The Five-Year Anniversary of Free Code Camp: A Journey of Growth and Exploration

It's been five years since we last spoke with Quincy Larson, the founder of Free Code Camp, an organization dedicated to providing free coding education to anyone with an internet connection. Our conversation was initially sparked by a sense of curiosity about how the organization would evolve over time. Would it be able to sustain its growth and continue to provide high-quality education to its community? The answer is a resounding yes.

Five years into its inception, Free Code Camp has established itself as a leading provider of coding education, with a focus on creating interactive curricula, explanatory journalism, and community engagement. According to Quincy, the organization's mission remains unchanged: to make technology accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or financial situation. "We're not trying to be a company that just makes money," Quincy explained. "We want to use our resources to create positive change in the world."

One of the key areas where Free Code Camp has made significant progress is in its community engagement. The organization's online forum has grown exponentially, with thousands of members from all over the world contributing to discussions, sharing knowledge, and supporting one another. In-person events have also become a staple of the organization's calendar, providing opportunities for members to connect with each other and learn from industry experts.

Quincy emphasized the importance of community in Free Code Camp's mission. "We believe that learning is not just about individual achievement, but about collaboration and mutual support," she explained. "When people come together, amazing things can happen." This philosophy has been reflected in the organization's curriculum, which emphasizes project-based learning, peer review, and feedback.

As Free Code Camp continues to grow and evolve, Quincy acknowledged that it faces significant challenges, including scaling its resources and infrastructure to meet increasing demand. However, she remained optimistic about the organization's future prospects. "We're not just a coding school," Quincy said. "We're a community of learners who are committed to making technology accessible to everyone."

To support this mission, Free Code Camp has turned to its members for help. The organization relies on donations and recurring subscriptions to fund its operations and expand its reach. According to Quincy, these contributions have enabled the organization to create high-quality content, including video tutorials, articles, and podcasts.

One notable example of this content is the YouTube channel, which features a range of educational videos on topics from beginner-friendly programming languages like Python to more advanced subjects like web development. The channel has attracted a significant following, with subscribers appreciating the organization's commitment to quality over quantity.

As we reflect on Free Code Camp's five-year journey, it's clear that Quincy and her team have demonstrated remarkable dedication and perseverance. From its humble beginnings as an online forum to its current status as a leading provider of coding education, the organization has consistently prioritized community engagement, interactive learning, and social impact.

In our conversation, Quincy revealed some exciting plans for the future, including expanded curriculum offerings, more in-depth primers on tech topics, and even a Linux-focused challenge course. These initiatives demonstrate Free Code Camp's commitment to staying at the forefront of coding education, while also exploring new areas of focus.

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Quincy and her team are well-equipped to tackle whatever challenges come their way. With its strong community engagement, high-quality content, and unwavering commitment to social impact, Free Code Camp is poised to continue making a positive difference in the world of coding education.

The Future of Free Code Camp: A Vision for the Next Five Years

As we concluded our conversation with Quincy Larson, it was clear that the future of Free Code Camp holds much promise. The organization's mission remains unchanged, but its scope and ambition have expanded significantly over the past five years.

According to Quincy, one of the key areas where Free Code Camp will focus in the next five years is on expanding its curriculum offerings. "We want to create more courses that are not just about coding, but also about technology and its impact on society," she explained. This includes a greater emphasis on explanatory journalism, which aims to put tech news into context for readers.

Quincy also emphasized the importance of creating high-quality first-party content, including video tutorials, articles, and podcasts. "We want to create content that is not just informative, but also engaging and fun," she said. This approach has already been successful in attracting a large following on YouTube, where Quincy and her team have created a range of educational videos.

Another area of focus for Free Code Camp will be interactive curricula, including challenges and projects that encourage learners to apply their new skills in real-world scenarios. According to Quincy, these types of activities are essential for creating a well-rounded education that prepares learners for the demands of the tech industry.

As Free Code Camp continues to grow and evolve, it's clear that Quincy and her team have big plans for its future. With a strong focus on community engagement, high-quality content, and social impact, the organization is poised to make a lasting difference in the world of coding education.

The Road Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities

While Free Code Camp has made significant progress over the past five years, Quincy acknowledged that it faces several challenges in the future. One of the biggest hurdles will be scaling its resources and infrastructure to meet increasing demand.

"Unfortunately, we can't do everything on our own," Quincy said. "We need to rely on our community for help and support." This has already been successful in the past, with many members contributing their time and expertise to help shape the organization's content and direction.

Another challenge that Free Code Camp will face is maintaining its commitment to social impact while also expanding its reach and influence. According to Quincy, this requires a delicate balance between focusing on individual achievements and prioritizing community engagement.

"We're not just about making money or becoming a well-known brand," Quincy emphasized. "We want to use our resources to create positive change in the world."

Despite these challenges, Quincy remained optimistic about Free Code Camp's future prospects. With its strong community, high-quality content, and commitment to social impact, the organization is poised to make a lasting difference in the world of coding education.

The Power of Community: How Free Code Camp's Members Drive Its Success

At its core, Free Code Camp is a community-driven organization that relies on its members for help and support. The organization's success is built on the contributions and dedication of its learners, who come from all over the world to share knowledge, learn from one another, and support each other.

