple Books app. And it's basically like all these library chains create this thing and then they buy the license to a book, an audio book, and then they can check it out to like one person at a time. So it's kind of like...

a way of like piecing out the license. But one of the great things about that, first of all, is audio books are expensive and very little of the audio book actually goes to the author. It's that it's incredibly like surprising how extractive audible is like their business model is ridiculous. Like, so I wrote a book, uh,

last year I think, uh, about how to learn to code and get a developer job. And I listened to it on one of my runs by the way. Awesome. So if you, true story, if you want, you can listen to that audio book on the free cocaine podcast. I just like recorded myself reading the book because I didn't want to like publish it on audible. Like I take ethical issue with that platform and I try not to support it, but sometimes I do get books off of it just because I think that it's like unfair and they, they have like all these restrictions. Um,

So Libby is like a very good app if you can use it, because if you're in the United States, you're probably paying taxes and, and you might even be paying taxes if you're a us citizen abroad. Uh, and you should be able to use those taxes to, for the benefit of yourself and for your family. Why not go ahead and access those books that you've already kind of paid for through your library system. So Libby is the app that we, that I guess you and I use to do that. Um, and the other thing is like, you know, Apple books. Uh, I've gotten a few on there. I like Apple books, uh,

uh, just because it doesn't have this weird kind of like subscription system. Like audible does. You just pay, you know, you pay like slightly more for the book, but then you just have it. And it's a one off. You got it. You don't have to like cancel some like platinum plan or whatever with audible. So anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm not going to spend the entire podcast complaining about audible, but like if anybody wants to launch a competing service, I think it can only get better than audible. Uh, at least in terms of like the relationship with both end users and with, um, authors. Yeah.

And Libby is great having kids now, too, because I don't know what I would do. Like, we try to encourage reading and books over screens and everything. And, you know, we do both, but it's about limiting. But my kids listen to so many audio books through Libby. And then my oldest to read so many through there. It's like they go through them left and right.

It's so convenient for that. Yeah. And, and like we're huge users of our local library system here in Texas. We've got a number of public libraries that have like,

like agreements. So you can like interlibrary loan pretty much any book you're looking for. And we can go and use like Texas has some of the nicest libraries I've ever seen because they have, you know, like they, they, they have high property tax and a lot of that property tax goes toward things like libraries, which I think is a very good use of our tax dollars. So yeah, we, we make heavy use of that. And like,

Every week we go and we have this big milk crate and we fill it with kids' books. Basically, the kids go and grab it and we'll check out like 40 books at a time. Then we take them home and then every night we read them. That is one thing like parenting advice. Get your kids reading. Read to your kids. It's so good. I mean, it's unsolicited advice, but I genuinely think that if you're not getting your kids involved and reading...

It's one of the obvious kind of like easy wins as a parent, in my humble opinion. And it doesn't take that much time. And it's just like a huge unlock. Like nothing is greater than... Like I'm watching One Piece with my daughter. She loves watching One Piece. She loves Sanji. And then...

All of a sudden, my son is like, I'm bored. And he just walks off and grabs a graphic novel or something and starts reading it. And I'm like, whoa, that's so cool that there's this really engaging anime. And he actually would prefer to be reading. That's what I'm like, yeah.

Like parenting when, I don't know. We've had to throttle, Tristan is the name of my oldest son. We've had to throttle his reading because he would just spend all day, you know, whether it be a physical book or if he's got the Kindle version or whatever, he's like, can I read some more now? It's like, well, yeah, but let's put a limit on it. Let's do go outside also. But it is such a good win to see them just light up and really grab onto that.

Yeah. So, uh, maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, your family routine because I,

You are one of the most busy people I know. And it's because you, you know, fill up your schedule with like just tons of stuff, right? It's not like you're being pulled in a bunch of different directions by other people. You have kind of like become the commander of your own destiny and just decided like, I'm going to prioritize running. I'm going to prioritize creating these tutorials. I'm going to prioritize running this, these, these newsletters on, uh,

with Excel and on recovery and things like that. Is there any time of day where you're just doing nothing, I guess?

There probably should be pockets of it. In fact, yesterday was a day where it was just like a very lethargic day because I was sitting right here in my home office. I mean, this is where I work most of the day anyway. And I just didn't prioritize breaking and mixing it up. And people talk about the Pomodoro timers and all that stuff. I've never done that, but there's very good sense in it. For me, if I'm not...

I typically don't leave for running. Like as soon as I wake up, I'll go in, I'll make a pot of coffee over here off camera. I've got a couch and I've got like my little quiet time area where I will center myself in the morning, reading some healthy literature stuff, just spend some quiet time to start the day. And that centers the beginning of a day. And sometimes it's five minutes. Sometimes it's 30. It just depends upon the day.

Throughout the day, though, I mean, between everything you mentioned and kids and running around, taking them to and fro and everywhere, it's not really until we sit down in the evenings and we're early to bed, early to rise, both of us. And it's like 8.30 rolls around. We're both in bed like, okay, do you want to talk? Nope. See you in the morning. Wow. 8.30. You go to bed at 8.30? Oh, yeah, bro. Yeah.

I went to bed last night at like 1030 and I was like, man, I'm being a very good boy. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's more normal than what I'm doing. I will be, I will typically be in bed at eight 30 and I'll crack open a book like that begins my winding downtime. My wife usually can go to sleep much quicker, but I'm asleep by nine 30. Yeah. It's, I don't last longer than an hour once the kids are down and we're kind of settled. Yeah. And kids for anybody out there who doesn't have kids, uh,

They wake up like clockwork. I call them little roosters. I don't know if your kids are like this, but like 6.30, I start hearing noise in the kitchen. Or I start hearing the piano. I'm just like, well, I'm awake now. I guess it doesn't matter that I went to sleep at midnight and struggled sleeping or the cat woke me up 10 times. The day has begun.

And that's one of the reasons that I manufacture and really hold to my super early mornings is because if I don't get alone time, quiet time, then running time, as the case may be, it ain't happening. Because my kid, you know, the first one of ours that's up, he's been getting up lately at 530.

Wow. And we're like, whoa, hold on. Whoa there, cowboy. He shares a room with his brother, so we let him come out, but he's got to stay upstairs in our room. He can't come down here and start the day until 6. But even then, 6 a.m., and it begins. Yeah. Wow. Well, it sounds like you run a very disciplined, regimented routine household over there in the control residence. Yeah.

Well, I, I fall in line with my wife. She's, she's better at keeping the, the family household routines than I am. And, but it works out real well for both of our personalities. Yeah. So I'm excited to learn more about, uh,

maybe your, your childhood and your journey, uh, recovery. And I would like, I'm not sure what the best point to start is. I mean, we can go all the way back, but like, is there a moment you kind of like snap to and realize, wow, like this is life, this is what I'm doing. And, uh, I guess more got more serious about life. Cause I think,

Most people have a normal childhood experience and they're just doing what the grown-ups are saying and they're looking around and entertaining themselves and stuff. And at one point they realize, I'm going to be a grown-up one day. What am I going to do? And then they start realizing, damn, I have to actually make decisions my own. I can't just rely on the grown-ups forever to tell me what to do. Was there a moment for you that you remember or some kind of period in your life?

Yeah. I mean, for me, we've mentioned the addiction recovery stuff in high school, pre high school, totally normal, boring. We won't talk about all that boring. Good. Right. Like it was a normal both parents together, still together, two younger brothers in high school started drinking pot, you know, other stuff kind of got in the wrong crowd for a few years and led to a full blown drug and alcohol substance addiction.

So my moment was, I guess it was a year post high school. I had started a community college here in Knoxville and for the first time in my life was flunking classes. You know, previously school came real easy. Didn't really have to study that, you know, that kind of mode started flunking out. The addiction piece was progressing and it got to a point, you know, we won't belabor all the bad stuff, but it got to a point of like, okay, I'm 19 years old. So I was young still.

I am not on the right path and know it was not raised anywhere near. Like I didn't know what recovery was. I thought AA was an insurance company when I was in the thick of my addiction. Um, so I had, I was clueless about a lot of things.

And that was for me the time period. And it lasted like my peak addiction period was like short lived. It was a six month window where it went from bad to untenable and we got to do something. And OK, let's go get shipped off to rehab facilities. What happened for me as I asked my parents for some help and and wound up in Mississippi, central Mississippi, middle of nowhere the next week back in 2002.

So, yeah, that that was the time period where, you know, literally waking up in another state, not really sure how I got here, like cognitively knew the chain of events. But just like, how did this happen? What do I do now? And Quincy, I moved down there for a 30 day rehab deal like your standard treatment facility.

