Ten years of freeCodeCamp

Ten years, Quincy. Ten years, freeCodeCamp… We got together on your fifth birthday/anniversary. I’m not sure which one you refer to. Is it a birthday, Adam, or is it an anniversary when a thing turns an age? It seems a birthday.

Birthday. It’s age… Right?

It’s a celebration either way.

Yeah.

But now it’s 10 years, Quincy. So that was five years ago that we interviewed you about five years of freeCodeCamp. Here you are on your 10th year, right?

Yeah. We just – we’re hitting 10 years this month. Toward the end of the month I’ll have a big announcement article that will come out… So if this may come out before or after that, but yeah, it’s late October. 2014 is when I sat down in my closet and I bashed out the first commits, and put them on the internet, and then started tweeting about them, and posting stuff on Hacker News, and stuff… Yeah.

How much does freeCodeCamp today look what you thought it was going to look in October 2014, when you first started hacking on it? Does it look what you expected?

Well, you have to consider that freeCodeCamp is the product of thousands of contributors at this point… And I’m just a single dev, and I had this much more narrow kind of general image of what I was hoping to achieve. And what that was was free developer education, extremely generically. We wanted to make sure that everybody had an option that was completely free, where they could go and they could learn the skills that they needed to go out and get jobs, and provide for themselves, provide for their families, and have an interesting, actualized career, as opposed to working at Taco Bell, which I did when I was a teenager… And I just remember how bad it was to work at Taco Bell. It wasn’t a great job. It barely paid anything.

Yeah, it’s a starter job.

Yeah. It’s a starter job, but a lot of people find themselves after college in quote-unquote starter jobs, working at Starbucks, and places like that. So we wanted to make sure that regardless of where people were in life in terms of age, where people were socioeconomically in terms of their ability to have time, where they can put the kids to sleep and actually study and stuff, we wanted to make sure that busy adults had a learning resource that would get them from wherever they were, to wherever they needed to be to be able to work as devs. So that was the vision.

So vision realized. Right?

I mean, you could say yes.

[laughs] It seems like it.

So here’s how I view it. There are certain people who are so motivated and so just galvanized to make their dreams a reality that they will just do whatever. You can parachute them into the jungle with nothing but a machete, and they’ll figure out how to invent nuclear fusion, or fission, maybe. And stuff like that. Like the [unintelligible 00:07:31.14] the professor. You have those people that are incredibly resourceful and incredibly driven. And it’s almost kind of like a spectrum. And then a little ways over, there’s probably the three of us. And then a little bit further over would be 18, 19-year-old me working at Taco Bell, not really sure what to do with life, and not even sure if college was worth it, and all those things. And then perhaps even further along, you would have the person who’s completely encumbered with maybe aging adult parents, and they’ve got this day job, and they have no energy, and they’re stressed all the time… Maybe they have more than one job, and maybe they have disabilities… They have all these additional things that keep them from achieving. So it’s not just motivational, it’s also circumstantial.

But essentially, from the beginning of time, there have been the Good Will Huntings that can just go to the library and get a college education for the price of $3 in late fees, or whatever… And that’s great. FreeCodeCamp has been a great resource to those people early on. I think even from the early days, we were a great resource for those people. What we’re trying to do is gradually allow more and more people to get involved and to chart a course for their learning. And so that that is one of the big things we’ve been doing. And a big part of that is just offering an inclusive, welcoming community that will help you when you need help. And that will give you feedback on your code that you submit, help you get unstuck when you can’t figure out some environment issue when you’re trying to set up a local development environment, or help point you toward a useful library for accomplishing XYZ… So I would say the story of freeCodeCamp has just been making it a little bit more accessible each day, through incremental pull requests, of which - I just checked the GitHub repo, and we’ve had… Let’s see, we’ve had more than 56,000 GitHub issues and pull requests.

Wow.

And the total number of commits is 36,472 commits.

36,472.

[00:09:45.13] Commits. And a lot of the commits I made really early on were squashed, because I was very verbose with my commits, and Mrugesh came in and he’s like “Oh, man…” So I went for the number one contributor to the number 100th contributor, because so many of my commits were squashed. And overwritten, and stuff like that over the years. But yeah, it’s just been a slow, incremental process of building up that core curriculum to make it more accessible, and more comprehensive, and then just the work of keeping it contemporary, and making sure we’re teaching React, and Next.js, we’re teaching Postgres, and contemporary tools that people use.

I’m reminded of that quote that says “People overestimate what they can do in 10 days and they underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” And I think that freeCodeCamp at 10 years might be a great example of that quote being true, because the accomplishment at this point seems massive and epic. And I’m sure - maybe not wilder than your imaginations, but if you look back to Quincy in 2014 and you told him where it is today, he would probably be a pretty happy camper, wouldn’t he?

Oh, yeah. I would be over the Moon. I would be through the roof. I would just be super-duper hyped that I could be a part of something like this. And I wake up every day and I thank God that I am able to be a part of this, and do something that is helping people. And - yeah, so I hope that doesn’t come across as like immodest, but I do feel like I have been a small part of something monumental so far, and I also feel that we’re just getting started.

It’s kind of funny whenever you look back at something, whenever you just sort of steadily chiseled away at this block… You’re not a sculptor, you have an idea, you’ve got obviously a chisel, you’ve got time, potentially patience, and you’ve got some sort of direction. You always say, instead of creating goals, create systems, and I kind of think you created a system. You’re a systematizer, so you’ve systematized the things that – generally the things that make other people quit, or don’t allow other people to join. You said that you’re one part of many to make this possible. I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t see your exact words, but… How big is the team? How has the team grown over the years? What size is the team today compared to five years ago even?

Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So the actual staff is pretty small when you compare it to all the open source contributors. But we do have kind of a core team, if you will, of people who we’ve brought on, that were open source contributors that we were able to budget, bringing them on to work full-time. So generally, the way this works is I’ll hop on a call with them, they’ll be like a prolific, long-term contributor, and I’ll learn more about them. And if they seem like they’re a good fit, and they seem like the person who would responsibly be able to manage themselves… Because I don’t manage people. We don’t have any sort of management hierarchy. I definitely admire what militaries and giant corporations can do in terms of creating hierarchies, that get things done, and stuff like that… But that’s not for us. We’re a remote distributed team.

So I get on a call basically, and I talk to people, and I’m like “Hey, if you could continue to contribute – right now you’re contributing five hours a week, six hours a week. You’re getting so much done with this limited amount of time. What if you could contribute 40 hours a week?” And if they’re like “Oh, well, then I’d focus on this, and I’d do this, and this area really needs improvement”, or “I’d to go deeper into this and potentially incorporate that into the curriculum”, then I’m like “Awesome. Well, let’s bring you on and you can do that.”

And so over time, we’ve – I think we have 35 people on the team, in 21 different countries. So we’re an extremely international – we’ve never had an office. I have never even gotten a WeWork type thing. Like, I’ve always just worked out of my home, first my closet, and now we moved from San Francisco to Texas and I have a proper house that has a yard that I mow every week, and things like that. So I just work out of one of the rooms in the house… So we fly these 35 people from around the world to Texas, here in Plano, Texas, which is a good school district. That’s why we moved here; it’s a really good public school. And we just hang out, and we go to different public libraries. I call it the library tour, and we go to several different – like the Plano Library, the Coppell Library, the Lewisville Library… And we go into all these different libraries for about two or three hours, and we [unintelligible 00:14:17.27] the sessions.

[00:14:19.26] And then we go and hang out at the National Video Game Museum, which is this amazing video game museum, if you’re ever in Plano… We go play – they have a perfectly restored 1980s style video arcade, and stuff inside it, among other things.

So if you look at the people on the team, it very much mirrors the kind of people that are contributing to the open source effort. And it’s not just the open source effort on GitHub; people who are writing books and articles that we’re publishing through freeCodeCamp Press, freeCodeCamp.org/news, people who are publishing video courses on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel… Yeah, just chill human beings that feel like they can contribute to the global knowledge base, essentially. The way that people acquire skills.

So that’s a very long-winded answer, but almost everybody on the team is a developer, who has also had some classroom teaching experience usually… And everybody’s a jack of all trades. I can give you a lot of insight over the years in how the team has changed in terms of priorities and configuration, but it’s basically been the same people that we brought on four or five years ago; we had the budget to start bringing more people on, because we got our charity tax-exempt status… And then we started getting donations from the community, and those donations have gradually grown. We’ve also gotten some ad revenue from YouTube, and display ads… If you go to the freeCodeCamp publication, you might see ads for upcoming conferences, or books, and things like that… And that has helped us kind of expand and sustain ourselves as a charity. So the team has not grown a lot. The team was – it basically kind of stabilized at around 35 people.

It’s a good-sized team for a nonprofit.

I think so.

I mean, 21 countries - that’s astounding. So there’s so many different things going on in and around freeCodeCamp. How do you, Quincy, decide what to work on? What’s important today? How do you make those kind of calls?

Yeah, so I listen to the community and what people in the community seem to think is important. And then I also talk to employers, I talk to professors… I talk to just as many different people as I can, to understand where things are going. And I spend a great deal of time immersed in listening to the Changelog Podcast and other podcasts about math, programming, technology, computer science… I spend a lot of time studying history, I spend a lot of time talking to people in India, China, Brazil, countries where there are huge numbers of developers that dwarf even what’s in the United States, in a lot of cases… And I’m trying to figure out “What are they doing? What is important to them? Where–” You want to skate where the puck is going, as Wayne Gretzky says… And we very much want to be out and ahead of things. And that doesn’t necessarily mean “Oh, AI is a big thing. We’re going to implement an AI chatbot that you can talk to.” I mean, that might be useful, but it’s just a wrapper around a big foundation model. I don’t know that the world needs another wrapper around the foundation model, but what we can do is we can take AI and we can use it to speed up our localization process. Before we hand-translated, and then we use machine translation to translate the freeCodeCamp core curriculum, and now what we’re doing is we’re feeding as much into the context window as we can, into GPT 4.0, and we’re saying “Hey, translate this to the best of your ability into accessible Brazilian Portuguese. Sixth grade reading level.” And then we’re having native Portuguese speakers review and correct that. And it’s much faster to correct machine translation than it is to translate yourself.