One notable example of this community spirit is the organization's online forum, which has grown exponentially over the past five years. Thousands of members participate in discussions, ask questions, and offer feedback, creating a vibrant and supportive environment that fosters learning and growth.

Free Code Camp's in-person events are another key area where community engagement plays a crucial role. These events provide opportunities for members to connect with each other, learn from industry experts, and share their experiences. They are often marked by lively discussions, networking opportunities, and a sense of camaraderie that is hard to find elsewhere.

The organization's curriculum is also designed with its community in mind. Project-based learning, peer review, and feedback are all integral components of the educational experience, ensuring that learners receive high-quality instruction and support from their peers.

As we reflect on Free Code Camp's five-year journey, it's clear that its members have played a vital role in its success. By creating a supportive community that values collaboration, mutual respect, and open communication, Quincy and her team have fostered an environment that is conducive to learning and growth.

The Future of Free Code Camp: A Vision for the Next Five Years

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Free Code Camp will continue to prioritize its community-driven approach. With a strong focus on interactive curricula, explanatory journalism, and social impact, the organization is poised to make a lasting difference in the world of coding education.

One notable initiative that Quincy revealed during our conversation was an expanded curriculum offering that includes a range of new courses and topics. "We want to create more content that is not just informative, but also engaging and fun," she said.

Another area of focus for Free Code Camp will be its YouTube channel, which continues to attract a large following of learners who appreciate the organization's commitment to quality over quantity. Quincy emphasized the importance of creating high-quality video content that showcases real-world applications and industry experts.

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Free Code Camp is well-equipped to tackle whatever challenges come its way. With its strong community engagement, high-quality content, and unwavering commitment to social impact, the organization is poised to continue making a positive difference in the world of coding education.

The Legacy of Quincy Larson: A Vision for the Future

As we reflect on Free Code Camp's five-year journey, it's clear that Quincy Larson has left an indelible mark on the world of coding education. Her dedication, perseverance, and commitment to social impact have inspired countless learners around the world, providing them with a platform to learn, grow, and connect with others.

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Quincy will continue to be at the forefront of Free Code Camp's mission. With her unwavering commitment to community engagement, high-quality content, and social impact, she has set an example for others in the industry.

According to Quincy, the future of coding education is all about creating a sense of community and mutual support. "When people come together, amazing things can happen," she said. This philosophy will continue to guide Free Code Camp's efforts, as it works towards its mission of making technology accessible to everyone.

As we celebrate Free Code Camp's five-year anniversary, it's clear that Quincy Larson has left a lasting legacy in the world of coding education. Her dedication, perseverance, and commitment to social impact have inspired countless learners around the world, providing them with a platform to learn, grow, and connect with others.

The Power of Community: How Free Code Camp's Members Drive Its Success

At its core, Free Code Camp is a community-driven organization that relies on its members for help and support. The organization's success is built on the contributions and dedication of its learners, who come from all over the world to share knowledge, learn from one another, and support each other.

One notable example of this community spirit is the organization's online forum, which has grown exponentially over the past five years. Thousands of members participate in discussions, ask questions, and offer feedback, creating a vibrant and supportive environment that fosters learning and growth.

Free Code Camp's in-person events are another key area where community engagement plays a crucial role. These events provide opportunities for members to connect with each other, learn from industry experts, and share their experiences. They are often marked by lively discussions, networking opportunities, and a sense of camaraderie that is hard to find elsewhere.

The organization's curriculum is also designed with its community in mind. Project-based learning, peer review, and feedback are all integral components of the educational experience, ensuring that learners receive high-quality instruction and support from their peers.

As we reflect on Free Code Camp's five-year journey, it's clear that its members have played a vital role in its success. By creating a supportive community that values collaboration, mutual respect, and open communication, Quincy and her team have fostered an environment that is conducive to learning and growth.

The Legacy of Free Code Camp: A Vision for the Future

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Free Code Camp will continue to prioritize its community-driven approach. With a strong focus on interactive curricula, explanatory journalism, and social impact, the organization is poised to make a lasting difference in the world of coding education.

One notable initiative that Quincy revealed during our conversation was an expanded curriculum offering that includes a range of new courses and topics. "We want to create more content that is not just informative, but also engaging and fun," she said.

Another area of focus for Free Code Camp will be its YouTube channel, which continues to attract a large following of learners who appreciate the organization's commitment to quality over quantity. Quincy emphasized the importance of creating high-quality video content that showcases real-world applications and industry experts.

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Free Code Camp is well-equipped to tackle whatever challenges come its way. With its strong community engagement, high-quality content, and unwavering commitment to social impact, the organization is poised to continue making a positive difference in the world of coding education.

Conclusion

Free Code Camp has made significant progress over the past five years, establishing itself as a leading organization in the world of coding education. Its community-driven approach, interactive curricula, and commitment to social impact have inspired countless learners around the world, providing them with a platform to learn, grow, and connect with others.

As we look ahead to the next five years, it's clear that Free Code Camp will continue to prioritize its community-driven approach. With a strong focus on explanatory journalism, social impact, and community engagement, the organization is poised to make a lasting difference in the world of coding education.