And ended up staying there for 15 years because got out of the 30 day thing, went on to the next thing, became very apparent very quickly. Probably a bad idea to go back up to the same friends, same playgrounds, same school situation that I just got screwed up in for the last several years before that. Yeah. So that that was the beginning of me.

Really growing up a few years after I should have started growing up and making a crap load of mistakes and setting back a lot of things, including my learning and education for a few years, that all that growth got stunted for a little bit of time.

Yeah. So as you were kind of coming out of, uh, like I've heard it described as kind of like a haze, like is gradually lifting because I mean, even if you're just drinking alcohol, which is probably the most common form of substance abuse around the world, um, it does like kind of gradually put parts of your brain to sleep is how I've described her and described. And, and there, so there is kind of like an awakening, awakening in a gradual return to your full normal power. Um,

Can you describe that process of like, kind of like reintegrating into daily life there in Mississippi? Like, uh, and, and, you know, maybe give us some context into like whether you were able to, uh, stay in recovery or whether you had relapses and things like that. Again, I'm not trying to, uh, go anywhere that's uncomfortable or anything like that, but just to give people some perspective on the additional levels of difficulty you faced as a result of, uh, you know, this legacy of addiction.

Yeah, sure. And I mean, I've talked about this so much through the years. No question is going to be off off bounds for you. So you're all good with that.

Hello, do we have a visitor there? Yeah, this is Hello Kitty. Her name is Hello Kitty because we were just chilling in the front yard in China. She's actually a Chinese cat, a naturalized U.S. citizen. And she just walked up. She was just a stray that walked on into our lives. And we grabbed her and we're like, she's ours now.

That's what Hallmark said. And so, you know, a whole lot of paperwork later and shots later, she's here. But anyway, yeah. Say hello, kitty. And my kids just called her Hello Kitty. So that's literally her name. We had a stray named Speedy when we were growing up at one time, walked up into the backyard. We fed old Speedy for about a week or two before he sped off somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah, but sorry for derailing you with Hello Kitty's presence, but she is a very needy cat. All good. To answer your haze question, yeah, I had much the same experience for really like –

my first year of physically being sober. And, and for me, like I said, I, I was sent down there to a rehab facility and I kind of went through the motions of the full, the full nine yards, if you will, of going through it, a multi-month, uh, inpatient and then outpatient. You live in an apartments and then you get a job and then you move to the next phase. They had like four phases of this. And, uh,

At the sort of end, I guess the last third of the whole program, part of the treatment facility's goal is to get you a job or you get yourself a job and then to integrate you into the recovery community at large. And so in addiction recovery, community and regular fellowship with others is like a huge part of, a cornerstone, if you will, of recovery.

especially the early days and weeks and years of sobriety. But then, you know, past then I'm still involved, not to the degree I used to be, but involved in, you know, reaching my hand back and helping the next person coming up these days. Um, but as that first year went by, um,

There was a period of, you know, there's a period of mourning like, oh, what have I screwed up? You know, what have I done? All that stuff. The self-pity, poor me type of stuff. And then that wears off and I went into the...

kind of invigorated, 19, 20 years old now and new start. My life is my own. I can live down here away from my parents and kind of got off into the more headstrong energy of being newly sober. And that can be as dangerous as the self-pity parts of it. But over probably the

I mean, I'm going to use a year because that's what I most often remember time period wise. Over that first year, it was just like coming up out of water and just like you've got your eyes open underwater and then you come up to the surface and it's like, oh, this is what clarity looks like. There's no more fog. There's no more. You kind of see things for as they are. And I began to see my past for what it was.

And also to look ahead at, you know, I started to see the value of having the experience and how it could be useful to others that like the beginnings of that kind of mind shift, um,

Um, as, as I really just kept doing the recovery thing that was in front of me. And like I did, I went to recovery meetings for, for years. Um, and, and to answer the last part of your question, yeah, I've, I've stayed physically sober since then. So going on 20, I think 22 years now.

And, uh, and it's been, it's been great. Like now I look back on it like, Oh, stupid. Amen. In his teen years did some dumb stuff, but I've got half of my life. The second half that I've lived so far has been really, really good and learned a lot from it, developed a ton of friendships and been able to help a lot of other people out who come in just like I did. Um,

screwed up and don't know what to do. So it's, it's been, it's one of those things where it's like, I would totally change all of that if I had a chance to redo it. But I'm also really grateful that I went through it and can, can pay it forward if you will now. Yeah. And it takes some degree of humility to, to acknowledge that like there were mistakes made and that like regrets are real. Like whenever I talk to somebody who's like, Oh, I don't have any regrets or live without regrets. And I'm like, yeah,

you haven't had much of a life. You don't have some regrets. Like what you, are you a total boy scout or were you just like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I don't get that. Or maybe that's like, that almost sounds like sociopathic to not regret like mistakes that have been made. And I do think that there are like clear, obvious objective mistakes that can be made. You can look back and you can say, yeah, that wasn't a good decision. At least that's what I can do. Um, yeah, totally. And I will say like on, on the note of like, you know,

Drugs, alcohol, that stuff. I am proudly... Even though I never struggled with addiction, when my daughter was born, I completely foreswore any alcohol. So I haven't had so much as a drink of alcohol in more than eight years. And I encourage other people, if you're looking... If you don't feel like...

You're as cognitively strong as other people around you and you're drinking even like periodically. There's a mounting amount of evidence that alcohol does hold you back. And certainly like marijuana and other kind of recreational drugs will hold you back.

So, yeah, like even little things like, you know, if you get like surgery or something, like just not requesting the heavy pain pill, but just saying like, well, let's try ibuprofen first. Like you do not want to find yourself addicted to opioids like so many Americans are. But I'm not saying like you should like it.

Anyway, I don't want to be like sermonizing or anything, but I do want to expound. Like if you want to live a life like aim is living where you're like in incredible health and you're incredibly productivity and things like that. Like, please consider removing psychoactive drugs from your life.

Alcohol being one of the most dangerous ones, in my opinion. There's really no downside to it, to at least trying it out, if, like you said, there's some negative consequence and you are partaking in something, even if it's not to an addictive level. Yeah. And that seems to be a more popular stance these days, just in general. Yeah.

Both sides of it, right? Like society is such that drinking and drugs are now so normalized to partake. But then there's a whole camp of people that are saying exactly what you did, like trying months or or a month of abstinence to flush the system, all that stuff. Yeah. And I think there's no downside to X in and out, even for a period.

Yeah. And certainly if you're like a young person, like it used to be like, it would be very difficult for me to go to like my high school class and say, has anybody here not smoked marijuana during high school? And like probably everybody would have done that practically back in the day. It was just like so normalized. And yet I talked to people all the time who just like,

never drank alcohol. Even they're just not interested in that. They've seen what it's done to other people. And they're just like, I don't want to really want to go down that alley for just like a little bit of like artificial, because it's not real drugs aren't real. Yep. It's just like things that you're doing to your brain too. But anyway, uh, I don't, I don't like, we're not going to talk about like the legality or anything like that on here. That's not the purpose of this podcast, but, but I do want to point out that like, there are many examples of people on the free cocaine podcast who just don't

Play that game, you know, and just focus on other areas, the many other areas where one can spend their time and attention during this life we have here on earth. So maybe you can talk about that progression from just working. Like, what were these early jobs like? What kind of skills were you developing? You did ultimately go back to school.

I did. Yeah. So I had failed out, flunked out, dropped out. I think I moved to Mississippi. I know it did in the middle of a semester. So I went from being like a real good student in high school to, okay, I've got like a one point something grade point average I'm transferring. So I went back to a community college in the Ridgeland, Mississippi, which is right outside of Jackson, central Mississippi area called Holmes Community College and

And I remember the the admission process. It took me about four years. So this was like four years after I had moved down there to where I finally said, OK, I'm going to get a college degree and I want to. I better just start taking classes. But in part of the admissions process or maybe it was it was post admissions. I was applying for some scholarship money because it was cheap, but I also was completely broke.

And I remember applying for this and I was I was like writing a letter somehow to the dean of scholarships or the dean of somebody. And I basically got a call from him and he said, you know what?

If you can explain why. Oh, it was it was after my first semester at Holmes because he said, if you can explain why you failed English comp twice in Tennessee and then got like an A with an A plus last semester, I'll give you the scholarship right now. So I was like, well, actually, it was because I was drunk all through the year and a half period. And then I dropped out of school and came down here. So, oh, well, that's that makes sense. Yes, you can have the scholarship.

And so that was the...

That was the beginning of what? I think I spent three and a half years doing two years of a community college program. And then I spent another two years finishing up at Millsaps College, which is like a small private liberal arts college on a business degree. I'm really taking my time. I was taking just like half load at the community college and just, you know what? I'll take creative writing. I'll take history.