Sure.

So it dramatically speeds up the rate at which we can get localization done. And we’re not going to be one of those pages where you just go and there’s some Google plug-in thing that basically auto-translates everything, and there’s like 70 languages immediately available in clicks… No, these are all translated by native speakers. There’s always a native speaker in the loop, because we value clear communication, and we want to make sure the curriculum is clear.

[00:18:11.22] And there are I think 10, 12 novels worth of content in the core curriculum in terms of text… I mean, it’s hundreds of thousands of words that need to be translated, and we want to make sure those are translated correctly. So we use LLMs for that.

So we’re always adopting new tools, but we’re not just following a leader, because we don’t have to follow a leader, because we’re a charity and we don’t have investors and we don’t have owners, and we can just basically kind of follow the will of the community.

That’s pretty intense. That last part was really – the hook, really.

Yeah.

In that you don’t have this grand corporation that drives the direction of freeCodeCamp; that you can bend the will of the people, you can go literally in the world where it’s necessary from a language perspective, from a need perspective… And - such an admirable thing, honestly. It’s just impressive. Very impressive. That’s all I wanted to say, Jerod. That was it.

I was keen on the exact same thing. I was thinking how liberating it must be to not have that thing that so many of us have, which is this need to capitalize, basically. To produce profit when you have – I mean, obviously, you still have a need for donations, an epic need for donations. And you’ve been working – you’ve been working on that as an entrepreneur who will be working on their revenue… I think. That’s my – just watching you. And you’ve gotten that flywheel going, to the point where sustainability seems to be there, of course; that also relies on future donors. So I’m not saying – if you’re interested in donating to freeCodeCamp, I’m not saying they don’t need your money anymore. I’m just saying that you’ve gotten to a point where it seems like you’re stabilized and you don’t have a hook to make more money for these people, because they’re just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and their appreciation, probably because they went through freeCodeCamp and got a sweet job at the end of it, and now they’re making way more money, and so why wouldn’t they just support that cost?

Yeah. And it’s great. It is liberating. That’s an excellent word to use… When you are basically beholden to the community; the grassroots support that is supporting you. This is not some political campaign where we lose, and all the money was kind of like “Oh, bye-bye.” This is an endeavor that will continue, hopefully, for hundreds of years. And that may sound hyperbolic, but there are plenty of charities that have been around for hundreds of years. The YMCA, which I just came back from… If I look sweaty, I just came back from walking to my local YMCA, where I exercise. That’s been a charity for 170 years, or something like that. The Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders. And so many educational charities and NGOs… And they can last for hundreds of years, because you can listen to Jeff Bezos himself talk about Amazon, and he says basically “Corporations have a shelf life.” Unless you’re some hotel in Europe, or a pub in Europe, or a hotel in Japan or something where you can have 1000 years of history… That is extremely rare in business, because investors need growth. They necessarily are investing money because they want the future value of total cash flows. The discounted value of that. They need that to continue to grow, so that the market cap will grow. Otherwise, why would they invest with you, when they can invest with somebody else? Everybody’s chasing growth, right? And you can only grow so much. Once you’re Amazon size, you can only grow so much. And Jeff Bezos has said in an interview that he thinks that Amazon is just not going to make it, and nobody ever makes it, because that’s just how things work. Rise and fall. That’s how companies work.

Right. The market changes… It’s very difficult to keep up once you’re established. Well, it’s just difficult to keep growing. I mean, at some point – like, how is Nvidia going to keep growing? What is the total addressable market of GPUs? They’re already a $3 trillion company. Is suddenly the world going to need 10 times, 100 times? Maybe. But at some point, it won’t need any more GPUs. There will be enough, and the market will be sated.

[00:22:10.08] And then all the investors are going to turn on them and just ditch them. And that’s the rational thing to do… If you’re a rational actor in the economy, it’s to take your money out of the company that’s declining and put it into a company that’s rising.

Sure.

And that’s how venture capital works. They’re trying to ramp up your valuation so they can exit when there’s a liquidity event, whether that’s an acquisition, or whether that’s going public, or something. And each round has to be bigger, otherwise you’ve got a down round, and you’ve got a company that’s in decline, and people start leaving the ship.

Right.

So because growth is so intrinsic to for-profit enterprises, it’s just – it’s not built for sustainability. Charities are by definition just built to sustain themselves. So if you want to go long, if you want to exist, multi-generational starships getting to Kepler or wherever, you need to have a charity type structure, or you need to have a family business that’s passed down generation to generation, where no single generation screws up, or sells it to private equity, or something like that.

So I know this is about open source, this podcast, but I will talk about sustainability, because I genuinely believe that if you are listening to this and you want to create an organization that is going to sustain itself long term, you should probably do a family type business, or you should probably do a charity, where there’s no ownership, and everybody’s just invested in the mission, and sustaining it. A charity can’t – I can’t sell freeCodeCamp to some giant education corporation. Only a charity can acquire a charity, and there’s no incentive for me. I don’t own any stock in freeCodeCamp. I could just give it to better owners. But when would I trust somebody to run it better than I trust myself or somebody else on my team, right?

I don’t know, Quincy… You can go ask Sam Altman for the workarounds. I think he’s got some stuff figured out over there.

That stuff is technically legal, but any charity will look down on it. What they’re doing is kind of a shame. And what edX did, where they sold to - I think [unintelligible 00:24:05.13] or one of the big… I can’t remember. edX was an open source platform that was technically a charity, that was founded by Harvard and MIT. Both universities put in 60 million dollars to found it, and they paid the CEO millions of dollars, and stuff like that… That was technically a charity. So yes, it is certainly possible that you can convert a charity to a for-profit entity. But if you’re optimizing around going long, you would never do that.

No, I was not being serious. I was being facetious.

Yeah, no, no, no. It’s worth noting that there have been historic instances of charities flipping.

Well, actually, if this thing goes through, as it seems it’s going to, this Open AI reshuffle - I don’t know how it’s all shaken out. It’s very much smoke and mirrors… It’s kind of a bad precedent for other entrepreneurs, to like “Well, why didn’t we just have a nonprofit, and then somehow convert it when it’s economically smart to do that?” I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole necessarily, but it could be a bad precedent. Such a public and valuable organization doing that.

Break: [00:25:07.29]

Let’s talk about demand, because we’ve had a market correction… #learntocode had its moment, and it’s kind of gone now, in terms of it being a cultural thing, where everybody must learn to code… And there was a time where you could go through freeCodeCamp and do the very strenuous work… How many hours that is? 90-hour courses… I mean, that was the original thing, right?

I mean, the core curriculum is thousands of hours long. Nobody ever finishes it.

Yeah, so it’s a lot of effort. But you could do it in six months, maybe? Nine months? How long would it take you? I mean, probably like 18 months, if you’re studying 20 hours a week.

Part time, a year and a half, you could get through that. And at the other side of that tunnel, maybe three or four years ago, was almost a guaranteed opportunity. And a little bit harder today in today’s market. Is that fair to say, Quincy?

Absolutely. And I’ve been pretty – like, we don’t really care one way or the other. We’re thinking over longer time horizons, and I think it’ll correct over time. The number of developer openings is back to where it was around 2020, pre-pandemic. During the pandemic, and everything, there was tons of money, and interest rates were really low, and there was stimulus and all this stuff… And interests spiked. freeCodeCamp, there were days where we were getting more than one million – like two million visits a day, or something like that. We had like a single article that was just blowing up and getting, I don’t know, 10+ million views, or something like that. It was just a collection of free online university courses.

But that had its moment, and we were going viral, so to speak, as the pandemic was going viral and trapping everybody in their homes, and stuff. And so yeah, absolutely, that was a huge year for us, and now we’re kind of having this regression to a mean.

But the difference now is the attitude. The vibe is different now in 2024 than it was in 2022. And I think a lot of that is because employers - they overhired, because they just wanted to grab a whole bunch of talent and hoard it. And that was like “We’ve got all this talent. If we need it, we can use it. We have plenty of cash.” Apple, Google, all these giant corporations have tons of cash, they don’t know what to spend it on, so they were spending it on talent, bringing a bunch of people on, that they didn’t necessarily need, and just doing lots of speculative projects.

But what happened was when the going got a little bit tougher, they’re like “Hey, let’s cut some of these people loose”, and so the market was flooded with mid-level engineers, and it became extremely difficult as an entry level engineer to find really anything.

And so that sentiment spread, and I think it’s definitely harder to get a job now than it was in 2022 as a developer, and people, I think, are blaming AI and the jobs being automated. But what’s really at fault, the real cause - and AI may be a contributor, at least in deluded managers’ minds; they may think [unintelligible 00:29:05.00] A lot of people just looked at Elon Musk and said “Oh, he fired everybody, and Twitter’s still up.” Yeah, Twitter’s still up. But I can tell you as a frequent user of Twitter that it is a shadow of its former self, and that I see a lot of nastiness on Twitter that I didn’t see before… And the features have not been super – I don’t think it’s a [unintelligible 00:29:22.08] company, frankly. Bot that it was ever a [unintelligible 00:29:26.17] company. Mark Zuckerberg used to joke that Twitter was like a clown car that accidentally crashed into a goldmine. And if you read the book Hatching Twitter, it’s like what not to do as a leader. basically.