The legacy of Quincy Larson and the members of Free Code Camp serves as a testament to the power of community and mutual support in creating positive change. By fostering an environment that values collaboration, mutual respect, and open communication, these individuals have inspired countless learners around the world.

In conclusion, Free Code Camp's five-year anniversary is a celebration not just of its achievements but also of its mission to make technology accessible to everyone. With its community-driven approach, interactive curricula, and commitment to social impact, the organization will continue to drive positive change in the world of coding education for years to come.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi i'm quincy larson i'm the teacher who founded free code camp five years ago and i am thrilled today to bring you this video it's very different from what we've been publishing on freecodecamp's youtube channel for the past five years we've been publishing in-depth tutorials and full courses on python java javascript kotlin a whole lot of different topics and we've also been covering important libraries like pytorch pygame tensorflow things like that so uh hang on mike i need to give my kid a little push hi quinn you ready higher lee all right i'm going to get back here where it's less windy so um we are going to be uh in this episode interviewing some of the most interesting people in open source that would be of course adam stokovic and jared santo from the legendary changelog podcast if you haven't heard the change log it is the preeminent podcast on open source software and pretty much every major open source maintainer has been on there at some point dan abramoff dhh yehuda katz and then of course a whole lot of maintainers you haven't heard of they have hundreds of episodes and this is their 10-year anniversary so uh i drove down to houston texas hung out with them in the studio and we recorded five hours of interviews okay i interviewed them for like two and a half three hours then they turned around and interviewed me for like an hour and a half all of that is going to be on this video i've added timestamps below so you can jump wherever you need to go in the video uh and just a quick heads up this is not a visually stunning video this is three people sitting in a studio talking into microphones i would encourage you to consider doing the dishes maybe uh going to the gym maybe driving to work doing other things while you watch this video because just sitting there staring at the three of us sit in our chairs for five hours would not be the best use of your time so listen to this in the background while you do other uh things that don't use your brain fully so you can still pay attention to the interview and um enjoy i think you're gonna learn a lot and i learned a lot about uh both adam and jared they had never done an interview like this where they talked about their background adam was in the military jared was like a recipient of several scholarships and he has some interesting stories behind that and that's how he was able to go to school and then just how they got into software development what kind of freelance projects they've been doing the story behind the changelog all this stuff it's so fascinating and uh so again enjoy the video and remember like after this we're gonna go straight back to publishing full-length courses uh this is just a one-time video so uh but i think you'll really enjoy it and have fun happy coding everybody hey welcome to the free code camp podcast we have a very special podcast today we are interviewing the founder of the changelog and his sidekick so i'm going to introduce them properly in a moment but i just want to welcome you this is a special episode of the freecodecamp podcast because we're technically on hiatus for the rest of the year while we handle a whole lot of other burning fires but i have been a huge fan of the change log ever since i started my developer journey back in the early 20 teens and this show has been a huge window into the world of open source development for me and i've learned so much from somebody the masters of open source development by listening to the changelog and today i am thrilled to flip it and ask a whole lot of questions to the creators of the show and celebrate their 10 year anniversary how many podcasts you know of that have not gone on to ten years not very many no all right so first uh adam stokovic the founder of the change log and the host for the past 10 years uh and jared santo who has stepped in and been a huge force in the change log over the past few years and we're going to learn a whole lot about them let's go first adam i just want to learn a little bit about you like sure what was your early life like adam you want to go back to like the beginning beginning like early life i mean like eight five what year if there were any really formative experiences in your childhood go for it but uh yeah i would say for me probably the one thing that wouldn't seem obvious is i grew up poor like from a town that people either go to jail become alcoholics you know just not a lot of hope and i came from a place where i would say that to be where i'm at today if people see me that i met and went to school with years and years ago just don't believe it you know um my dad died when i was really young so it was a big part of my life to have a father figure missing in my life my mom was amazing she uh she raised me my brother uh single mom you know and i love her she's uh she's since passed away in 2008 but she was always my encourager always my believer in me and uh and quite honestly she's the reason why i'm at where i'm at because i guess ages ago when blogging was cool right back in like 2003 2004 cool right yeah when it became when it was the the era of blogging the vlogo sphere right yeah it's the blogosphere um i had a blog right and it was i didn't live right next to my mom anymore i had moved and was enough i was about five hours away so i had to have a blog to you know keep up with family it was where we posted our family pictures and just did whatever and i shared my thoughts and i got really into web design through wordpress and the theme kubrick if anybody remembers kubrick i do i work over here uh that was an entry point for me that's how i learned css by like looking at that css and be like what is margin what is padding all that stuff and so i got really curious about web design and you know just all that stuff and got really into it and then i got really busy at work and just sort of like didn't have enough time because it was just a hobby for me at the time and my mom's like you know you're not doing this anymore why not you know this and that and i'm like i just have time for it's no big deal whatever she's like but you're really good at it and like she's like you're really good at it you shouldn't stop you shouldn't quit you're really good at this you should find a way to do this more and you know it was literally that moment when she said that that i sort of internalized that as like huh okay mom says i should do it i should do it and literally if if she didn't say that and i know how silly blogging would have been at that that time it was not even a cool blog it was just yeah my family blog it was like nobody should ever read it not interesting thoughts