I'll take this class because I like the teacher, really treating it like an extended high school, which oftentimes community college can be. And then finally got to the point of, well, I guess I should declare a major. And some of my mentors at the time, they were telling me a few different things, but the one that really resonated with me most was, well, just go get a – if you don't know what you want to do, and I didn't.

Just go get a business degree. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be beneficial or I think he encouraged accounting, but it required a couple more classes, maybe a semester longer than I could afford. So just some perspective real quick. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your flow, but accounting is the most popular major in the United States. Uh, and I think it's like business majors in general, uh,

And the conventional wisdom is if you don't know what to study, just study business because it's inarguably useful to know how business works. And that's true. That's a true statement. Yeah. And accounting, I like to say, is kind of like the physics of business in terms of like the money has to go somewhere. Where did it go? It's like following oxygen passing through the circulatory system or anything like that. Money is kind of like the oxygen of the world. Yeah.

Money is the operating system that the United States, at least, operates on. And pretty much everything involves money. And the sooner you kind of acknowledge that and...

For me, it was a big struggle. Like it just took me a long time because I'm, I was very idealistic headstrong and I didn't want to believe that it all came down to money. But over time I've kind of like come to terms with that. And, uh, I've had a very complicated relationship with money. You know, like I've talked about this on the podcast, like basically living in my car for a year after I dropped out of high school and all that stuff. And just like wanting to pretend that like,

There was some sort of... You know, hanging out in the public libraries and things like that, you can kind of delude yourself into thinking, like, I don't actually need that much money to survive. But then you think about, like, all the things that can go wrong and how little...

of a safety net there really is in society to save you. And then you start thinking like, well, I just, the rational thing to do is to make as much money as possible and save as much money as possible so that I am sure that regardless of what happens, I will be okay. And you know, later when you have a family, it becomes even more important to do this and things like that. But, but getting a business degree is a great,

way to just kind of have that understanding of how the world works and then like learning economics which is kind of like the incentives around scarcity

That gives you a framework for understanding the world and understanding why countries, nation states make the decisions they make, why individual actors in a local community do the things they do. It just provides you with this great framework for understanding the world. And a lot of it is theory, and it doesn't really hold up in practice. But it is still better than nothing like it.

A bad model is still better than no model at all in my mind. So anyway, that concludes my endorsement of you studying business. I do think it's a reasonable thing to study. I think if you don't know what to study, study computer science because that is the highest paying and the skills are transferable to so many different fields. You're going to learn lots of math, engineering concepts, stuff like that. But I don't think that accounting is a bad major and I don't think general business administration is a bad major either.

So, sorry, I'm kind of like teasing lessons out of what you're saying and repackaging them for people listening through my own filter. But let's get back to you. And I would endorse everything you just said. I totally agree with that with the same caveat. And, in fact, one of my mentors was encouraging me to go to engineering at a school – what was it?

I think it was Mississippi State because Mississippi State had a real good engineering program. But to do that, I would have had to leave my job, move over two hours this way. My wife and I had just started dating the year prior to this. I'd rather go two miles down the street from my house, which was literally where the college was that I ended up going to. And I would...

Like if there was something in my schooling I would change, and it'll be apparent in a minute why, because I ended up kind of trying to do this, I would have done engineering first or computer science would have been what I had landed in just because it ended up being the thing I was much more interested in. I just didn't know it soon enough in my story.

So take us from your schooling and congratulations on getting that scholarship. And, you know, it sounds like you were able to finish your degree program.

Yeah, I did. I was able to transfer in and I had some help getting into this other college. You know, a couple letters of recommendation from community members. I didn't mention this whole time I've been working for the same coffee shop as a barista that I now help run. So I was doing that in the mornings and then going to school primarily in the afternoons and the evenings.

And by nature of the, you know, it was a central coffee shop in Jackson. So I knew people from, you know, the streets to doctors and lawyers. I served them all and knew just a lot of people. And so I got some letters of recommendation ultimately from contacts I met in the community that helped me get into the school that I graduated from.

And got that business degree. That was 2012 when I graduated. Okay. So, you know, a cool decade after I probably should have been finishing up. Yeah. But you were able to work your way up in the coffee shop chain to...

running multiple locations. And I'm really excited to dive into the logistics of how you run multiple coffee shops. But maybe you can talk about what it's like to work as a barista in a coffee shop because this is one of the most common jobs in the United States. Coffee shops are everywhere. I think Starbucks alone employs more than 100,000 baristas or something. And Starbucks is probably just like, I don't know, 25% of the coffee shop market, even though they're by far the market leaders. There are so many other coffee shops. And of course, there are local chains like the one that you're involved in.

Maybe you can talk about what it's like, what your day is like as a barista. Oh, man, I loved it for most of those. I pretty much did that for 10 years. And I went from being hired on straight out of that rehab facility. This was my first job I got hired on to as a night worker. So I was working at the time like 6 p.m. till 11 or 12 at night. We stayed open a lot later then than we do now.

And I'd get off work and go home and crash and then get up. I'd go to a recovery meeting at noon, and then I would repeat the process. And I went from that to flipping the script and working mornings. So I'd get there at 530 in the morning, work till noon, and then go to classes when I eventually started going back to school all afternoon. And some of my earlier years, I was...

I think when I was, I know when I was in Holmes, the community college, I had some days where I was working afternoons because I had a morning class. But by the time I got to Millsaps, I was, I had all the business. Most of the business courses met in the afternoon anyway. So it worked out real well to just split the day between those things. But as a barista, I mean, everybody, many people listening to this, if not everybody, has the experience of being a customer at a coffee shop probably. Yeah.

And as a barista, I loved being the hub person

kind of the nexus of the little town that I was in where all I got to do is show up at work, make some cool drinks. Like I'm an artistic guy by, you know, by nature. And so I liked the, the arts and crafts version of it, of, of your creating something with your hands. I really, I really enjoyed that. And it's one of the reasons web development was appealing. I I'm creating something from scratch. I can see what's going on. I see the results, the fruits of my labor.

And so that was real fun for me. But more importantly, the craft part of it aside, you just got to rub elbows with the community every day. And I have a lot of friendships that I met at those coffee shops that I worked at in those early years. One, my buddy Brian, my best friend down there. I've been friends with Brian since his kids were this big. And they're in college now.

So I love the community aspect of it. And I was a introverted. I am an introverted person by nature. So it forced me into a situation that I wouldn't actively seek out, but I learned to become comfortable in, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, what you're describing almost kind of reminds me – have you ever seen the 1980s show Cheers? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The parallels right there are up and down. A lot of people – a lot of my old-timer customers would compare their visits and their experience in Cups, the coffee shop, to Cheers. Yeah.

straight up they say it's like this is like cheers the jackson cheers yeah and i'm going to give a very quick overview of cheers for the people who weren't alive in the 1980s which is probably at least you know maybe half of our audience uh but basically there was a show in the 1980s called cheers uh and it was a phenomenon it was like one of the most beloved kind of situational comedies of

of all time. And it centers around a recovering alcoholic, uh, Sam, who, when he was, you know, a drunkard, uh, I'm sorry, that's probably not the most, but, but he was always drunk. He, uh, I think he got like injured as a base, a professional baseball pitcher or something like that. Um, for, uh, the Boston Red Sox, I think is the, sorry, I don't know if you can, I think it's the Boston Red Sox. Uh, he was like, and, and like, uh, when he was really drunk, he like somehow bought a

bar, but then he went into recovery. So he's like a recovering alcoholic who just happens to have to work in a bar all the time to, to keep the lights on. Right. Um, and, uh, he's got like all, all these kinds of recurring characters, you know, there's the know-it-all mailman, there's the kind of like angry, um, lady Carla, who, who's like despises her customers, but like has this charm about her. And then there's like, it's kind of like, it's a, it's a show about like class, um,

Essentially, you've got the working class people and you've got the educated people coming in for their martinis and stuff. And they're all kind of mixing in this social kind of like...

town square type location of this bar in Boston. And the thing that I think a lot of people like about it is, is it's like real, you know, they address like a lot of real topics on the show. Like, like one of Sam's, you know, baseball team members comes out as gay. And then there's like an episode where they're like, well, is this going to become a gay bar now? Like there were people that are like, no, you can't like gay people into this bar. And they address these social topics and,

in the 80s when very few people were talking about them and a lot of this stuff was just you know kind of avoided by mainstream media so it's seen as this really good kind of like

just something that kind of defines the era in a way. It's a capstone and it is still pretty funny. My wife loved watching it because she was like learning more about American culture and we were actually in Boston a few weeks ago and we went to the Cheers bar. It was too busy to get a seat but we did walk through and we got some photos and stuff. Cool. And yeah, it's just really cool. Like so,

It sounds like being a barista is kind of like being Sam there, like polishing the glasses and like talking to people and learning about their daily lives and giving somebody to talk to while you're fixing them fancy lattes. Yeah. And even more so the longer you stay. So like I spent 10 years doing that, which is abnormal, especially today to spend that many years in that environment doing that.