But my point is, a lot of people look to people like Elon Musk, who’s just like “Fire everybody.” And so you see this hurting. You see all these managers laying people off… And even Apple, which historically never laid people off… Not since the 1990s had they done a layoff… And they laid people off. You know something’s bad when Apple, which has, I don’t know, more than $100 billion in cash that it’s just holding, and it’s choosing to lay people off. And it’s not because it’s – it’s because they overhired, in my opinion, and because now the cost of capital is much higher, and interest rates have changed… And there’s a lot more uncertainty with AI.

[00:30:16.00] I think the uncertainty is much more significant than the actual net improvement in productivity as an individual developer. So you have managers who think “Oh, I can just have one developer do the job of 10 developers if they’re using AI.” I don’t believe that to be the case. I use AI all the time. I probably talk to LLMs more than I talk to any single human being other than my wife and my kids.

Right. I would say right now my personal productivity increase has probably been 20%. From 1 to 1.2, something like that.

That’s exactly what I was gonna say. 20%.

Yeah. It’s nice. It’s helped me. I continue to use it. I appreciate every time it gets better. But yeah, 20% improvement is not going to dramatically change your engineering team structure, right?

Yeah. So you could lay off one of every five developers, maybe. One of every six, or something. I’m not sure exactly how the math shakes out. But yeah. And that’s basing it on the productivity increase… But we haven’t laid anybody off. We don’t believe that – and we’re using this stuff extensively, internally. There’s just been so much work to be done, we just shift people around. So I can talk about how we’re shifting the team around… But let me talk just a little bit about people who are on the job market. If you’re listening to this, if you’re on the job market, trying to get a job as a developer - the jobs are going to come back. Hang in there. There’s a very slow correction… It takes forever for these hiring cycles to happen. It takes forever for the Gartner hype cycle to ride the wave from the peak of inflated expectations to the trout of disillusionment, to the plateau of productivity. If you’re familiar with the Gartner hype cycle, it’s this phenomenon that pretty much every technology has gone through. And LLMs are going through that. And when people say AI, they’re talking about LLMs. That’s been the major breakthrough.

So I think that if you’re in a situation where you are trying to learn to code and you’re hoping to get a developer job, my advice would be don’t quit your day job. The same thing I’ve always been saying. Like, if you’re working at a Starbucks, or if you’ve got a job at some accounting consultancy… I worked as an accountant for a while; I did temp work, essentially, moving from company to company… Doing that sort of stuff, it sucked. Keep doing that work. Whatever’s paying the bills, whatever’s keeping food on the table, and keep paying down your debt, and doing all that stuff. But just plan long-term. Expect it to take a couple years.

If you look at the pre-2000 bubble, if you had basic HTML, CSS skills, if you knew how to run a web server, FTP some files or something like that, you could get a job as a web designer. And then in 2012-ish, I would say, the tools became so good that a lot of people could get jobs as WordPress developers, or doing basic Ruby on Rails work… That’s what my first job was, doing Rails dev on a small team, just maintaining a Rails codebase… And over time, it’s gotten a little bit harder, but the jobs were increasing, so we didn’t really think too much about it. It’s just “Oh, now we’ve got to learn React. Now we’ve got to learn about a whole lot of security considerations. We’ve got to think about accessibility…” There’s always been this layering of additional things you need to learn, and that’s not going to go away. It’s just going to get harder and harder in terms of the actual skills that you need to know to work as a software engineer.

But at the same time, the number of openings started to fall… So now there’s this bigger gap between what needs to be learned, and the rewards or the likeliness of being able to find a job. And I do think that if you just continue applying for jobs patiently as you continue to build your skills, your network, your reputation, then you will eventually get a developer job, but it may take a little bit longer now than it took in 2022. That is kind of my thinking on that.

[00:33:58.21] So my advice to people who are on the job market is just be patient and keep learning, and don’t give up. Because if you give up, you’re never going to get a developer job. But if you keep at it, you will eventually be able to build out, through your community, through people you know, through different social groups you’re a part of… Hopefully, you’re going out and putting yourself out there and trying to meet people, through building projects and publishing stuff on Twitter, Reddit, wherever you share your stuff… Eventually, you’re going to have a decent portfolio. Maybe you’re going to build a big, impressive app that ties a bunch of stuff together, and is impressive from an engineering standpoint, and you’re going to be able to get a job. It’s just going to be a grind.

On that note of applying yourself to this job, I wonder how much opportunity there is for somebody who has a skill, let’s say in a domain. I’m being vague, because I don’t know how to be clear. There’s a lot of opportunity where – at least I see a lot of opportunity where you can apply a technological solution to a non-technological problem. Whereas you can go and spend a lot of time on freeCodeCamp, and learn a lot of different skill sets, and then here’s a domain that doesn’t have a lot of people leveraging web tech software, or anything that’s even just remotely non-backwards from the way it used to be, to - let’s just say, involving software. Is there any opportunity like that, where you’re not just looking for a job, but looking for – you’re not just creating future software developers, but future software entrepreneurs. Or people who could be entrepreneurial in their pursuit, because they can come alongside an entrepreneur and level up their ideas so much because they just never applied technology to the sales process, or to the marketing processes, or any of these things where it’s not just simply engineering, it’s simply applying what would be considered just software skills.

Yeah, so I’m reluctant to push people toward entrepreneurship, because everybody pushes people toward entrepreneurship, and that often means financial ruin. But I do think that if you can work as a consultant, and essentially you meet somebody at the library or at the gym or something and they’re telling you what they do, and they’re discussing… One question I always ask people is “What’s the most frustrating part of your day-to-day?” And that helps identify “Oh, yeah, I have to deal with these TPS reports”, or whatever. And then it’s like “Okay, well, what if I wrote a script that just did that for you and you just go to a website and click a button and it did those for you?” And then they’re like “Oh, that’s possible?” And you’re like “Well…”

Yeah. I guess it’s kind of where I’m leaning towards, is like this automation idea. There’s a lot of people who just don’t get to a level where they can even leverage Zapier, or If This Then That. Just these platforms alone are so powerful. And there’s a lot of things you can even do self-hosted in your own home, that is kind of interesting in your own domain. But I’m just thinking, your demeanor seems to push people towards, or guide people towards becoming a software engineer and going to work for someone else… When the liberating idea might be being liberated from having to have a typical nine-to-five, “I work for somebody else” job, that software development, to me – and you can concur with this, Jerod, because you’ve done this, too – it’s liberated us to make our own choices, to do our own thing, and to work on our own thing, not just somebody else’s thing.

Yeah. Well, I’ve talked to tons of people… So freeCodeCamp has a podcast, and I’ve interviewed – I’ve done more than 100 interviews there, including Jeff Atwood, and Joel Spolsky, and David Malan, the Harvard professor, and people like that… And a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed have been entrepreneurial, in the sense that they didn’t necessarily work for very many people, or they didn’t even necessarily work as a developer for people. Maybe they had lots of other jobs, but they were able to build a consultancy, or they were able to build a product-focused company and potentially raise money, or get enough grassroots support to bootstrap it into a sustainable organization.

[00:37:56.28] I think that my general advice would be that is a little riskier than just going out and getting paid to learn by getting a job somewhere. So I always push people in the direction of “If you want to de-risk your future, go just work for somebody else.” And they’ve already figured out the money part of it, and they’ve figured out how to offer you this salary, and then you can take that salary, or contractor compensation per month, or whatever… And then you can just take that money and you can get paid to learn. So I always encourage people to go work for somebody else first, just to de-risk it a little bit. And you’ll learn a ton on somebody else’s dime.

But I would say, absolutely, if you’ve already worked as a developer, you should consider entrepreneurial opportunities. But everybody and their dog is selling some book about entrepreneurship, or they’ve got some podcast talking about entrepreneurship, and I just want to make it abundantly clear, I think that entrepreneurship is great, but I think it’s great to work for somebody else first. Jeff Bezos worked for many years for other people before he founded Amazon. And that’s true of most – and by the way, I think this is the second time I mentioned Jeff Bezos… I don’t even think I’m a Jeff Bezos stan, or anything like that…

Total fanboy over there, I can tell.

But I think it’s hard to argue that he’s been extremely effective at accomplishing his goal, which maybe was just to make a ton of money. And I think there’s something to learn there, regardless of your opinion of him as a human being. Don’t judge the teacher, but judge the teaching, I guess. So you can take a look at a lot of successful people, and usually at the beginning of their successful journey they were working for somebody else and learning, making a ton of mistakes on their dime, and then taking the lessons from that experience, and then applying it so that they had sufficiently de-risked their own endeavor.

And the other thing I’ll point out is most people who are successful entrepreneurs, at least in the United States, are not 20-somethings that dropped out of college, and stuff like that. They’re people in their 40s, that have already lived through some experience and have a much more high-resolution model of how the world works, and how business gets done, and how things get done, and rules and regulations, and how financial reporting works… All these different things that you will learn just working in a giant corporation for a while. The dynamic of managers. It’s hard to be a good manager if you’ve never been managed. Those kinds of things.

Obviously, Adam, you served in the military. You learned probably a tremendous amount about how the world works by flying around Bosnia, and places like that, and seeing it on the ground, and being part of a hierarchy. That is invaluable. So I don’t want you all to think I’m just some puppet for the man, or something like that… But really, go out and work for other people first, and you’re going to learn so much and you’re going to just de-risk. I know I’m being extremely redundant, and I’ve said that three times, but I genuinely think it’s an important lesson that you may not be hearing from enough people. You may be hearing, “Oh, just go for it.”