at all but she's like you should keep doing this and that's that's probably one of the most formative things for me i would say to get me to hear there's a couple other things of course too but that specifically around web design web development and like pursuing it deeper was that moment yeah so you touched on the fact that you were working and you were working in another field and just pursuing software development as a passion let's back up a little bit to you know high school you're in this town where generally people don't go on to bright features how did you break out of that sheer luck sheer luck god's will um i would just say gosh man i just you know i look back on those times so i was the person that didn't have any money for college and my friends many of my close friends had some sort of plan because their parents were fortunate enough to have money the bank and make that plan for me i didn't have that plan i didn't even have great grades in high school i was terrible and not because i wasn't smart but because i just didn't have anybody really assigned for my mom and a couple others like really helped me to apply things and when i graduated high school i barely graduated it was terrible like i missed so many days of school the last year of my high school year like i just didn't want to be there anymore i wanted to move on to whatever was next and when i left high school this is like going super deep but when i left high school i i kind of told myself you know i need to make a plan and so the cool thing to say would be i'm taking a year off you know prior to going to college i just didn't have any money to go i didn't have a plan like how am i going to get there and so uh i spent the next year after high school sort of like making some sort of plan i worked at uh this place called reese brothers where they did telemarketing hey i was a telemarketer once at one point in my life i actually may have called you at one point to ask you about at t long distance it was probably like 10 cents or whatever and i can give you a great deal if you bought today hey that's how that worked uh but yeah i was a telemarketer got done with that and then i became a pizza guy i started to like toss pizzas and flip them and spin them there was a local mama pop local mom pop pizza joint what's it called i forget but it was amazing amazing they had this thing called a red top it's amazing pizza and then my roommate at the time because i'd moved out of my home and uh went and got an apartment with a buddy of mine and all that good stuff well he was in the national guard and i come from a family that has you know all of the all of the men in my family have all been in the military my dad my grandfathers my brother my uncles so it wasn't like this legacy thing but i was like hmm i gotta do something maybe i'll make enough money to buy a car i was really motivated by money in the car and like some sort of like uh money for college and so the sgli bill was an option then and so i was like well all right i'll go in the military so i went to the military full-time uh in 1998 and so i was in the army for three and a half years they had this special program where you can go into uh it was training plus three years or something like that and so i went in for training which was about six to eight months and then three years of service so it's around three and a half almost four years not quite four years so typically the term of service is four years that's why i'm making a big deal about it because anybody listening would be like i thought four years was the minimum well i kind of got off a little bit there by shaving a few months off but went to bosnia you know did all sorts of cool stuff in the in the army went over in europe uh gosh that's a lot of fun so i mean the military jared knows i've told jared this story at least but the military for me was um there was a moment when i was in this thing called ait advanced individual training everything in the military is an acronym so there's always like something you know you got art you know ucmj you know that's the the rule set essentially the the government for lack of better terms the the laws um what am i getting at so when i was in eit the drill sergeant like i was just i was even though i went in the military i was trying to like do something i didn't really apply myself to be the best soldier i was still sort of like figuring it out and i wasn't doing a great job i was late not prepared not the best at physical fitness you know so i was like the lower echelon of soldier and so one day i'm standing in the in the third uh the third line of formation and the drill sergeant says stokoviak front center your first squad leader now and so that means that you're now the leader of the first squad and there's like usually like you know three or four squads so like three different lines so if you think of a formation it's the rows or squads and so if you're on the if you're on the the if you're facing the formation on the far left side that's the first person and that's the person that's in charge of that squad so i got i got basically made under the person who is in charge of the unit i was the second income command for lack of it better terms and i didn't do anything to deserve it or earn it he just gave it to me and uh and like from that day on i was like i'm a leader now i have to be a leader how do i be a leader how do i lead how do i what's it look like what does a leader look like how do they talk how do they walk how do they act and so it sort of reshaped my formation of what it meant to lead i started to uh you know press my uniform shine my boots you know they call it dress right dress in the military be very you know you know all the angles are squared and whatnot so i just i just i guess i was given an opportunity to lead which is why i'm a huge advocate for you know just helping somebody that doesn't even think they deserve it or know how to do it give them a chance you know encourage them into a leadership position and uh i was not the best i probably failed a lot and that didn't matter though because because where i'm at today as a man as a dad as a father as a leader of any sort is because of some of those moments we must have seen a lot in you if he gave you that responsibility so it's possible that i don't think he did honestly i don't think he did i i don't think i deserved it at all he wasn't like oh he looks good let's get him up here i think he was just like rando and i was just having a draw and i think i was telling jared this story of the day like he's like would you would you say would you would you thank him today or something like that yeah well we were talking about people who influenced us in our lives and the question is should you go back to that person because you don't you don't appreciate it then i mean sometimes you do but especially as a young person we just don't appreciate what we have the opportunity is given to us and the question is well now that we have we look back and i say we're talking about a teacher of mine shout out to mr kasner in uh high school there he is a guy who like i was like wow i didn't realize it but you're he was a good teacher and he impressed things upon me and the question was well would you go back to that person if you could and just thank them because now you have that appreciation and