It worked out great for what I was doing also at the time. But as you stay for multiple years, you really become cemented in that community into whatever role, like character role, that you fall into and pigeonholing others into their roles. And it was a real neat time in my life. I appreciate that part of it while I was in school. Yeah. So one of the things that I'm really excited to learn a little bit more about is –

went really deep down the rabbit hole of getting really good at doing latte art. And what is latte art? Because my understanding is like you, you checked out a bunch of VHS tapes and like, like just kind of learned how to create elaborate latte foam art. Yeah. So, so this was, uh,

I guess mid-2000s when apparently VHS was still a thing because I remember getting a VHS tape and playing it out at our warehouse where we roast all our coffee. So we have this big warehouse where we roast coffee and have a training set up and everything.

But basically, when you combine espresso from the espresso machine, these little short shots of really condensed coffee, if you will, with a little layer of crema on top, which almost looks like a caramely-colored cream layer, a real thin layer, but it's present on a good espresso shot.

When you combine that with frothed milk, which is not like fluffy, foamy milk, but just a real microfiber, almost like velvety texture milk, you

You can pour it in such a way, and I don't have anything I can really demonstrate, but if you kind of tilt your cup and pour it in a certain way and wiggle it around, you can draw on that caramelly colored top layer with the white milk little geometric designs and stuff. You can do a little rosetta, you can do a heart, you can do a swan, and you can do a little

And those things were becoming real popular in those mid 2000 years in the barista scene, which also was quite pretentious in those years, if I might add. Yeah. And I was a part of the problem for a few of the years at least.

Um, but we all got real interested in doing that. And me and my buddy Joe, we bought a bunch of gallons of milk and, and went out to the warehouse and spent like a Saturday watching these, you know, like pausing the VHS tape. Like, how did he, how does he doing his roast? Just total geek out stuff like, you know, the, the, that you do when you're a barista five years in to a 10 year barista career. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like the narrative, at least in popular opinion that you hear is like, this is a quote unquote starter job. I never liked that term. But basically, you move on, right? You're not meant to be waiting tables when you're 70. People will say stuff like that. But the amount of pride and craftsmanship you took in it, I think belies a level of...

for getting things done right, even if it's something as pedestrian as putting some foam on top of a drink that somebody's going to drink while they're rushing out the door to get to work or something like that. So I applaud you for taking it seriously. And there's this Abe Lincoln quote, which I always love. It's one of my favorite quotes, but Abe Lincoln says, whatever it is you want to be, be a good one.

Yeah. That's so good, right? And that can resonate with everyone and should resonate with everyone. Yeah. So let's talk about your progression from working as a barista. You're in recovery. You're kind of like...

tooling up your skills as a barista, you are finishing your education out and learning about the physics of business accounting and other business administration topics that you're studying. How do you go from merely working as a barista to actually running the entire chain? What was that progression like?

Yeah, it was a progression. So here's what I thought was going to happen. My last semester of school, and this would have been in 2012, so like the spring 2012 semester.

I was I had combined one of my finance classes or or an entrepreneurial class or something was giving me credit to basically go to our accounting office for our company that I was working with and like shadow an accountant and like learn some of the ins and outs of real junior level stuff out there.

But what I thought was going to happen was, okay, I'm going to now go get a real job, right? Because it's a coffee shop. I'm going to go get a real job at like a bank or a big company or I don't know what. Because that's the thing that you now do when you have a business degree. And I think I had a finance concentration or something like that. So what I was doing was,

I was still working some hours. My whole career at school, I had to work. I had to pay for rent and everything. So I was working and then going here, and then I was starting to apply for jobs very half-assed and unenthusiastically because now that it came to the end of it, I really couldn't imagine myself in a corporate stiff type of role. And I still can't.

What ended up happening, though, was during the course of that semester, two really important and pivotal things. One with my career was my boss approached me and said, hey, would you consider staying on? And I forget what the role was, but she made a role that was basically like a coach.

Corporate vice president or operations officer. We called it something. In a small business, you can call anything whatever you want. Yeah. But she basically offered me a role in upper management to help her run. At the time, we had I think we had five corporate stores and five franchise stores.

Depends on the year as to whether the number's right. But we had several corporate, which we owned, and then several franchises, which we were their franchisor. So she offered me that. And we'll come back to this second point. But the second pivotal thing was I took Calculus 1 because I had put off taking any higher level math until the very last time that I had to take it to graduate.

Because I was scared of math and I was scared of science for reasons really unbeknownst to me. Because what happened during that Cal 1 class was...

I realized I was screwed because I'd forgotten all the trigonometry. So I relearned trig and took Cal one at the same time, relearned on my own and took Cal one at the university and freaking loved it. So I was like, man, what, what have I been doing? Like taking finance classes? This is where it's at.

We'll come back to that in a minute because I went back to school the next year and really went into the deep end. But with work, I said, yeah, sure, I'll do this job. And so I stopped being a barista one week. And then the next week I was suiting up and showing up at our warehouse to the office that we had out there.

But I just became a floater sort of. So I was shadowing my boss, who was the co-owner at the time. Her and her husband, who has since passed, were the only two owners.

I was shadowing her. We had a little team, a small upper management team, and I was really just going from shop to shop. Sort of think of it as a district manager role with a little bit of work in the accounting office to see how the nuts and bolts, the beans, counting the beans at the coffee bean shop. Yeah, like a literal bean shop, bean counter. That's right. That's right. And from there, so that was year one in 2012.

From there until today in 2024, and really it's been the same the last several years since COVID, until about 2019,

I just gradually had more responsibility put on my plate to where my title today is COO, Chief Operating Officer. But, I mean, all that means is that I'm ultimately responsible to make sure all the gears are greased and turning and operations are smooth. There's a fair bit of strategic planning for, you know, menu planning and pricing and everything.

A little bit of everything, right? So it's my general business degree part of schooling has really paid dividends on running a small business operation rather than just being pigeonholed into one specific thing. Yeah. Which I've enjoyed that. I think I might get bored if I was too narrowly focused.

Yeah. And that's one of the great things about being in like an organization that is smaller and not a giant fortune 500 company is there's so many different types of work that you're doing. Like as the executive director of free code camp.org, which is like the executive director is basically the charity equivalent of CEO. I get to do all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

Right? And no day is the same. I get to compose. This week, I composed an article about Free Code Camp's 10-year anniversary, and we crunched the numbers, and we figured out our top contributors in terms of volunteer contributions both to code, both to writing tutorials, and of course...

Eamon, you are on that list. Thank you very much for everything you've been doing. My pleasure. Through your thoughtful tutorials. And then just had meetings about platform development, looking into how we can keep our infrastructure costs down or lower them. We spent more than $100,000 last year on servers. After all the credits, I was able to track down grants and stuff like that. It's...

There's a lot to be done. And the great thing about being kind of like higher up in an organization is you get to do a lot of things and you get to put your finger in all the different pies, so to speak. So there's a lot of learning. And I imagine you're still learning a lot within that role, just how you can be a better operator. Yep, totally. And that's the appealing part. Another appealing part of it, too, is I'm...

I hope I will always be a lifelong learner. And we throw that term around very loosely, but I really sincerely mean it because I freaking love learning how to improve my professional self and how to go into coding and different skills and level up technically and then how to just do things smarter by nature of how I can stitch things together in my business and in my personal life.

Yeah. And doing things smarter. That is like you can only work so hard. Like the smartest, greatest physician in the world can only go see so many patients a day and help them help diagnose their, you know, their problems or help treat their problems. But as somebody like you and I who commands machines, an array of machines, we

that are at our disposal, we can essentially greatly scale what we can accomplish, right? We don't need to physically be doing anything. We can automate stuff. And then like right now, as you and I speak, there are probably around 10,000 people using free code camp that work. And I could be on this conversation learning from you. And I don't have to be like making sure like every packet gets rooted exactly where it needs to go because of the beauty of software and leveraging abstraction.

You have really been out there beating the drum of automate, automate, automate. Figure out ways to work smarter because you can only work so hard. And I want to talk about how you were able to... Obviously, you learned the ropes running coffee shops online.