Yeah. I think you just don’t want to be an entrepreneurial guru, is the thing. You’re just really against being the entrepreneur guru.

I mean, I don’t disagree. I think that unless you grew up and you’re like 12 years old, selling something on the corner… Some people are just salespeople from the start. They’re making money, they’re hustling at 12, 13, 14. Yeah, go ahead – they start their first business at the age of 18.

Most of us do well to learn on somebody else’s dime, and just work for them, let them make the mistakes, let them make the profits… You get your wage, and you get your education along the way. And then after a little while, then yeah, maybe it’s your turn to strike out and take a shot at it. But you can sure avoid a lot of easy errors by working for somebody else for a little while. So I don’t disagree.

Yeah. And I’ll just tell you my own personal experience, which I’ve written about at length in my book, which is freely available… Just google –

You’ve got a book?

Yeah, just google “learn to code book”, and it should be one of the first results. Yeah, I published that, and there’s an audio book that’s on my podcast feed if you want to hear me read it. If you want to listen to four hours – there’s some kids banging on pianos in the background, and stuff.

[00:42:00.10] But basically, my journey has very much been like - I worked as a teacher and a school director for like 10 years, and I built up domain expertise in adult education before I learned how to code, and before I learned how to apply it, and built something that people would actually use and found useful. So that is my journey. But you may absolutely – if you’re listening to this, you may just be one of those people that never had to work for somebody else and was always so resourceful that you could conjure money out of the wealthy people around you or something like that, and then sustain yourself off of them. Or maybe you progressed from the lemonade stand to selling cell phones, to – whatever the entrepreneurial journey was that took you to where you are. But I will say that I do think that for every person who’s succeeded at that, there are lots of people who have a lot of debt, and probably their family won’t talk to them because they borrowed money from their family, and all this other stuff.

I saved up about $150,000 working as a teacher, working as a school director, just putting money into index funds and waiting… And I had that money to call upon when I needed to sustain myself, and provide for my family while we were going through the first few years of freeCodeCamp. We had basically zero revenue for the first three years. We got tax-exempt status from the IRS, and at that point we started accepting tax-deductible donations from the community. And we just gradually built that up, and now we have more than 11,000 people around the world who donate to freeCodeCamp each month, recurring monthly donations. And that’s how we sustain ourselves.

Nice.

And it took a lot of time, and it took a lot of patient work, but now we have that freedom. We don’t have VCs calling us and asking us when we’re going to raise another round, or exit, or trying to… We don’t have some board of directors that’s telling us what to do. We’ve got a couple people that I knew before freeCodeCamp started, who were business people and accountants and stuff like that, who are on our board, and I just meet with them every three months and tell them what’s going on, and they’re like “Cool.” And we just keep doing it. But we’ve worked very hard to navigate into this position of independence, and I’ve worked very hard to learn what I needed to learn to where I could be the person, I guess, at the top, who’s not accountable to a whole bunch of other people, but is rather accountable to a community of peers, rather than being accountable to some person above you. And I think that’s what people – if you ask people why they go into entrepreneurship, some people might be like “I want to be rich.” Rick James, right? But I think a lot of people just want to be free from all the nonsense that comes with having this big hierarchy above you.

When I talk to people in the military, that’s the biggest complaint about people. Not that the mission is flawed or anything like that, but it’s usually just like “Yeah, I just had this one officer above me who made my life miserable”, or something like that. Or “I just – I didn’t have any agency. They were just telling me where to go, and I had to go, and I had no recourse, or I’d get court-martialed”, or something like that.

People don’t want to live their lives where they’re just being bossed around. They want to just be free. They want to have that proverbial house where they can mow their lawn, and they can buy their own damn business, and nobody bothers them except during tax time, you know?

Well, a lot of us would to avoid that particular annoyance as well, but that’s a different podcast. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think there’s a – the law of diminishing returns applies to almost everything, including how much money you have and can make at a certain point. We’ve talked to many people who’ve made it, and the money stops driving them, because it’s just like “Well, that’s just not a thing.” And you think satisfaction is at the end of that particular high watermark, and it turns out no, it’s way, way, way lower in terms of “Now that this money has taken care of my base needs, I don’t have that stress of anxiety of “If I have a $400 emergency bill, I can’t pay that.” When you get past that point, when you’re like “Yeah, I can pay my bills, I can pay my mortgage, put food on the table, maybe have a little bit of spending money to do a vacation or to scratch an itch or a hobby”, at a certain point the liberty and the freedom is way more valuable than that next million, or whatever that number happens to be in your head. So I’m with you on that.

Break: [00:46:22.05]

Can we talk curriculum?

That’s what I really want to talk about.

[laughs]

Yeah. Okay, awesome. Let’s do it!

Let’s talk curriculum. So you have the core curriculum. Of course, it’s expanded and changed, and you have a legacy curriculum because you’ve probably rewritten things over the years… And it’s probably the main thing that you think about, is curriculum, reaching more people… I don’t know, that’s probably your core two things, I would guess. A lot of the curriculum is web development-oriented. Of course, it doesn’t stop there. I’m sure you’ll tell me the plethora of things. But if somebody was going to start today, I’m just thinking about web as a platform for success, and how it’s changed, and we have these silos now, and there’s a lot of aggregation of profits to a few small organizations… And I’m wondering how viable the web is as a platform for future endeavors. Is that a place where we as developers or wannabe developers should be still investing and honing on web development as a starting place? Or should I be looking into data science? Should I be looking into robotics? What is smart for somebody who’s trying to get into the game, or invest in themselves, maybe switch their focus in the game?

Yeah, so I would still encourage people to start with web. And the reason why is about half of all developer jobs are web-focused… You hear about mobile app development, and really that is just a mobile app skin on top of a bunch of APIs that are running on the web, and stuff like that. You hear about a lot of machine learning, and things like that. And it’s true that machine learning is distinct from web development. I could talk about the big changes we’re making to the curriculum… But I would say that the skills that you learn, like data structures, algorithms - everything you learn while you’re learning to be a full stack web developer, virtually all of that is transferable. Almost everybody’s going to need to create some sort of website, or some sort of mobile app, or some sort of integration with an existing platform through an API, that serves whatever it is that they’re creating… Whether they’re creating data science insights. Most data scientists have to deal with data visualization. They have to figure out how to get what’s in their Jupyter Notebook or wherever it is they’re crunching the numbers, they need to figure out how to get that in a place where people who are making decisions based on those data can consume them, and understand them.

So web does touch pretty much everything, and that’s why I recommend starting with that. A lot of people would say “Start with systems engineering. Software systems engineering.” And learning how C works, because everything is built on top of C, and doing the classic computer science degree program work of building your own compiler, building your own operating system, building maybe your own search engine, maybe building your own LLM… Doing all those things. And then a lot of people would say you should just focus on machine learning, because that’s the future. Everybody’s going to be telling the machine in English what to do. And I’ve written a lot about this in my book, and I do believe that in the future programming will consist of talking in natural language, highly structured natural language, to a computer, the way that people on Star Trek talk to the computer and the computer builds things on the holodeck, and those things like that. But that still requires knowledge of the different layers of abstraction below. And in order to effectively get things done with technology, to some extent you do want to understand how that technology works. And I think a lot of people do have a decent understanding of how RAM works, how motherboards work, how hard drives work, how buses work… A lot of the actual computer engineering stuff that software is operating on top of. And we can certainly get a much more higher resolution understanding of that by looking at the underlying operating system kernel, and things like that.

I will tell you what the freeCodeCamp curriculum is doing… But in general, I do recommend – if you’re not sure where to start, start in web. And then work out from there. And don’t feel like “Oh, websites are – nobody uses websites anymore.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what web development is. Gaming… Any sort of field where you’re essentially writing software, there’s going to be some component that travels over the internet. And so a lot of those principles. So without belaboring that point any further, I will tell you where the freeCodeCamp curriculum is heading.

Okay. Please do.

So about six months ago the CEO of CompTIA reached out to me. Really chill dude named Todd Thibodeaux.

[00:54:07.10] Okay.

And he said, “I love freeCodeCamp. I use it every day. Where can I send a donation?” I was like “Okay, cool.” And I sent him our bank details… He sent a wire of a quarter million dollars.

Wow.

Yeah. So I’m like “Awesome. This is great. Maybe I need to learn more about CompTIA.” And I made a tweet thanking CompTIA for their gift, and then it was just amazing the feedback on that tweet. Everybody was jumping in and saying amazing things about CompTIA. Like “Oh, I’ve been A plus certified, or I have had the security plus, and everybody at my company has to get security plus as part of their continuing education…” Like, all these people talking about it, people are getting CompTIA certifications as part of their degree program, all that stuff. And I was like “Whoa. There’s so much interest in these rigorous CompTIA type certifications.” We’ve always had rigorous certifications, but they’ve never been industry-style certifications. It’s always been like proof of learning is how we look at them. You complete a freeCodeCamp certification, you build all the projects, you’ve got tons of proof of learning… And people ask me “Oh, can I get a job with my freeCodeCamp certification?” and I always said it’s a proof of learning. It’s one of a basket of things that are on your resume that make you a compelling candidate for a job. But I’ve never said “Oh, it’s a guaranteed job.” And I don’t think any certifications guarantee jobs, or anything that. Some of them may have employer replacement programs… PMI is another organization, the Project Management Institute… And there’s ICS2, ICS Squared… There are all these other organizations that have these professional certifications, and I was like “Wow, maybe freeCodeCamp could move more in that direction.” We could create professional certifications, we could make them free, and we could make them on topics that other certification programs aren’t covering.