that was what i was asking you and i would and i was like well you know what i did today i was googling drill sergeant hillard you know the person's name that that did this and i was like what's what's really interesting as somebody in that position he probably has no idea he changed my life and i mean like yeah this these things happen out there that we don't get that feedback loop like as software developers and people who you know deal with teams and flows and frameworks and systems we we crave that feedback loop and it's a it's a built-in mechanism into the human brain to desire and need that feedback loop right to have relationship is a key humanistic feedback loop find a human in solitary confinement whether they're in the you know in the caves or in you know um in prison or something like that you find somebody super alone you're going to find somebody seriously dealing with some mental issues because of that solitary that because of that that soleness and uh yeah i don't think he he has any any idea that uh he influenced my life so well which is crazy to me yeah the the feedback loop is very loose in the real world especially among i mean who knows were you able to find him on google are there so many as a matter of fact i kind of got scared for a second because i did find an article from the base i was at that was tragic and i started reading through it and thank god his name wasn't in it it was something else you know sad about the situation but i was like gosh here i am looking for this person and something bad happened to them or whatever you know you find somebody's obituary you know and it's kind of terrible too because like if you're out there and you're listening to this you're thinking man there's somebody who influenced my life try to thank them if you can because i mean the last thing i would want is to find that person's obituary and it'd be too late you know if i could find them somehow some way i would be like thank you so much for sharing leadership with a crap soldier like me because wow it changed my life it's a great reminder i'm gonna have to put that on my to list because i've got a lot of people myself who have steered me in the direction a lot of teachers a lot of employers and managers yeah um so you get back from the army you did your three years and and your uh your education before that um did you end up going to school or what did you do from there that's funny um so that's actually the next part that got me to where i'm at closer to today i was i would say at least so here specifically geographically in texas so um for a little while there i lived in canada and that's a really long story and i don't feel like going into that but i went from the military to florida because a good friend of mine that i grew up and went to high school this is one of the people who had a plan had parents with money and they sent them to college to school and so instead of going to school i went to the military this person my good buddy uh donald kilgore you know donald yeah we work with dk quite a bit he uh he went to film school in orlando florida at a place called full sail really well known for audio visual directing film all that good stuff and so i left the military with like this sgli bill thinking i'm gonna go to florida and i'm gonna go to film school i'm gonna go to audio school so i i'd wanted to do either directing of films or getting to like audio stuff around films i loved it i didn't know how to do it but i like the idea of it which is so ironic of what i do now at least one component of my job and uh yeah i never went to school i never went i never ended up making it there which is kind of an interesting story if you want to go there i can i can take it to like the next i would say if we had to like uh fasted my skill set one of my biggest skill sets is sales and just relationships and partnerships i love that kind of stuff and i'd mentioned uh reece brothers and doing telemarketing well i'd always been i'd always like to help people and so i think when when you say well sales is really just trying to help people solve their problems it's not about getting jared to buy something he don't want to buy with money he don't have you know it's it's about he has a problem i can help solve that problem that's sales to me and that's what we do we solve people's problems in a lot of ways and so um i uh kind of a long story about i'll make it really short i had a friend who was trying to be a dj and we were at uh a club early in the day kind of like seven o'clock times people are into the club you know it's not the time you want to be a dj and so we were there i see him talking to this guy at the bar i see him go back and do his thing and i go over and introduce myself because i'm i'm like if you're a friend of my friend you're a friend of mine kind of kind of person and so i went over and i introduced myself as hey i saw you talking to my buddy dion my name is adam etcetera or whatever and long story short this person's name was sean hughes another person that i would love to see again and thank uh because that day he was i was at a crossroads of like what i was doing which was basically nothing i had no real ambition at the time i was like i'm really hating what i'm doing now i'm thinking about getting the car sales so car sales right i love selling hey people need cars i can help you solve your problem by getting a great car whatever but car sales is generally not the most fun sales job it's got a lot of just a lot of achiness to it so yeah you know it doesn't have a great uh a great reputation for being a great job you can make a lot of money but it may not be the best job for you and so long story short i meet sean he's like don't get into car sales i've been in the car sales it's terrible don't do that i tell you what come in on monday this is friday come in on monday to my office he's selling a great young man got a great head on your shoulders i got something i'm working on at a company called muzak i'd love to interview you for this thing we have going on so that's another like huge moment my life where i went from like no direction to direction i go in on monday meet with sean it's a great office it's a legit job or you gotta dress nice right and you get a computer like you know to be like i'm not talking to a pos which is a point of sale system or you know which is nothing wrong with that it was just the next direction for me um because at the time i was i was a server i was serving you know waiting tables doing that kind of stuff in orlando making good money because lots of hospitality around that area but yeah this guy man hired me into this position it was an lapd program called leads appointments deals proposals so more acronyms not in the military this time but leads appointments deals proposals that's what it was all about i was basically inside sales for account executives and i learned the ropes of this business if you haven't heard of muzak if you've been into say old navy or banana republic or any sort of like upscale retail environment they put the sound systems in they put the music in and that's what i learned how to do like this sort of like um a soundtrack to evoke an emotion right i started getting into user experience this whole aspect of design and stuff like that music had a really good brand design i always thought it was