But there was also this desire to continue to learn. And it took you kind of like almost down the inevitable path of being able to scale your effort laterally and just have a lot of things happen.

a lot of pots boiling at the same time that were maybe watched by robot versions of you. Even if it's a very simple kind of automaton version of you, your intention has been expressed through code or through some sort of, uh, you know, script that you've written for like a, uh, an Excel spreadsheet or something like that. And as a result, you have kind of these autonomous, uh, agents, these drones that are going around and, and doing your bidding a hundred percent.

And I'll give you the earliest example that I can think of, and it's something that's still in production for us at CUPS today. In 2013, 2014, it was right after I started my upper management roles, I was first dabbling into coding and how do I get more technical? What can I level up?

And we were still at our cafes, and hopefully this is not the case for anybody anymore, but we were still faxing orders on physical paper in a fax machine to our warehouse where they would take it and physically fulfill the orders. And we had a lot of, like, real ancient systems going on.

And I remember the first thing I did, I was like, man, I think we can, I know we can do better than this. Can I just build something in a spreadsheet? And so I hooked up a bunch of Google spreadsheets and each store had their own sheet and you can connect them together. So you have different permissions on different pages and different columns. And ultimately I made our own interest or inventory management and ordering system that

Straight up homebrewed in spreadsheets or in Google Sheets, as the case was, that I added scripting because you can script stuff with. It's basically a JavaScript language and an app script that Google uses where you can script it to do certain operations at the end of the month and whatnot.

And built this thing that on the front end, hey, yeah, maybe we should have been doing that all along. But it was the first real world project where I saw that with not very much skill, like minimum skill level. And just knowing what solution I needed from this problem, I can make this work.

And it can be a real big time saver and error reducer because you do stuff on paper, you're going to make errors. I mean, it's guaranteed. You can still make them in spreadsheets, but the calculations and stuff, you can at least hard code in there so that the calculations aren't messing up. There's always humans in our business. That's where the errors come from.

But I've been doing stuff like that in the years since. And Quincy, this is not like I kind of jokingly say like low skill level. This is low skill level stuff that can make huge differences and does in small business operations where the owner, the founder, the operator, just maybe they know what a spreadsheet is. But I take for granted the fact that I know a lot about spreadsheets.

And the very basic stuff, a lot of people still don't know how to use or utilize in their business to the fullest potential. Yeah.

And I think that this is precisely why I'm bullish on software continuing to be like a major industry and why there are being tons of developer jobs for a long time to come. Maybe those jobs will be a hybrid operating officer slash developer who maintains like all the various scripts within the small business. But there are millions of small businesses just in the United States.

Right? And there are millions of charities here in the United States. There's more than a million charities. So...

if you think about it, like that's a lot of small organizations that don't necessarily want to buy some, you know, big Oracle package. Maybe they can't afford it, but like it's, if it's not like what they need for their very specific needs, what they need is the skills so that they can go and implement solutions and maintain those solutions and expand those solutions. And there's always new work to be done. It's not like magically like, okay, the entire operation, it's not like the Jetsons where you just push the button. George Jetson's job is literally to show up,

At his plant, press the button, and then he just kicks back, takes a nice nap, right? Yeah. And that's kind of the joke is like in the future, everybody's got flying cars and like work is just pushing a button and you don't have to... You can be completely dim-witted and still do your job, right? But the reality is...

We're so far from that, it's not even funny. A vast majority of small businesses are probably overpaying for crappy enterprise solutions, and they have no idea how those are working, and they do need developers, even if that's a contractor, to come in and audit their process or something like that. Because both you and I kind of learned

By doing, I learned a lot of my early developer skills just trying to update and maintain our school's different systems. And, of course, spreadsheets were a huge part of that because spreadsheets are probably the greatest productivity-saving software invention of the past decade.

70 or 80 years. Like if you think LLMs are saving people time, wait until you look at like how much time spreadsheets have saved people. It's unfathomable how much time people used to spend like manually doing calculations before visit coke in like, I think the late seventies or something like that. Right. And now we, of course we've got Excel and we've got,

Google Sheets, but we had Lotus. We had all these different tools that progressed toward what we use today. Most people still have absolutely no idea how to leverage the power that spreadsheets have. That's one of the reasons I applaud you for continuing to create these amazing tutorials. Can you talk about some of the most impactful things you did using spreadsheets early on?

Well, I mentioned one of them just then, and I'll take another one just from my personal life, because that's why I was an early user and continue to use Google Sheets for a lot of things over Excel in certain circumstances. But when my wife and I got married,

We, you know, you see a zillion templates out there to make your own personal budget, finance trackers, all this stuff. And I homebrewed another finance tracker out of Google Sheets that we've been iterating on and using for the 12 years we've been married now. I just make a new one and make it better every year.

that requires, by design, not as a bug, but it requires us to be conscientious about our purchases. So it doesn't just scrape our bank account. We could do that. Like there's tools for that too. It requires us to manually do some things so that we are manually seeing, you know, we don't use cash anymore. Who does? But we're manually seeing, oh, we're spending this money. Here's our balance. Here's our categories. I got a data analytics tab that

you know, gives charts and, and year to date stuff like that. Um, but, but for our personal finances, for our personal, um, just, uh, financial conscientiousness, it's been a very impactful and we both came into it kind of on the same page. So it wasn't, it wasn't a hard shift in our marriage to get on that same page, but I would say it's been a key factor in, uh, in,

And getting us out of debt, which we did early on, and we've got our house now, so that's the only debt we have. But then keeping us that way. Like, you know, we could, you know, spend up to our ears in credit cards and stuff, and, you know, we'd choose to pay it off and get the Amazon points instead.

Yeah. Yeah. And I am also very proud to say that the only that I have is the mortgage on our house. And my wife and I are also trying to be very conscientious about that sort of stuff. I think that like set it and forget it. Like the credit card companies want to make it super easy for you to just go out and spend money and forget how much money you spent. It's so frictionless. They're out of business if you don't. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. And credit card companies are able to offer, you know, Amazon points or other kind of,

rewards because there are a whole lot of people that are indebted to them. And so like the people that are organized that make heavy use, I mean, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game, right? It's not your fault as a user of a credit card that a whole bunch of people are irresponsible with their credit cards. But, but like, obviously people being bad with managing this is subsidizing the people who are being good with this and are getting rewards. So, yep.

The unfortunate truth. That's just the way it is. And you want to be on one side of that equation rather than the other. And the way you get there, I think, is just being conscientious, as you and your wife are doing. And, of course, there are going to be situations where people are in dire straits and, you know, like credit card debt is probably the most dangerous type of debt other than getting, like, money from, like, a loan shark or something like that. But, you know, obviously, like, I speak from a position of relative privilege, but, like,

planning things out and saving as much as you can. So again, I'm going off on another soapbox sermon, but just making sure that you're saving as much as possible because you never know what's going to happen. I like to joke that the only thing you know about somebody who drives a $100,000 car, you don't know whether they're rich. All you know is that they had $100,000 more than they have now before they bought that car. Yeah, so true.

Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like you were using it, and I like the idea of just destroying the spreadsheet every year. Not destroying it, but creating a brand new spreadsheet for every year and then just keeping your budget going on that. Also, because I personally use Google Sheets a lot, and I've hit the 10 million sell limit before.

Nice. Yeah. That's impressive. Yeah. Well, free code camp has a lot of transactions. Uh, a lot of chill human beings donating each month. And if you multiply that out, that's a lot of metadata from like PayPal and places like that. But, um,

Maybe you can talk about some of your articles that you've been writing because you've written so many tutorials to help people make better use of these spreadsheets and how you come up with ideas for writing about Google Apps Script and things like that. Are these just things that occur to you when you're working? You're like, oh, yeah, I use that a whole lot. I should teach other people how to use it.

Yes. So far, most of my tutorial writing and my YouTube channel, really, they do a lot of the same things in parallel. It's come from either something I have previously made, like a budget or a search bar or something, something I've seen already on YouTube that I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I'd kind of like to remix that and do it in this way. You're using these functions or using Apps Script or not using Apps Script.

Um, or just something that pops into my head. I mean, I, I'm sure you can relate to having a Google doc or 50 somewhere with ideas. And I've just got over the years, so many ideas that I'll just jot them down. Like I think you're supposed to do. Although I question that sometimes because I have so many and, and I'll pull from those. Um,

But usually it's something I've made or something that at this point somebody has requested from a previous video. So I have a lot of... I'm grateful to have the... Not a ton. I don't have 10 million like you guys. Bravo. But I've got a few thousand subscribers now and I'm getting people actually asking, hey, how do I do XYZ? Hey, can you help me build this? And I can share this sheet with you. So my favorite thing to do is...

is to break off a bite-sized project that's maybe even a piece of a bigger picture, how to do this one functional thing, and then do a five-minute, ten-minute. I wish I had time to do longer things, honestly. But to do these bite-sized tutorials right up a little bit,

And then the beauty of the Internet, man, it just lives in perpetuity until I decide to take it down, update it or whatever. And it continues. You know, some of my best performing things were some of my earlier work going on two years ago now. Yeah. So I've really gone head over heels into the I.