So we are working on four professional certifications that are going to somewhat replace our existing curriculum. Like, the coursework will always be there, we’ll always have the legacy certifications. But what we’re doing is we’re building a single, much more comprehensive, linear web development curriculum called Certified Full Stack Developer. And you earn this through completing - here, I’ve actually got a list of all the coursework that is currently in this certification.

So it’s about 3,000 hours of coursework. You learn semantic HTML, accessibility, CSS fundamentals, Flexbox, design concepts, typography… You learn how to work in a code editor, get your code environment set up, JavaScript fundamentals, higher order functions and callbacks, DOM manipulation, algorithmic thinking, object-oriented programming, functional programming data structures, dynamic programming, web standards, React fundamentals, TypeScript fundamentals, testing concepts, Bash scripting, SQL and relational databases, Git, security and privacy, Node, Express, security for web developers specifically, like OWASP, working with APIs, AI engineering fundamentals, and how to get a developer job. And you’re going to learn a ton of Python as part of that too, because we use Python as kind of our backend language.

So that is a very comprehensive web development curriculum, that not only is it going to involve the traditional freeCodeCamp core gameplay loop of building a bunch of projects - because freeCodeCamp has always been all about building projects - but we are adding a whole lot of additional stuff.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve had over the years is we’ve leaned way too much into learning by doing. And a lot of people want more conceptual stuff. And we’ve always said “Oh, just go to freeCodeCamp… Just keep doing it and it’s like wax on, wax off.” Like Mr. Miyagi teaching you how to do all the basic karate movements without actually having to do the karate itself. Or maybe you’re doing the karate, but you don’t actually know why you’re doing what you’re doing… So it’s been very learn by doing. And we’ve minimized kind of the theory that we’ve given people and we’ve just told people “Oh, go over to the YouTube channel, read the books that we publish every week, and you’ll get plenty of theory.” But what we’re actually doing is we’re working to incorporate that.

[00:57:59.05] So not only are we going to have the interactive step-by-step project building - we’re going to have 64 of those - but we’re also going to have 513 lectures, which are just three to five-minute videos talking about different concepts, everything from different design patterns and things like that, to how a system on a chip works, and stuff like that. And then we’re going to have 83 labs, which are basically just - you have a test suite and you have a blank canvas, and you have to write the code to get that entire test suite to pass.

And then we’re also adding a lot more spaced repetition. So we’re adding 66 quizzes and 6 preparation exams. Then we’re adding a big capstone project, and then we’re adding a final exam. And that’ll be conducted through an audited kind of testing environment that we’re building. It’s open source. So yeah, we’re building our own Flutter app, where you can go in and you can take exams, and stuff like that.

And then if you pass the human-curated capstone, if you build all those different projects - it’s more than a hundred projects - and if you pass the exam, then you become a certified web developer. And then you have that certification for three years, and then you have to do some continuing education to keep it refreshed every three years.

So it’s very similar to all the other big industry certifications. All of them expire after three years, all of them require you to do the additional coursework, continuing education… But the big distinction with freeCodeCamp - we’ve put this word at the beginning of our name, and we’re sticking to it.

What’s that word again?

Free.

[laughs]

Free.

This certification is going to be completely free.

Free.

Wow.

So all the coursework is free, all the prep work - you can take the exam for free. There’s no exam fee. We actually built our own environment because we didn’t want to pay Prometric, or whatever. We didn’t want you to have to pay them a hundred bucks, two hundred bucks to take some environment where you’re like sitting in front of your computer, taking an exam and they’re watching you, and stuff. We wanted to be able to do all that stuff ourselves, so we can keep the marginal costs as near zero as possible, so that we can offer it completely free.

Hm. That sounds amazing.

Very amazing.

That’s my entire commentary. That sounds amazing.

Where is it – what’s the state of this new curriculum?

We’re going to launch some of it in time for Christmas.

Okay.

So this is the first of four planned certifications. The other one - we’re doing a machine learning-focused certification… All of them are very heavy on Python. We think Python is the future. And you’re going to use JavaScript for the web development, obviously; it’s the lingua franca of the web. But almost everything is going really deep on Python. We’re using relational databases extensively… We’re going very low-level with especially – okay, so the three other certifications: certified machine learning engineer, certified data scientist, certified software systems engineer. Software systems engineer - a lot of C, a lot of working with compilers, a lot of building systems that might run on a satellite. Or might run in a self-driving car, or some sort of mission-critical code, that’s extremely high-performing and that can be very deeply…

In C, Quincy? Mission-critical code in C?

That’s how they do it. [laughter] They’ll build some layers of abstraction on top of it, but if you go – I mean, yeah…

That’s hilarious.

Yeah, we’re going to go all the way down the stack.

I know that’s how they do it. I’m not sure if that’s how they should continue to do it for our new – our new people should be learning perhaps a memory-safe, low-level language, but…

Well, we want people to be able to work with the extensive corpus of legacy codebases out there…

Well, I get it, man. I mean, you probably –

…many of which are decades old. The COBOL systems that are running the unemployment office, and stuff like that, right?

Right, right.

Mainframes… So why not teach it? Why not teach people as much as possible? We can teach everything. There’s no limit. And if you are willing to invest the time to complete a 3,000-hour curriculum, that is 500-plus micro lectures, and a whole bunch of projects and stuff like that… That is a significant commitment. We think maybe one or two percent of people who start it are going to actually go all the way to the end. And that’s why we’re able to offer everything for free, because actually going through and looking at a capstone project, and providing the exam and all that stuff - very few people will make it all the way to the end of it. But that’s by design, because I think a lot of people will get – it’s like an inverted pyramid. A lot of people are going to get a tremendous amount of value before they even complete it. And they’re going to walk away just having a much better understanding of programming, and technology, and appreciation for how to build software, and some basic know-how for how to build software. But they won’t necessarily make it all the way to the end where they’re like job-ready. And that’s one of the things we just need to accept.

[01:02:27.11] I have always said, anyone who is sufficiently motivated can learn to code. That does not mean that everybody is going to be able to go out and work as a software engineer. You need to really care, and you need to – I think gone are the days where you could just learn a little bit, like the three-month bootcamp type things… And we’ve never been about that. We’ve always been about rigor. Rigor, but accessibility. Those are the two words that permeate all of our discussions as a team, as a community, about where we should go. We want things to be super-rigorous.

You know how we are developing the university degree program? …which has been in development for a few years. We’ve got a few of the courses done. We’re still figuring out the accreditation process, and everything. It’s a 2030s thing. But we are still working on it. And what we did was we looked at the top 20 computer science programs in the United States. You know, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Caltech. We looked “What are they teaching?” and then we built a composite curriculum around what they’re teaching, and we made sure that we’re teaching all the engineering math, all the hardcore engineering and computer science concepts that they’re covering, and all the applied stuff. So we’ve built our curriculum based on that.

We’re trying to be as rigorous as possible. We think that we can be – there’s no reason why we can’t be much more rigorous than an MIT, because they only have four years. If you actually went through and earned all four of these freeCodeCamp certifications, it might represent 12 or 15 years of expenditure. But if you’re like me and you just insist on learning… That’s one thing – if I can talk about myself a little bit, I am obsessed with learning. I want to unlock – I want to die with a fully unlocked skill tree. If I’m not learning about programming and technology, I’m studying foreign languages, I’m learning musical instruments, I’m trying to learn more about other world cultures, and traveling to different places, and talking with people… I’m just obsessed with knowing as much as there can be known.

Back in Ben Franklin’s time, you could in theory kind of know everything there was to know. You could read all the books, you could talk to all the important people and correspond with them through letters, and you could have this kind of life of mind where you felt that you had a pretty good understanding of this corporeal world that we’re walking around, this surface that we’re all anchored to. This prison in space that we’re never escaping, unless we figure out wormholes. There was a time when you could know all that stuff, but there’s just been this combinatorial explosion of stuff to know. And I feel like it’s this great challenge, this endeavor. The universe is taunting me with how much it has for me to learn, and I feel obsessed with learning it.

“The universe is taunting me.” I love it.

I think that that’s what the vast majority of people in the freeCodeCamp curriculum - like, I suspect that we’re all kindred spirits, and we all love learning at the end of the day. Yes, we need to put food on the table. We need to get skills that pay the bills. But we also love the process of learning, and we don’t look at it as a labor. We look at it as kind of like a pursuit of joy. And I think that describes a lot of the human condition. I think humans are naturally curious, and they naturally, when they reach the top of one peak, they look around, they see a higher peak, they want to get there, you know? I think that’s just how human ambition works. And a lot of people feel human ambition in terms of accumulating resources. Making sure that they have – I liken wealth to a water tower. It’s good to have a water tower there; in case we lose power, in case something really bad happens, the town still has water. But at some point, there’s diminishing marginal returns to having a whole lot of water towers. How many water towers does the town really need?

[01:06:11.05] But yet you have billionaires who still want to acquire more and more. And I feel like they’re in this kind of like impoverished doom loop of just maximizing resources, when what they could be maximizing is knowledge, and the human experience.

So yeah, anyway… I’ll get off my soapbox. But that is what really fires me up and what drives me, is the prospect of being able to have the world’s most rigorous curriculum, and at the same time the most accessible curriculum, that’s free, that runs right in a browser or in a mobile app… We’ve got these great Flutter-powered mobile apps where you can learn… And yeah, that’s what drives me.

And there is another big thing I want to say about the curriculum, too… I know this has mostly been me just ranting…

Rant away.

Okay. So we’re working on this English curriculum –

Or maybe not. I’m just kidding. [laughs]

English.

English? Quincy, we already speak English.

You and I and Adam speak English as native English speakers…

I try.

True.