elevators that's where it began okay so it began in like the early 1920s gotcha as a combination of music and kodak because the person who founded muzak it was a whole different era but he loved the he loved he loved music and he loved kodak so he just put them together music there you go not the silliest uh company name origin sorry yeah you could do worse you could do worse and so you know i got into sales there i started making good money and uh yeah that's that's i never made it to school though so the interesting to answer sort of a long-winded version of like did you go to school the answer is no but i found a really awesome job that helped me learn all sorts of skill sets that i literally use today yeah to help build our business yeah and i guess to some extent like they used to say going to the military was like an alternative to going to school because you learn a lot of the same things right you learn how to uh structure how to operate and structure and everything um and by the time you'd already traveled around the world and done a lot of things to expand your horizons anyway yeah i'd seen i was used to traveling i was used to being a vagabond for lack of better terms you know just pack a bag and go somewhere or take a few things only very i've slept in some really weird places and i've also showered and not showered in some really weird places so i've actually the longest stretch i've gone for not showering is about three and a half weeks what wow we were on a field problem and you were lucky it was just like a certain kind of field problem where we had to it was simulating a real world in-battle environment kind of thing and we were learning because we're going to bosnians we had to train so when you go in the military you just don't know how to be a soldier and how to do these things and go overseas and do different stuff you have to train to do these things so we went to training to learn how to you know go overseas and kind of simulate that now i showered over there which is awesome but during this what they call them field problems during this field problem yeah i didn't shower i mean a wash rag to myself maybe a little bit like a legit in the shower shower i might be pushing a little bit at least two weeks maybe three weeks yeah and i don't know if i could do it like it was tough i'd be knocking myself over every time i lifted my arm everybody smelled yeah i was gonna ask if it wraps around like it's bad for a while but eventually you just kind of get used to it it goes back to normal yeah it's kind of like uh yeah after a while it just sort of like normalizes i will say that when the field problem is over and we all got back to the barracks the first few in that immediately went and showered came out from their shower and then everybody else is still coming in you're like oh my gosh you guys smell so bad like it was it was pretty bad at that point you can smell the difference and the line for that shower must have been like tightly packed everybody's like anticipating the hot water yeah yeah this i may forget that i don't really know but i'm sure you blocked it out there's always a line it's like a line to brush your teeth even yes yeah yeah so how did you transition from doing sales for music and you said doing some some kind of in the direction of user experience design yeah choosing music and and trying to evoke specific emotions and communicate certain things how did you explain the process of transitioning from that to getting more and more passionate about tech and ultimately um doing what you're doing now yeah it's it's interesting that uh one of the things that made me realize i was more geeky than i'd ever thought i was because i was never like i guess just when i grew up computers weren't around everywhere to sort of like easily stumble into or more easily get into you know and so you almost had to really try and so at the the first time i had a phone was at this job they gave me a cell phone it was next tell that told how long ago it was it was a next telephone phone a next telephone it was crazy and the very first time i had my own laptop was at this job the ver the first time i like really used a computer for anything that was not like online chats or just whatever dinking around was at this job so i'd kind of gotten into there's a uh i don't know if it's still around but it was called act and act database it was like a maybe you know this you've seen it jared but it was a databasing system for like a basic crm and that i started to tinker with that i was never really good at it but i started taking some classes around it and just realized that i had this sort of inkling into like a geek or what i considered a geek at that time geeky things you know and uh muzak had a really interesting brand a really clean design a really uh a real focus on uh how they say things and it's funny one thing we actually have that's a behind the scenes repo on github it's it's a a repo we call one voice so that jared and i can sort of like say the same things and sort of define the same things around our business to say when we talk to somebody around a partnership or a sales opportunity or you know our guest guide various things are in this so that jared and i can have you know and begin to develop one voice for whomever sort of leads commands and interacts with you know these levels of our our business and so that's something that they had they actually had this entire book called one voice and i was like that's really interesting how much you think about uh the emotion that you want to invoke as a part of your brand you know who you say you are really mattered to music and they could have just been they had some really good branding people right and people believed in it but hey i drank the kool-aid man i was all in it so that that's kind of what got me into it but um i'd actually i mentioned at some point i moved to canada uh i moved to canada uh as part of my job and they had an affiliate there and i was working in canada and uh long story short this is when george bush was president the americans did not have a great reputation abroad whether it was canada europe wherever else at least from from my perspective because people would not buy from me because i was an american right so i like was an amazing salesperson killing it like i think at age 21 when i was working at muzak in the united states i was making like 80 90k a year in sales like i was just doing it for like full-time sales for like less than a year almost barely two years if that so i was really killing it i was like top five in the country for you yeah and then going there and it's nothing against canadians but i i was i i felt really um i don't know how to describe it i just felt i i just felt like really sad that that these people would not buy for me because of where i'm from and because i have an american accent and i'm not canadian and don't say hey i love canadians they're amazing and i was like okay i just can't make ends meet so long story short i i went there to to work for this company there and i just couldn't cut it and so i knew somebody who who ran this it business which is really where my story of technology and like true web and software and stuff became a thing and like networking because this business was called it weapons they were i.t weapons you get it right okay it was pretty