I wish another word was out there for content creator, but I've always been a writer. I love the craft of putting something into the world. I love the combination of the coding stuff and the real-world productivity with spreadsheets and kind of combining all those together so that somebody else benefits from it like I benefited from when I figured out how to do it. It's been so much fun. That's why I keep doing it.

And I, again, I applaud your, um, you're kind of like learning in public. You're learning how to do things, things in the training ground and teaching other people how to do it, which is how knowledge has historically always been passed down. Usually through like, you know, apprenticeships and things like that, like going all the way back to the ancient times. But, uh, now it's passed on by somebody like, man, I've got this weird problem that is probably, I'm maybe I'm the first person that ever encountered it. They start Googling around, they find an article, uh,

by Amon and they're like, oh wow, I didn't know you could build games in...

Excel, right? You like build Minesweeper. You can do lots of things. I think you have some tutorials on doing that sort of stuff or that you can write functions and like the degree of automation, the degree of using Excel as essentially kind of like a makeshift database between all your different coffee shops and the roastery, right? Like those kinds of clever applications of relatively ubiquitous, easily understood technology, right? Like you don't have to create like a custom web UI and all this stuff. You could create like a back office and

tool to do that. Or you could just have an Excel sheet that is immediately useful that you can quickly iterate on. And you've kind of taken the route of just going to where people already know how to use Excel. Everybody has used Excel in their career. At some point, if they even touch the computer, it's inescapable. And so they understand the concepts of cells. And you can create a very simple user interface, if you will, in Excel or in Google Sheets.

So, yeah, these are extremely powerful tools, and I applaud you teaching them. One question I have for you is you're somebody who's, as you said, you love to write. You play piano. I don't know if you want to play something real quick. You've got that piano hooked up, I think, and it's pretty audible. Yeah. Yeah, maybe take like 20 seconds to play something for us. Let's do 20 seconds of...

What about some Rachmaninoff? You know Rachmaninoff? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. This was like the, this is a prelude that my mom played like in her college days or something. And I knew what it was growing up. And it was like my goal. I coveted learning how to play this. I can't play the whole thing right now, but I'll play the start and you might recognize it. It's one of these big, bold pieces. ♪

And it goes on and on and on. And then it gets crazy fast. And like, oh, it's like a blizzard at the end of it. Yeah. But yeah, I've been playing on and off since childhood. Super rusty these days.

Yeah, I think Rachmaninoff is generally considered one of the hardest composers in recent time. I'm sure there are contemporary composers who intentionally make their music really hard to play or really like... Yeah, I mean, you can see some black MIDI type. If you're familiar with the Japanese black MIDI thing where they're basically kind of like playing things that are impossible to play on a piano by programming them with MIDI. But...

Wow, that sounded great. And so you are playing piano. You've written novels through National Write a Novel Month, NaNoWriMo, I think. NaNoWriMo. Good old NaNoWriMo. So you're very much in touch with the creative aspect of the human experience, but at the same time,

you can set a lot of that aside and just focus on the work that needs to be done. And I think that's the hallmark of like a good, strong, creative person is to be able to adapt to reality. Like Van Gogh,

arguably one of the greatest visual artists of all time sold a single painting is in his entire life, right? His existence was subsidized by some wealthy, you know, brother-in-law or something like that. Right. And like his entire life was failure and he had a miserable life. He shot himself in the chest after like sending his letter, his ear in a letter, you know, like, um, it just doesn't sound like a very fun life. I think he also had substance abuse issues and, um,

you know, imagine if somebody like Van Gogh could also say like, I'm going to do this. And maybe people would argue like the, the, you know, the true artists can't like, uh, adapt themselves to reality. But like, you could argue that like,

There is some adaptability. Maybe he could have figured out a way to potentially meet the market where it was a little bit and not had such a miserable life where he's dependent on his brother-in-law. Right. And maybe gotten some easy wins by, for example, doing some murals.

at like the local coffee shop at the time or something. I don't know. Like, again, pardon me. Like, I don't know a lot about his life. And, uh, I think he was in, uh, the Netherlands at that time. Uh, cause there's a Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, but I,

what I would encourage to a lot of people listening to this is you can be a very creative, uh, artistic person and you can also, uh, figure out a way to channel some of that into getting things done. And one of the best ways you can do that is through code and through like figuring out innovative ways of

of using Google sheets, right? Uh, you can create music, you can create art and you can use technology as a tool to do that. Not just talking about like, you know, the AI generated drivel mostly that you hear these days, but, but like, like, and I guess for some people that are like, Oh, this AI music is good enough to be B roll audio for my YouTube video. But like musicians, no, we don't like it. It sucks. Yeah. Um, maybe it'll get better. But, um, but my point is, um,

like you are a great example of somebody who's clearly like a very creative kind of person who really enjoys expressing themselves, but you figured out, you know, kind of like productive real world, you know, all suited up, uh, you know, type ways that you can apply that creativity to, to affect, you know, kind of like, just like a local business. Um, and, and so for me, I really see you as, um, as, uh,

a great role model for me as somebody who also considers them somewhat artistic and creative. Uh, and, and it's great to see people like that succeeding too. And not just like the, cause we all know that there are lots of people that don't have a creative bone in their body and they're, they don't have an ounce of intellectual curiosity and yet they're millionaires because they, you know, they're like slum Lords and stuff like that. Right? Like there are lots of those kinds of people out there too. And the creative, uh,

Thinking those who think and feel as Neil Peart says, those kinds of people need to step in and like make a splash in industry as well. Right. So so I really think it's it's cool what you're doing.

I just want to like none of this was planned or anything, but I'm just kind of like reflecting on the life you've laid out so far for me. Like I think there are tons of people in the free code camp community who represent this. They want to spend their time running. They want to spend their time reading to their kids. They want to spend their time, you know, listening to podcasts and audio books and, you know, performing music.

amazing musical pieces like, like you just performed there with the Rachmaninoff. Uh, they, they want to have that kind of life of mine, but they also want to be able to provide for their families and they don't want to be like, for lack of a better word, like kind of like a deadbeat, uh, starving artist type Van Gogh type. And again, I hope that that isn't the thing anybody, because some of the greatest art and music and culture of all time has been created by people who experienced zero, uh,

you know, fanfare during their lifetimes. And we're probably just a charge of the state or of some wealthy relative who saw them as like, Oh, there's your crazy brother, like doing his paintings again. Uh, or, you know, your crazy husband, or I can't remember exactly who was subsidizing. Thank go. Anyway. Sorry. Sorry. If I'm like completely butchering, uh, Van Gogh's personal history, but I do know that like, uh,

for most of the art that we've seen over the years has been subsidized by some wealthy patron, whether that's the king who brings, you know, Mozart into his court or, you know, the Duke. I can't remember the relationship. There's a great movie called Amadeus. Everybody should watch. If you haven't seen it, it's an incredible movie. But anyway, I'm going like way off of the topic, but I just wanted to emphasize my passion for creative thinking people also building up

clout for lack of a better word and power in the real world. So we're not just a society run by, you know, anti-intellectual people that just read Zig Ziglar books all day and like are just trying to like kind of like mindlessly amass resources so they can, you know, be alpha or whatever. And it's such an easy thing relatively to do today because you can start with zero resources and just the internet. Yeah.

You you probably don't remember. You mentioned to me or suggested, I think, on a Twitter DM or something when we first met a couple of years ago, two, three years ago about starting a hash node blog and just starting to document, you know, and that's still something that people recommend. Just document your journey like this is a good starting point of just typing up what you're doing and getting it out into the world.

Now, people listening may not think may not equate that with like drawing a beautiful landscape or something. But I do. I think that there is a creative component in just the act of documenting and writing and doing it well that can open that door to whatever else you can create down the road. And I mean, and that's what I did. Like I start. I was like, OK, well, Quincy said it's a good idea. I'll go. I don't know.

I don't know what this hash note is, but I went and got a hash note blog. I think six months later is when I started writing for you guys. Now I've got a couple of newsletters where I'm contributing not just technical stuff, but personal passion projects and really finding a way that it can live again in perpetuity on the Internet and be helpful in whatever manner for others.

and be an expression because I, you know, I'm not going to be comfortable in a, uh, suits job somewhere just in a cubicle. Uh, but I got to pay my fam, you know, I got to get money to feed my family. So it's a both and rather than an either or where I can find productive, creative ways in the business I'm at and whatever's to come after it. And then I can also, if I need to do more creative stuff, uh,

You know, the only person stopping you is you. And that's what I kind of looked at myself in the mirror when I really started going harder into the creation. Okay, what bandwidth do I have? And let's be realistic here.