That represents about a sixth of the people on Earth. There’s more than a billion English speakers. But there are also a lot of people who grew up speaking Arabic, who grew up speaking Chinese, who grew up speaking Russian, and Ukrainian, who grew up speaking all these different world languages, Spanish being probably the biggest in the freeCodeCamp community, and they can improve their English, too. And in fact, they probably already learned a tremendous amount of English if they went to school, because English is taught in basically every high school program on Earth… Because English is the language of science. It’s the language of business. Thanks to Hollywood, it’s arguably the language of pop culture… And yet, it’s a very difficult language to learn. It takes years and years of commitment to studying. It takes years and years of practice, talking with other people who speak English… And not everybody has access to those resources, and we wanted to make sure there was a free English curriculum so anybody can ramp up their English toward that of a native speaker.

Now, will they ever actually get to native level? That’s arguable. I’ve been studying Chinese and Japanese for 20 years, and I’d argue I’m maybe like a fourth grader in those languages. But they will eventually get pretty good at it, and then they’re going to have access to so much more opportunity.

So we have taken the European framework, the CERF, Common European-something Framework. I can’t remember the acronym. And it’s like levels. It’s like A1, A2. B1, B2. C1, C2. And we just started with A2, because everybody has A1 from high school. We’re not trying to teach “The cat chased the ball.” Everything’s in the context of working in software. So it’s English for developers.

And we’re creating these exams that are going to go ahead and be standard exams. You hear of people taking the TOEFL, the TOEIC, the IELTS, all these Cambridge exams, and stuff like that… We’re introducing our own exams. And we’re just going to have a free alternative to those exams. And we’re also creating all the coursework. And it’s fun, interactive, animated dialogues, and stuff like that. So we’ve already published all of A1. I think the certification exam is going to come live soon. It’s going to be the same exam environment we’re using to issue the certification exams for the full stack developer, certified full stack developer… And people will be able to improve their English on freeCodeCamp and get certified in that as well.

Very cool. That English stuff - wasn’t our transcripts going to be used for some of that? Or there was an endeavor you all were putting together with our transcripts to be involved somehow.

Yes. So the Changelog has maintained pristine transcriptions from way back. You always have had a big eye toward accessibility, and a lot of people prefer just reading things, skimming things in text… They want to search through it…

And you all have one of the best corpuses of podcast transcripts in existence. So, of course, this dataset is amazing. And I think you’ve made it open data. And so yeah, we’re working with a data scientist to analyze that. The practical answer to that is things have been busy, and we’ve obviously been working on a lot of different stuff… But that is still something we’re trying to mine for insights as we get to the higher level parts of the curriculum.

[01:10:17.23] Cool.

Because obviously, the conversation you and I are having right now - that is probably nearing native level to be able to grok everything.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. That’s exciting. I’ll have to work on my English in order to live up to that, you know, Quincy? If people are going to be looking at us, Adam, and saying this is expert-level English… We should work on it, don’t you think, Adam?

I try. I try, you know? [laughter] Every once in a while I slur, and murmur…

I will say, one of the biggest opportunities with the advent of LLMs and this steady improvement in their quality is in language learning. You can have a conversation partner that’s infinitely patient with your bad grammar, and with your restricted vocabulary… It can even adapt what it’s saying in effect. When I, as an English teacher, when I talk to somebody who’s relatively beginner at English, I can kind of modulate what I say, and I know what the highest frequency English words are, and what they’re likely to have encountered at that point, and I kind of gauge their level and then talk at that level to make it easier for them to understand. And Wikipedia has simple English, which is basically English using just the thousand or so most common English words, and they figure out ways… The guy who does – I think it’s the guy who does XKCD; he wrote a book where it’s basically he explains how rockets work and all these other technologies using very simple words. It was just kind of a fun little gimmick, but – I can’t remember examples, but they’re really silly. Like the way he describes the [unintelligible 01:11:43.04] or some silly things that. And you can absolutely change how you communicate when you’re communicating to non-native English speakers.

I presume a lot of the people listening to this have native level English proficiency, and grew up speaking it, probably; many of them have advanced degrees, they were sitting in lectures where their professors were rambling in big, highfalutin words. So I’m not modulating my speech at all. This is just how I talk in kind of a free environment where I’m not really thinking about what I’m going to say ahead. I’m just talking. I’m just spitballing.

No modulation required.

Yeah. But with an LLM, you can even prompt it. You can say “I am a fourth grade reading level Japanese speaker. My native language is English, so you’re probably going to notice a lot of weird things, quirks in how I speak Japanese based on English being my native language.” If they’re somebody who was a Swahili speaker, they might use slightly different grammar, or they may be making different grammar mistakes than I’m making. Things like that. So you can really [unintelligible 01:12:41.23] a really good prompt, and you can learn languages. I don’t think we need special apps for that, though. I just go in and talk to GPT-4, in Japanese, or in Chinese, and I practice that way.

Yeah. It seems like a system prompt; you can have custom system prompts for different sessions, and you could have one that just has that in there, so that you don’t have to say it every single time. You enter into a chat. I definitely can see –

By the way, here I am, still, the English level for [unintelligible 01:13:06.12] whatever. You’re not having to “by the way” the LLM every time you talk.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

I do have an insight, though…

Oh, what’s that?

Maybe it’s kind of embarrassing to some degree even as an insight, and I’ve never - I suppose never to this conversation have I truly compared freeCodeCamp, or at least saw you in similarity to the quality level that MIT, or Carnegie Mellon, or other well known incumbent educational sources, let’s just say; these are schools… Maybe not so much in quality, but also not even – don’t be degraded by this when I say this, but even in seriousness. I know you’re super-serious, but the fact that they have brick and mortar walls doesn’t make them more or less capable or serious than you are… But you’ve clearly been able to cultivate the right people, cultivate curriculum, and not just create a free resource - which is kind of easy. You create something, you make it free. That’s the easy part. It’s creating the quality of something that’s free, that’s also quite usable by the global market to be a differentiator. That is the truly, truly hard part.

[01:14:22.27] And MIT has lots of alumni money, Carnegie Mellon has lots of alumni money, Harvard has this similarity of alumni money… How in the world - one, the similarity to your ability to compete… I’m assuming you’re now competing with – because you’re free; not just because you’re free, but because you’re free and good, at least with this latest curriculum you’re going to launch and the ambitions of it… How in the world have you been able to – I know you have a teacher background, and Jerod and I know you well, so the audience… This is not the first time we’re talking to Quincy, by the way. How in the world did you meet the right kind of people, attract the right kind of people - compress that part - but have the right kind of people give these lectures, develop the curriculum, have the actual knowledge to put it out there, to structure it in a way, to make it curriculum, not just a lesson, curriculum - which has a different connotation to it - to even do this in the first place. That to me is the hard part. It’s not the easy part.

Yeah, well, if you compare freeCodeCamp to an organization like Harvard - 400 years of history, the oldest university in the United States; an endowment of maybe like 100 billion… At least 60 billion, I think, last time I checked. That’s a lot of money that they have, that they can draw from to do different initiatives, to invest in research, things like that. And if you look at what they’re trying to accomplish, first of all, they’re trying to bring people from all over the world, they have to deal with immigration offices, and all these different countries… They are also trying to house those people, feed those people, maintain partnerships with the vendors on the campus, keep the gym equipment up to date, manage sports programs, interface with all different kinds of regulatory bodies… They have this very structured kind of traditional university system that dates back hundreds of years, where professors go from adjuncts, or postdocs, to associate professors, and then full professors, and gradually get tenure… And for every professor, they usually have an administrator or two as well, who’s running various programs… They have a lot they need to comply with. Curriculum is just one of many, many things that they think about. freeCodeCamp is all we think about. We’re a community that has a giant curriculum, and then we have lots of extra curriculum resources, and stuff like that. But it’s really just the core gameplay loop of come into the community, learn a whole bunch, then turn around and start contributing as an open source contributor to the codebase, or start creating courses that we publish on the YouTube channel, or start writing articles, writing full-length books that we publish on the freeCodeCamp publication… That’s kind of – because all we’re focused on is just this one specific thing, and we don’t have any of that stuff. We don’t have an office, we don’t have a football team… We don’t have any of that stuff. But we can just focus on this core thing. But it turns out, what a lot of people actually care about when they go to a university is not whether there’s going to be a really nice, lazy river around the dormitory facilities, or something like that, right? It’s not whether like “How many climbing walls do they have?”, you know? It’s not those kinds of things. It’s “What am I going to learn, and how am I going to use that to get a job?”

So to some extent, we kind of distilled the main thing that we thought was important and we just focused on that, and eschewed all the other stuff. And we have that luxury because we’re not a 400-year-old institution with all these existing obligations, and all these perceptions, and stuff like that. We’re a 10-year-old charity, that just kind of popped into being and just kind of grew. And I have a full institutional memory of every single decision that’s been made along the way, because I’ve been a part of it. So to some extent, because we don’t face all the constraints that a traditional institution faces, we can just go –

[01:18:25.24] So in lots of parts of the world, they didn’t have very good phone infrastructure. They didn’t have lots of ground line… And it was a big deal. Even in rural America today, a lot of people don’t necessarily have good phone lines, and stuff. But cell phones came out, and kind of leapfrogged that, and now people just use cell phones. And then similar things with fiber optic cable, the little satellites, and now you can kind of leapfrog that, to an extent. So I view freeCodeCamp as kind of we leapfrogged 400 years of innovation, and stuff, and we were able to look at what everybody was doing and just choose what we thought worked, and focus on something very narrow that we thought we could do. And everything is dictated by budget, and everything is dictated by what we likely can actually affect change in, which is developing a really good programming curriculum, and teaching some English, and creating a bunch of extracurricular resources. The freeCodeCamp YouTube channel - we just published a course on music production using Fruity Loops Studio. So we’re going to be teaching lots of cool stuff. We published a DaVinci Resolve course. And you could argue, “Oh, that’s not math, programming, computer science. That’s video production.” But the reality is by being pretty focused on just a few key things and doing a few key things well, and not trying to be everything to everybody, the cost involved is a tiny fraction.