cool it was pretty cool they did citrix they did vmware they did like watch uh watch guard like so they did hardware and software they would do large scale citrix implementations and this is when it was all about uh thin client fat what's the other server yeah like the you did all of it on servers so citrix was like you know you had a thin client that was you know kind of stupid and all that was just a terminal to right your server and so everything was server based and it's just an interesting area this is around 2003 2004 2005 time frame so that's kind of the error then i learned about servers what they were all that good stuff and it's it's just pretty crazy to think like this job at it weapons started to open up doors into into software hardware technology and at one point i didn't even know what a server was like i hear it i hear people say server but like what's a server so so ultimately of course you went on to found one of the most important uh podcasts about software in my opinion and yet you were working in sales yeah there must have been a pretty big transition there yeah just just give us some broad strokes about how how you went about getting more technical this was kind of interesting too because i i kind of stumbled into it right like when i was working at i.t weapons i was learning more i was starting to take over the website for it weapons and i was starting to deploy it and stuff like that which was like basically just dragging and dropping an ftp it was really you know it was those days kind of thing it was a self-built php kind of just a rendering kind of situation so it was really interesting that that's like how much things have changed um i started getting more and more responsibility there around that kind of stuff and sort of like defining where the brand went how we spoke uh we would have in office um kind of like conferences for lack of better terms where i would organize them i would like get the people there to speak from citrix from watchguard from you know from vmware or whatever and i would coordinate people and i would coordinate the clients and just kind of like start layering on all these different things of like biz dev design sales you know all that kind of stuff and then a buddy of mine which ultimately came here to texas i was in canada a buddy of mine started reaching out to me about like i don't know why he asked me these things but like he's like hey i got this issue with this webpage i'm making can you help me and i just started to solve his problems and he's like hey can you just build these things for me i've got some clients and like so next thing you know i started to just like moonlight and freelance in web design and developments i would design it i would develop it i would ship it i would support it and i would help you know to some degree even land the deals you know so sort of like full full spectrum of like identify people to work with understand what their problem set was design something to fit it and then build it and make it and ship it and support it and after a while he was like do you just want to because he's a good buddy of mine i grew up with him i was kind of telling you that some of my friends had plans he was the one that had a plan went to school and he was the one that went the full sale his name is donald kilgore love donald he's like you just want to like become a partner in my business and help me do this and so we did started landing some really big clients i think probably the biggest deal we landed was like twenty or thirty thousand dollars and i was like for a website that was a big deal it was an rv dealership here in texas called demontron they're really well known around here they have chrysler jeep ford whatever and they have an rv place and so we built out and this is actually leading into rails too because this is like 2005. david had recently just said whoops and we were all watching you know i'm saying right right david had him on our hands that's right david hartman video details vlogging in five minutes yeah and so we had we had built this version of uh of de montron and we didn't really like how it was functionality and so that's when rails was really cool i started getting into that more i reached out to some people and kind of put together a team i was on the front end and they were building up the back end we built out this really awesome site in rails and i think i just kind of stumbled into it because i wasn't trying to be even though i know i said my mom said i'm really good at it i wasn't really thinking i would be a web developer i kind of like just was doing it was into like biz dev i really like to create and develop relationships and i just see that as like one more way to do it because one i could do it well no one else was really doing it i had an opportunity i can cultivate clients i can do a lot of these interesting things and the door just opened up yeah and i imagine a lot of the job was communicating with the clients and understanding their needs and you know you've got to watch out for hours even like like on the phone for hours talking through things and figuring things out and and a lot of iteration a lot of feedback from them so it's really fun so would you say rails was one of the key inspirations for you starting a podcast around open source i mean rails is one of the most important open source projects it's brought so many people into the fields it revolutionized yeah a lot of uh crud based web apps were built for sure so a little piece of the history is so the person that i hired to work with me on the rail site his name is josh owens he's pretty prominent in the javascript and i believe like meteor space now um i think he still lives in in ohio i can't recall maybe columbus area um he had a podcast that began in 2004 called the web 2.0 show so i don't know if you know this quincy but at one point the web was just 1.0 and then then it became 2.0 and that just meant that we had gradients and like rounded corners what version are we on at this point who knows you know yeah who knows don't use an html5 and css3 right there you go that's right and so he had a show a podcast called the web 2.0 show it was one of the very earliest first technical or tech or software focus podcast and at that time you didn't have to do much because you just had to be a podcast you could be terrible quality sound wise great content it didn't matter you had all the listeners because there was no one else doing it and so his partner had quit and this is how i got into podcasting and more specifically how i got into like talking to people that weren't just like my buddies nearby about software technical related things and so i became his uh his co-host i think in like late 2005 early 2006. i literally been podcasting since like 2005. i can say 2005 because at least like november 2005 not all the whole year but i can claim 2005. yeah wow so you were on the ground floor yeah podcasting as a medium yeah yeah i mean in a lot of ways i mean i can remember using a really crappy uh snowball it was like a white microphone it was crappy to me because you can see the mics we're using now and over time i had to learn about audio too things that i never even really cared to learn about that you sort of had to had to be forced to learn these things just by way of producing audio and now you have to deliver