But what can I do with what I have and what can I generate and put out there for good in the world? And the world doesn't need a lot of AI generated, you know, crap restating what's already there. But it does need well thought out solutions to people's problems. And we'll continue as long as long as we're around, I think. Yeah, 100 percent.

Well, I want to make sure that we capture the various facets of your ambitions and what you've been working on. What are like? Obviously, you've got a family. You're probably pretty settled there running that coffee chain. You know, you got four young kids and it's probably going to be another, you know, 15 years or so before they graduate. I often think that like.

I have to joke that like having kids really did solidify what the next 10 or 15 years of my life is going to look like. I'm going to be supporting my kids and like walking them to school and making sure that they, uh, you know, uh, have like reasonable upbringings and don't get into too much trouble. Right. Um, and, and that also means I'll probably be here in Texas for like the next,

you know, 10, 12 years until they're, they've graduated high school. And then I'm hopefully going to move to New York city or Tokyo or some cool place and like live out my, my silver years doing exciting stuff like that. But, uh, for now, like this is like home base and it's,

It strikes me that that might be the case for you. I did talk with somebody named Dorian on an episode that just dropped that I encourage everybody to listen to. Also, uh, someone who's overcome, uh, or is in the process of overcoming a lot of, uh, addiction issues. Um, but, uh,

He takes his kids and he just travels the world and goes to Thailand or Europe and places like that. And I think that that's another cool approach. But where do you see the next few – really, if you can map out the next decade, what kind of skills do you want to continue to expand? What do you want to do with your family? What does an Amon in his 50s look like? Yeah.

Well, I am parallel to you in a lot of ways. We moved here and we kind of skipped over a few years to not really dive into the weeds there. But we moved here to Knoxville, which is where I grew up after me being in Mississippi, where I got shipped down for treatment for 15 years. So we've been here for eight years. I guess we're going on our eighth year right after we had my first child.

And so we had second, third and fourth year. We got back around. My parents live here still around family and this the foreseeable future. Same as you and Dallas. We're going to be here for the kids unless something crazy changes. We moved here purposefully for that. And we love the area. We're an hour away from the Smoky Mountains and it's a beautiful place to live. And I got roots here. So we're pretty well established with that.

professionally, sort of in the same boat. I thought, you know, and one of the big thrusts for me diving deeper into Free Code Camp specifically, into my own publications also during COVID was I didn't know if I was going to be out of a job back in 2020. I thought our coffee shops might go under. We might close up shop. There was a lot of uncertainty in the air, as was the case with the rest of the world, right? Yeah.

So I really started skilling up in preparation for and started applying for jobs that I had no business applying for. But I was applying anyway, thinking that the clock was ticking.

Well, fast forward, you know, the four years since our company has gratefully done fine. Some shops closed, some did well, so forth and so on. I see this probably a few more years. Maybe I would very much like to be doing this.

The technical stuff, the creative stuff, the self-employed or under another company stuff. I'd love to do that full time, but the nuts and bolts are not there. You know, it's it's trading insurance and a salary for, you know, hundreds of dollars, which is where the current income is or a few thousand. You know, the nuts and bolts don't work. Yeah. So long term. Yeah. I would like to do some.

double down further with this stuff, but I don't know if that's in the cards because having kids growing up, albeit 10 years after I should have, as I mentioned, you know, that just changes reality, which is why I'm a proponent for doing both anyway and seeing what, what doors open and, and still providing, but also being able to, uh, to, to have that creative outlet, to have that outlet where, where you can help others on the side. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that does describe how kind of like you're almost kind of like hedging without taking any additional risk. Like what you're risking is your sanity doing all this additional work. 100%, right. But I think that's like there's so much –

I get like work-life balance shamed sometimes because I'm trying to do a lot of stuff and people are like, just relax. Like relax and do what? This is relaxing. It is relaxing working on projects, but there are certainly tense moments, right? Like...

when I really need to get something live, but I've been so distracted doing this other thing. And so there is a trade-off there. It's not free to spend an extra 10 or 15 hours a week or however much you're spending on building your YouTube channel and writing these tutorials and building and maintaining your newsletters and things like that. It doesn't come free. There is a cost to it, but at the same time,

Where are you going to fit that? Like you can't leave your job that gives you insurance and that also provides helping you pay off your mortgage, helping ensure that like in case something happens to one of your kids, you're going to have something to be able to help pay for their recovery or treatment. You know, I think what you're doing is pretty sane and pretty rational, even though it may look like from the outside, well, this person's like working themselves into an early grave. Yeah.

Well, and it's so funny because I look at the couple of years before we started having kids and I remember very distinctly the sensation of, man, I just, I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do. And just thinking things like that. And people were telling me, you know, those that had gone before older and wiser, like, uh, you have all the time in the world. Like this is the prime time if you want to do stuff. And I did, you know, went back to school, did, did a number of things.

But fast forward to today, and I think that I managed to fit more things in in a constructive, creative way into less time by nature of the fact that now I have full family and additional responsibilities. But you don't know the one without having the other. And then when you have the other, you can't go back. Yeah. I talked with Phoebe Voong Fadel, who has – I think she has three kids. They're very young. Yeah.

And she similarly, like both her and her husband work, and she's working as a dev. And she said that having kids actually was like a forcing function. It forced her to get organized and to make better use of her time and wake up super early and learn programming tutorials on Free Code Camp and other resources that she used so she could build up her skills. Yeah.

Um, and so in a way, like the structure of just knowing that it's, you know, a little kid is going to wake up and start making noise, banging on pots and stuff at 7am forces you to go to sleep early. And, and you know that like, okay, this is the time. Like I can't just sit here. I've only got this finite amount of time to use today before I've got to go to sleep if I need to be able to get the next things done. And so it sounds like you've been able to harness those. There's a saying in, um,

In design that like one of my design professors told me, he said, freedom comes from constraint. Yeah. And the constraint of having somebody wake you up every morning, regardless of like how much sleep you get and you got to fix some breakfast, you got to walk them off at school, make sure they're sunscreened, you know, make sure their homework is in their backpack, like all those various morning routine things. And then,

You've got to come back and you've got this meeting exactly at this time. Every week is a standing meeting. And you've got this deadline, this deadline. Those deadlines do force you to get creative and to make more efficient use of your time. And certainly what I've found is I waste a lot less time. I have no idea how much... I used to play tons of video games. I beat Dark Souls... Well, I didn't beat Dark Souls without leveling up, but I was like a one bro. And I got so good at Dark Souls 1 that I could get almost all the way through it without...

even leveling up my character, just like avoiding the hits and stuff like that. And I mean, that was dozens and dozens of hours of maybe, maybe a hundred or more hours that I just spent playing dark souls. And that was, you know, now that I've got kids like that sort of stuff, it would be unfathomable that I just sit down and spend something on a silly vanity thing like that. What have I got to show for it? I could brag that I almost beat the game without leveling up. Who cares? Right. How many people did that help?

So I feel like that forced me to grow up and to – and again, I don't want to like – this video games or anything. Like spend your free time doing whatever you want to do. But also just know that you're going to have a lot less free time once you have kids.

So true. And that rings especially true for me, the Dark Souls reference, because I was in on Dark Souls 1 also, and I played 2 and 3, but Soft Spot remains for 1. And I couldn't tell you how many hours I spent on them. That was pre our first kid and then during our first kid. But I can't imagine it now. We even, like, I bought a PlayStation 5 I shouldn't have a few years ago and got Elden Ring when it came out last year. And it's like, oh, I'm going to play Elden Ring. Like, I'm going to play Elden Ring.

When am I going to play this super hard game that requires a loss of sanity and sleep to actually do anything good in it? And, you know, needless to say, I played about a quarter of it probably, and it still sits up there. Yeah, and I never beat it myself because it was just like, you know,

There's something to be said for a game that respects you like Elden Ring or like Dark Souls. They respect your intelligence, and they're not trying to handhold you, and they're like, this is going to be really freaking hard, but you will get better. And I liken it to Free Code Camp's curriculum. We want to move in the direction of being more like Elden Ring in the sense that it's brutally hard, but if you keep working at it, you are actually going to get better. So people complain about the difficulty level of Elden Ring.

And of games like Dark Souls and stuff. And they're like, there's no easy mode. Like, there's no difficulty setting at all. Everybody has the same extremely frustrating, difficult experience when they go fight the first boss, and the boss just completely destroys them. Right? And they're just like, man. And, like, I actually played... The first time I played Dark Souls, I just...

couldn't beat the first boss and I just walked away because I was accustomed to games that had like save states built in and like they had this nice smooth difficulty curve and they would coddle you essentially and give you like little accomplishments like achievement unlocked and stuff like that, right? And then...