Minuscule.

Mm-hm. Are they threatened by you at all? Are they impressed, threatened, scared?

Gandhi said “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Right? And that joke –

Are they ignoring you? Are they laughing –

We’re still at the ignoring point. [laughter]

Okay, they’re ignoring you. You’re not even [unintelligible 01:20:03.27]

That’s a good place to be. That’s a good place to be.

I was just thinking, with this whole - especially I would say probably really since COVID, it became somewhat clear to some folks this idea that college is a scam. And I suppose you can conflate the idea that university could be a scam. So if you want to take those two words, college and university - sometimes people will say, “I didn’t go to college, I went to university.” So okay, whatever.

Yeah, that is a person I do not want to go to a dinner party with. [laughs]

Yeah… A little too pedantic for my liking.

Well, you can ask Brett Cannon. It’s a little bit different in Canada. In Canada, college and university are quite different. So anyways… So in some cases it’s culturally normal. But let’s just say that there’s a hair of credence to the idea that college is a scam. Not saying there is, I’m not trying to be political in this argument… But if there’s been some discredit to the idea of college, there’s been some recalibration to the value that going to a school can bring you. So I suppose in that recalibration you have - what are the alternatives? And if you are a leapfrog, bypassing the hundreds of years of institution, why are you being ignored?

I don’t know.

We can’t read that face. Give me a real answer here.

I have no idea. But first of all, I don’t think university is a scam. I think it’s overpriced. If you were to make university free, then I think a ton of people would go.

Sure.

And when I say university, I mean just getting a four-year degree, but college – what we call college in the United States, by the way, is just anything. That could even include graduate school. It could even include medical school, if you’re a physician. “When I was in school…” There’s a lot of people who just to call it school, because it’s just this big, abstract n years of learning that you have to go through.

[01:21:55.22] So I think university education is fine. I don’t think everything’s perfect, I think it’s pretty inefficient. I think the idea that you have to do two years of general ed before you actually get to the core of what your subject matter is that you’re studying… I think there’s plenty of things that you can have fair critique on. But what I think you can’t critique is if you were to remove all costs from it, then college would be – I don’t think college would be controversial at all. I think pretty much everybody encourages –

Well, it’s like saying education is a scam. The question is, is it worth the price of admission? If you’re being educated for free, there’s no scam there. If you’re being educated for far too much money, now maybe we can say “Okay, this is–”

That’s a scam, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, at the end of the day, it’s education. And so education, if you can make it free, is of immense value, which is what Quincy is doing. And I think they’ll continue to ignore you, maybe to their detriment… But I was thinking about the Harvard football team, and these Ivy League football teams, and I was amusing myself as you talked, Quincy, thinking about the freeCodeCamp football team and what that might look like. And then I had an idea, a new institution for digital age e-sports. Huh?

[laughs]

It’s kind of a joke, but maybe… You have enough people involved. You could very easily and cheaply put together a freeCodeCamp e-sports initiative, and you could just – you know, a little bit of merch, maybe some Mountain Dew, whatever the e-sports people need, that power them…

[laughs] Get some Mountain Dew [unintelligible 01:23:27.05] on my shirt…

And you could have a little freeCodeCamp League of Legends, freeCodeCamp Rocket League team… Like, you could have some teams and be the first educational institution that truly embraces e-sports. That might be kind of cool.

So the main challenge I would have with that – first of all, that’d be encouraging people to specialize… Like, I’ve watched lots of documentaries, and I play video games, and stuff… And the main challenge is, first of all, just like other physical sports, your acumen does kind of decline with even – a lot of pro gamers might peak at 25 and their reaction time starts to go down.

Sure.

And that’s a problem. I like sports like chess, and things like that. And you could argue chess is kind of a young man’s game, or a young woman’s game… But - I mean you can still play pretty well, because it’s not synchronous, you’re not having to make hundreds of keyboard and mouse inputs per minute, like with Starcraft or something like that. So I would say the biggest problem with that is it would be encouraging people to get really good at video games, when they should be learning the code. I always joke that freeCodeCamp is not competing with universities. We’re not competing with textbooks –

You wouldn’t be, because universities are not doing e-sports. I mean, you would be the – talk about reaching the next generation of coders. They’re out there playing games, man. They’re out there watching the experts stream their games. Just an idea. You don’t have to commit to it, but…

He’s resistant.

Yeah, I know. But he’s gonna mull on it, he’s going to think about it…

Yeah, so I just worry that people would think “Oh, instead of coding, I could just be playing games.” And really, you should be coding. Competitive programming is something I’ve considered, for sure. We could have a competitive programming league. There are lots of cool websites –

For sure.

…that people use to do competitive programming. People ask about [unintelligible 01:25:03.18]

How about a capture the flag team? The freeCodeCamp CTF team. That might be kind of cool.

Yeah. I mean, these are great ideas.

Code games, Jerod.

Code games are cool, man.

These are also things that – you know, a very small team, surgically focused on a curriculum, I see these kind of like digressions. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We built a video game. We built Learn to Code RPG.

I was just going to ask you about that, because this was my segue into this merging of the two things. When we last talked to you - and I’m watching this video game stream behind you as we talk, so I’m also thinking games - you had this idea of gamifying education, and getting this software developer video game, which you eventually released a game, right? Yeah, it’s basically like a visual novel type of game built in Renpai, which is a great visual novel engine. If you want to build something that people will actually play, you could write a book… And good luck getting people to read it. You’d have to be really compelling, and good at telling people to read your book to get them to read your book in 2024. But if you put it in a visual novel, suddenly people are very interested, and they’ll just click through it on their lunch break while they’re eating.

[01:26:06.09] I do think that the future of education could resemble a game… If you’ve read Ready Player One, it’s basically the entire education system has been delegated to being a part of this big MMO game.

The Oasis.

Yeah, The Oasis. I think that – yeah, that is certainly important. But at the same time, I think that if you want to create people who are sufficiently intrinsically motivated, then you do want to kind of pull back a little bit on the gamification. And we used to use gamification a lot more than we do now. What we noticed is it was kind of incentivizing the wrong – it was incentivizing compulsive completion of things, but it wasn’t done in the spirit of learning, it was done out of a sense of guilt and obligation almost… Like, “I’ve got to keep my streak up”, and stuff like that.

Sure. Candy Crush style?

Yeah. And so I think that there’s a lot of danger in leaning too much into games, and learning. But I don’t want to sound an old man yelling at a cloud, like “No, it’s got to be books, and you’ve got to be sitting in a lecture, listening to the old man squeaky writing on the chalkboard.” I’m not that way at all. But I do think that –

But no e-sports teams; that’s where you draw the line.

Well, people swing in these dramatic directions, like “Oh, we’re all doing AI chatbots now”, and stuff like that. And I want to kind of be a voice of balance and reason. So I do think – the e-sports idea is a novel one, and an interesting one. But yeah, I don’t know. [laughs]

No, I’m not asking you to commit right now. I’m just looking for a spot on your Rocket League team. That’s all.

Okay, okay…

Just kidding. I’m terrible.

We’ll just have to put you through the paces, and we’ll have to move you into the barracks, where we keep all the other Rocket League players.

That’s true. Yeah, I’m going to have to move on campus.

It’ll be in South Korea.

Okay… Wow, this is getting more and more difficult. I see you’re raising the stakes. [laughter] It probably will be. There’s a lot of good players over there. Hilarious. Well, what have we not plumbed? Let’s talk about the future real quick… Future of education. Here we are, 10 years in. We’ve talked to you five years back… I think we’ve talked in between as well, but this is our anniversary episode. 10 years of freeCodeCamp. Can you look – is it even possible to look 10 years down the road and just think of what it might look then?

He knows exactly where it’s going to be.

He does. Look at him.

He’s got a roadmap. Show us the roadmap.

He’s got an answer ready for us…

Yeah. So we think 50 years out, 60 years out. I think in terms of what is likely to be accomplished. Okay, so if you go all the way back to the the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book in history, it was more than – it was like 600 years ago. It was just with the advent of the printing press. And this book came out and it brought literacy to everyone in the 1450s. 1450s. 600+ years ago. 670 years ago. And still, we have illiteracy. I don’t believe that AI is just going to magically change illiteracy. I think that there are a lot of people who just – it’s still hard to learn to read if nobody teaches you how to read; it’s very difficult. I hear all these things of people who have unschooled their kids, and they haven’t necessarily put effort into teaching the kids… There’s just this idea that the kids will naturally learn how to read. And some kids might, but a lot of kids won’t necessarily learn how to read, and they’ll end up not having reading level nearly what their peers, and it’ll be a huge kind of crushing weight on their shoulders, like “I’m not good at reading.” And they’ll carry that with them. And I feel like it’s the same thing with technology.

People certainly have this with math. “Oh, I just suck at math.” They never learned how to do math, and they always feel bad about themselves, and they’re always intimidated whenever they’re reading a book and there’s some math, or something like that, or whenever they look at some equation… Even the most simple equations, when they’re walking around the science museum and they’re just “Oooh…!” They get this anxiety. And same thing with software. “I don’t really know how a web server works. I don’t really know what garbage collection is doing.” It’s just, in the back of your mind you’re just kind of unsure of yourself.