And then you go and you play Dark Souls, and it just does nothing for your confidence. It's like, you're going to suffer. The entire setting of the game is absolutely miserable and brutal, and you just have to keep dying over and over. And the game actually teaches you to persevere through that. And with my daughter playing chess, she got so frustrated the first few times she played chess with me. And, of course, I just destroyed her because chess, there's no random luck game.

where you can like magically beat somebody who's better than you. No, if you are not as good at chess as the other person, they will beat you. You will lose. It's almost deterministic, right? Yeah. And yet like just the ability to like, it gives you kind of like that grit where you're just like, you're persisting and you're keeping going. And so it's no surprise to me as like an ultra marathoner who plays any games at all that you were drawn to the Soulsborne games. Oh, yeah.

And it's that grit. I'm attracted to it. The incremental improvement, just slow trudging forward, barely. And what I was going to say about the difficulty level, there is no difficult setting in the game. You just go and you farm low-level enemies and get a bunch of XP, and then you level your character up, and then the game becomes easier because you're kind of like...

You're buffing your stats. And so people can, in theory, be really bad at Elden Ring and still win because they've just got this giant sword and they've got all these stats and stuff. And it's a way that you can beat the game without actually getting good at the game. That is an option available to you. But so many other games don't even give you the option of getting good at the game. They just kind of hold your hand. Yeah.

That is one thing that I profoundly respect about those Souls games and the fact that they don't just add a bunch of microtransactions and stuff like that and it's not a pay to win by any measure and you actually pay like the 60 bucks and you get the game and you have the full game and you can go home and play it like as much as you want, right? But

But I really appreciate the fact that it, the respect that it has for the player. And I think that your tutorials are excellent in that they have a high degree of respect for the learner. And they're like, you probably weren't born yesterday, but just in case, I'm going to describe, you know, I'm going to define this term or I'm going to, you know. So there's a certain amount of respect, but at the same time, you're not deluding people and, you know, coddling them.

And Free Code Camp very much wants to go in that direction with these big curriculum updates that we're making, which you can read more about. I'll put a link to it in the description. I'm also going to put a link to your tutorials and to some other things you've been working on. But before we adjourn, I just want to make sure, are there any other big topics that you'd like to talk about?

I think we've covered the bulk of what I do. All the links, like you said, will be down below. And the main thrusts of my two energies are into this spreadsheets and coding channels and then the addiction recovery channels. And so if either or both of those are interesting to you, you can check out more. Absolutely. And I'll just tell you, like, there is...

I don't think anybody has ever said, I regret spending time getting better at spreadsheets. Right. I don't know. I don't think anybody's ever said that. Never said by anyone. It's always a good, it's the same thing. Like, oh man, I regret getting better at SQL databases or Python or anything. It is just inarguably a useful skill to have. Yeah. The world runs on spreadsheets. Like for,

for a lot of people on like wall street, their entire job is like moving things around in a spreadsheet. Right. Um, and, and I, I cannot overemphasize what a massive, you know,

burning torch passed down from the heavens. The Promethean fire passed to us through the innovation of spreadsheets. It is one of the most labor-saving inventions of all time. And so I strongly encourage you to get better at spreadsheets, to explore. I mean, you can use LLMs with spreadsheets. You can do a lot of stuff, and you have tutorials on how to do a lot of this stuff. And you can build games in spreadsheets. You will be...

completely blown away with some of the ways that people are using spreadsheets. There's even competitive spreadsheet usage. It's like a cross between eSports and Excel.

It's pretty phenomenal, too. Have you ever watched any of that? I've watched some of it. And the way that they think, it's like competitive programming, basically. It really is. It's amazing. It's really cool. I'll try to find a good video about it. Have you created any videos about competitive spreadsheets? I have not. It has been a daunting subject for me because I label myself as not being at that level. But it's constantly on my radar. Right.

This year, I've actually been doing more Excel work than Google Sheets, trying to kind of go into the much, much bigger ecosystem. And that's on one of my 50 to-do list topics that are sitting there for me. Well, if you're listening to this in the future and Eamon has written an article about

kind of like, or created the video overviewing like what competitive Excel spreadsheets are. I think that might be a cool term to, to, to focus on with your YouTube creation at some point. I will be adding that as well in the show notes. So be sure to check out Amon's amazing tutorials and, and follow his YouTube channel and just know that like,

You're going to learn a lot and channel your inner Amen when you want to be creative and you want to be artistic, but you also want to get things done and pay the bills. Because I think that's what it's all about in 2024 is like figuring out how to like...

There's never been a greater time to be a creator in terms of just having access. You can get Logic Pro for $200. You never have to pay for anything again. Or you can use FL Studio. It's free. Fruity Loop Studio. We've got a tutorial on this digital audio workstation on the Free Code Camp YouTube channel. That's a pretty good tutorial, too.

Yeah, thank you. And we've got tutorials on DaVinci Resolve if you want to get into filmmaking and video editing and things like that. The tools are so much better than they've ever been, and there are so many great free tools. It's just a question of prioritizing what you want to learn, how you want to go about learning it, how you want to apply what you're learning, and then the eternal question of how can you make money so you can...

continue to keep calories flowing into your body and the bodies of those you love, right? And keep, uh, you know, a roof over your head, right? Like you can figure that out. Of course, free code camp gives you like the shortest path to potentially getting a developer job or using your developer skills as a freelancer or, or, you know, creating some sort of, uh, software focused, uh, business. But, uh,

There's so much that you can do with the various creative tools out there. And I want to thank you for kind of demonstrating just how you can do that and how you can kind of like have your cake and eat it too, how you can have a, you know, a healthy balance, not totally crazy and scary family life in terms of not living paycheck to paycheck and actually being able to build equity and, and, uh,

buy a home and those kinds of things, which, you know, used to be very easy for people. You work like a summer job and you can pay your mortgage like, and you've got the Mustang from like, you know, uh, just working at the garage for a few months and stuff like that. Like it seems like it used to be so easy back in the day and now everything's super duper expensive and things like that.

And again, I just want to compliment your ability to adapt to the situation and to figure out a way to make it happen. A lot of people aren't having kids because they're worried about economics. At the end of the day, you want people to have kids? Make them economically prosperous. It's not that people don't want to have kids. It's that having kids is really expensive and it's scary. But...

You've got four kids and you figured out a way to make it work. I've got a couple of kids and I've been talking with a lot of other people who are figuring out like a path to stability so that they can have kids and so that they can, you know, have that aspect of their lives as well. And it all comes back to skills to pay the bills. And so learn some skills. They pay the bills from aiming, learn them from free code camp. And yeah, yeah.

For sure. I second all of that. And I mean, it really boils down to getting stuff for me. A lot of times when I look at an insurmountable thing in front of me that I just I don't know how to get around it. Well, I'll just I'll literally take out a piece of paper and write down the time consuming elements of my day. OK, which of these can I cross out?

And you know what? Dark Souls and video games was one of those hours long for every week things that I now do, you know, much more productive things. I generate a video a week in time that I used to spend playing video games. And that's like one low hanging fruit, right? So it just comes down to a willingness to adapt to what it's going to take.

Absolutely. Things are going to continue to get harder for pretty much everybody. The world is getting more competitive. There are more people out there that are competing to kind of get the same calories that you're trying to get in terms of like finding, like getting some freelance contract or, you know, competing on some, you know, freelancer website. Heaven forbid you're trying to find work on one of those.

The world is going to continue to get more competitive and you're going to continue to need to keep climbing if you want to stay above the waterline that's rising. And so...

I applaud you for setting aside a game as fun as Dark Souls so that you can focus on other things. It's not easy to do. I love Dark Souls and I have fantasies that at some point I take a vacation, I can play back through it. But yeah, I just thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing your lived experience. And thank you for everything you're doing to help people recover.

as well. I think that is commendable. And, uh, yeah, I'm just, we're just so honored to have you, uh, creating tutorials within the free code camp community and representing just like what a hardworking, um, you know, serious, uh, creative person can accomplish.

That's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on here and letting me contribute to a community. And if you haven't already gotten on Free Code Camp, please go do so yourself out there because it really is the fastest way to skill up in these areas. And it's only getting better every year. Quincy wrote, which I think he's going to mention later.

and link in the description an article about all the 10-year updates that have hit and are coming in the next three years. And there's some big stuff planned out. So I'm excited for your platform and appreciative for all that you've done for the developer community at large. Yeah. Well, thanks again for your kind words and for coming on the show. Everybody, until next week, happy coding.