[01:30:00.20] And so if over the course of 600 years there are still people – when they have had this relatively abundant thing that they could read, mass market… 600 years… It’s going to be a very long time before technology literacy is solved, and before everybody can just feel confident that they understand how recursion works, and things like that. And I do think that these are things that people in Star Trek – like, I always look at Star Trek and I realize that it’s flawed in the sense that it’s just kind of this vision from the ’70s, and then it got interpolated through the ‘90s, with Next Generation, Voyager, and D6-9, which is the best one, according to Andrew Brown, big Trekkie and massive contributor to freeCodeCamp… He’s created 50 certification preparation courses on our YouTube. But I realize that it’s just kind of a sci-fi vision of the future, but it makes practical sense. A lot of the things in that show, I can see that that’s where we’re heading. We’re heading toward computers where you just talk, and you can use declarative speech instead of imperative speech. And the machine, it just gives you a lot more affordance in figuring out what needs to be done. And if you watch The Expanse, there’s lots of AI… But it’s not everywhere, and they’re not talking to AIs, and stuff. It’s just like doing the little things like recalibrating the turrets on the ship, and stuff like that.

And I think that 100 years from now, if we want to talk 100 years - let’s just choose a big, round number - people are still going to exist. We’re probably not going to be all walking around in exosuits. I will be impressed if we’ve terraformed Mars at all by then. I just genuinely don’t think that there’s the political will, and the budget, and all that stuff, and I think that people greatly underestimate how difficult it will be to colonize space, and stuff like that. I think realistically, we’re still going to be here. Hopefully, we’ll have done some stuff to mitigate climate change and mitigate job loss due to automation, and stuff like that… But people are still going to need to learn. People are still probably going to need to work and figure out a way to make money. I don’t believe that UBI is coming to save us, universal basic income, or anything like that. I think fundamentally, people are going to still need to learn and they’re going to still need to go out and do things to provide for their families. That has been how it has been throughout civilization, throughout the history of every civilization, whether that is the hunter-gatherer tribes… People have needed to go out and figure out how to keep the calories coming to keep the body going. And I think institutions come and fall, but we’ve got these human animals, 100,000 years of human tribes interacting with one another, and warring, and things like that… But I still think that they’re going to need to learn. I don’t think there’s going to be a magic matrix thing where you just “Teach me how to fly a helicopter” and there’s a program.

Right. [unintelligible 01:32:37.11]

There’s not going to be some magic upload. There might be something that dramatically speeds up education, but people are still going to need to design those systems, and figure out how to optimally convey that information. So freeCodeCamp is still going to be doing that 100 years from now. We’re still going to be teaching. And that I can be confident of.

So now that you know what is unlikely to change, then you can focus on what is likely to change in terms of preferences, in terms of people’s ability… We’re probably going to have faster and faster internet connections. We’re probably going to have more and more photorealistic 3D environments that we’re walking around in… We’re probably going to have way better data processing… AI is probably going to continue to improve, whether it’ll be just step changes, like we’ve seen throughout AI history, or whether it’s going to be a smooth, upward gradient… TBD. But I think we can be relatively confident that human decision-making is still going to be involved. Human labor is still going to be involved. We’re still going to be doing things, and people are going to still need to learn stuff. So that is my worldview. I don’t think a nuclear war is going to end human civilization. I think humans will just build back, and you’re not going to eradicate all 8 billion humans on Earth… Even if you look at all the extinction-level events that have happened throughout human history - I think there have been six great extinction events. Humans would easily survive all of those.

[01:33:54.04] We’re way better prepared to survive those kinds of things than these giant dinosaurs, or these species that can’t even communicate with one another. Look at all our technology. We’re not going to die out. People who are thinking the world is going to magically end, or that some technology is just going to come and fundamentally change everything… Keep waiting.

I think what is going to happen is it’s just going to be continual, incremental progress for probably millions of years. And we’re at the very beginning of this. So that is kind of my worldview, and that informs my decision-making. So… Sustainability. Let’s focus on not dying as an organization. Let’s focus on making sure we have plenty of sustainability, and that we don’t pull a Facebook where we hire tons of people, and then have to lay tons of people off heartlessly. We’ve all seen that video call where Mark Zuckerberg is laying people off, and how incredibly awkward and unflattering that whole experience was, and how it was probably completely avoidable if they hadn’t been all greedy about trying to hoard the talent. So just trying to optimize for the long run.

That’s an extremely broad, sweeping answer… I hope that’s helpful. But that does inform – like, I’m not planning on retiring, or anything. I don’t have a second act. I’m not going to be just touring as like a jazz bassist, or something like that. I’m going to be working and running freeCodeCamp. And I’m hoping to live to be 100. I’m working out and eating right, and getting plenty of sleep, and avoiding dangerous situations, so that I can hopefully live a full [unintelligible 01:35:19.04]

What are some dangerous situations you’ve been avoiding recently?

So just what I teach my kids: defensive driving, defensive walking… Always walk far away from the curb. Always assume that the person driving is staring at their phone, or they’re drunk, or something.

Yeah, I might do defensive driving. How about peeing on electric fence? Avoid that one?

Yes. Don’t whiz on the electric fence. [laughter]

You mentioned your bass. Let’s finish. Let’s close with you playing us some bass. Now, Quincy has what he calls the freeCodeCamp theme song, which I don’t know if that’s what you’re going to play for us… Play whatever you like.

Alright. So I’ll just give you some quick context before I show my very rudimentary playing that any serious bass player will probably have a good chuckle at. I picked this up during the pandemic, and I’ve started to learn other musical instruments as well. It’s just something I really enjoy doing. It’s a completely different area of your brain that gets unlocked, and it’s so much fun. As John Paul Basquiat says, “Art is how you decorate space. Music is how you decorate time.” So with that extremely profound quote, I will give you the extremely silly freeCodeCamp theme song here.

Alright.

So I’m just going to make sure I’ve got audio signal…

That makes sense a lot. Right? If you break that down… Because –

Music is how you decorate time. I like that. I haven’t heard that before.

Music is all about timing. It’s all about [unintelligible 01:36:42.04] time, whatever times… I forget. I forget my musical talents, but… That is so wild, to think about that, that it decorates time.

Song: [01:36:55.02]

Yeah, man.

Love it, man.

That is a theme song I made for the freeCodeCamp podcast. I wanted to have a cool musical element. You all have Breakmaster Cylinder. We don’t have quite the budget for that.

Sure. [laughs]

But I was like, “Okay, I’ll create a theme song, and then I can just play it every episode.” But it was just too cheesy, so what I’ve been doing is I’ve just been covering different pop songs, and doing the drums and bass and guitar. So if anybody has any requests, let me know and I can play 20 or 30 seconds of a pop song at the beginning of an episode of freeCodeCamp.

I have a challenge for you.

Okay.

I think you might this, but you might not. We’ll see. What if, as part of your betterment to getting better at bass, and then Seinfelding it? One thing that Seinfeld did with the Seinfeld show was that that intro…

Intro: [01:37:51.00]

…was uniquely different every time, because it was uniquely played every single time. It was never produced and then just done every time. It was the same person who produced it, and did the work, but they did it fresh, every single episode. I wonder if you could do a fresh version of that every single episode, and it just gets better and better and better… Or maybe it just gets marginally better, as you progress through your talents and it just gets more polished.

Yeah. I mean, that is an interesting idea. Maybe check in periodically and have a different iteration… Because every single week, trying to come up with different variations… Also, fun fact about the Seinfeld –

No, no, no. The same exact one. Just the same one.

The same one.

That’s what he’s doing. Aren’t you?

Well, no, I’m doing different songs each time, because frankly, some Duran Duran song, or some Jamiroquai song is way more interesting than anything I would write.

I think you are –

Jamiroquai is pretty good, I’m not gonna lie. [laughter]

That was a pretty awesome very first musical video for them too, as well. Virtual Insanity…

Oh, yeah. Virtual Insanity… There’s some good YouTube videos about the making of that video.

I’ve seen those, yes.

Yeah.

Very cool.

It’s crazy town.

They move the walls. So cool. Anyways… I still want to go back to encouraging you. What if you just did this every single episode, and you re-recorded the same exact thing every single time?

Think how good it would get over the next 10 years.

[laughs]

Well, not so much even bettering that, but… It’s always the same, but uniquely different every time. Because you can’t literally play the same thing, the same way every single time. It can be very close, but it wouldn’t be the exact same. Which is why not a lot of people know that Seinfeld’s intro is uniquely done every single time, because it sounds the same.

Yeah. I mean, you’d have to listen really carefully. Also, fun fact about that… They’re not actually playing that on the bass. They’re using the synth.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So it’s a little easier when you’re doing the synth to – on the bass, you actually have to learn the new parts, and nail the articulation.

Oh, okay. Well, I wasn’t comparing literally to you to the bass of the Seinfeld, but…

Oh, because it definitely sounds like a bass, doesn’t it?

It sounds very accurate, especially considering it’s ’90s technology.

But then it was a hallmark of the show, obviously. It was a signature sound.

Oh, yeah.

And it was the same every time, but different. So I would encourage you to do the same every time, but different for you.

Awesome. Thanks for that idea. I’ll file that with the e-sports team idea.

I can’t do a podcast, Jerod, without giving ideas with it. That’s just how it works.

That’s right. We have good ideas around here, Quincy. We’ve got good ideas.

That’s right.

Well, speaking of good ideas and good podcasts, we are going to go now record an episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast with Adam and Jerod… So to our listener, if you want more of us three talking, on a different show, check out freeCodeCamp podcast, at least this week, but every week and see what Quincy’s doing… And you can hear us talk more about ourselves, I suppose. I’m not sure what we’re going to talk about, but…

We’ll see.

We’ll see. Hopefully it’s good. Bye, friends.

Bye, friends.

Cheers.