a show that sounds really good we used to get away with it before we can like not that we wanted to but we could ship something to our listeners that wasn't immaculate sound quality you know but now we kind of feel like we're because of what listeners desire and demand and because so many people are doing it well and it's also a lot easier to produce it well you know now we i couldn't think of like shipping like if you go back and listen to the web 2.0 show you'll hear what i'm talking about yeah yeah even even some of the earlier episodes of the changelog listening to them i mean there's it's just night and day yeah today in the production quality it's it's funny you go back and listen to episode number one and then even go from one to just 100 just go on the on the hundreds go to one 100 200 and 300 what would like 367 will ship this week i believe so yeah the way the way the change all came about was was uh i was working with a buddy named netherland and when netherland win netherland kind of like the netherlands but netherland and uh i think he used to say that too uh he goes by penguin p-e-n-g-w-y-n on on twitter to look him up but uh he was at an interesting space because he ran a consultancy uh called squeegee now wins got some really interesting witty humor so it was called squeegee because he liked to like clean things and make things nice and their brand was like a lot like you might imagine like a cleaning products brand so like kind of like and shiny and it was really interesting i loved uh i love that aspect about it but he was in this crossroads because he had just decided to leave his consultancy and sort of like go a new direction and so did i and so we were sort of both in this sort of like let's establish our name for ourselves let's kind of like you know etch out some new territory and obviously i had a background in at least doing something with podcasting and stuff like talking about things and i was like what if we were both talking about how fast open source is moving and i'm like you know what people just need is they just need like a a way finder through the version so if something changes if you know rails 1.0 versus 1.8 or whatever it might be you know somebody just needs to sort of like chronicle the change log of a of a of a software product or software open source whatever like someone needs to sort of like tell that story that's what what's missing what happened here and what happened here and what's happening between people don't have that and so i was like what if we just did a show called changelog so it was just changed like a first and one was like what about the change law this is like the opposite of the facebook facebook that's right change log 2 the change log sounds more definitive yeah and so we were the change log and as a matter of fact it's really funny because it began as we still own these domains yeah when did you get changelog.com because that's a really good domain yeah it took it took a couple years and it wasn't very expensive there's a story behind that it had the changelog.com yeah it began it's changelogshow.com and that was actually what our original uh google account was set up under our email was actually adam at changelog show and then we aliased the changelog.com and then eventually i'm like you know what we just need to shorten it to just change log on twitter and wherever we can and so we only really did that because they became available to us somebody uh on twitter gave that handle to us thank you i can't recall your name but we wrote about this it's never heard about somebody on twitter actually responding did they just voluntarily or they just gave it to us yeah they were they were in software and said they liked what we're doing they're like i see that you're going to use it for good things it's not like you just want it because you're some jerk or whatever and so they knew we had good intentions um changelot.com was owned by somebody else in software and they i don't think they were really interested in selling it until i made him an offer and then he agreed to it we go we got chainsaw.com for a thousand dollars wow a thousand dollars yeah what year was that uh i want to say like 2015 maybe not that long ago yeah maybe 2014. man what 2014. these are some really chill people because i mean that's a great deal yeah he could have he could have seen like well the writings on the wall you've been doing this for a while you're probably going to keep doing this you're you know i want more than a thousand bucks but it sounds like he believed in the mission if you want to give you that kind of price yeah i don't think he believed in the mission i i think he just saw us as someone who could do something with it that wasn't just i guess i don't know just something useful and we were willing to give him what what he desired which was a thousand bucks and we ended up using cdu s-e-d-o to do the sort of the whole um in you know what's the uh the escrow kind of situation where we put the money in there he's able to collect the money or whatever and then it's it's a nice easy way so i recommend if you're gonna buy a domain from somebody i don't have all the details but that's how we did it i would use i would do it that way if you don't know the person do it with some sort of like exchange scenario somebody in the middle that can facilitate it and i don't know if they would actually like press charges that they didn't follow through but there's something there's some sort of commitment well if with an escrow in the middle they can hold the funds yeah yeah i mean it's especially if it's like an international transaction which court you go to yeah dispute things you know yeah exactly smart but change law.com was pretty cool we we even had it was a big move you helped you did all that tell us some of the technical parts of that i mean what was the five years ago just like a lot of lottery a lot of redirect lottery before we dig in all that so of course i listened i had to listen to the first episode of the change log for uh doing the research did you like it i mean it was it was pretty rough i pulled it up on like i've got a i've got a podcast tool that just makes it really easy to pull up uh old podcasts i don't know how they archive it because even when i go on like itunes and try to scroll all the way down it doesn't go all the way back which kind of it's disappointing jerry can share some reasons why at length and in detail but yeah yeah but uh i was able to find it and pull it up and uh we'll link to it in the show notes if you want to give it a listen just to hear that it's really easy to com slash one yeah oh really yeah it's really easy that's a good path um but uh yeah so david berwin i'm sorry neverland yeah sounds like a really cool guy he ultimately went to get a job at github right yeah there's some story there too we can go into a little bit of that so um when i became uh close friends we had actually done some uh some teaching together so when was more developer less designer and less front end but he really had a an eye for aesthetic and an eye for design and he loved to always tinker and he was and if i had to describe he was always like a a minimalist approach to things but not you know he wasn't the kind of developer like i can't touch css or he just loved to like dive into things and he just thrived at that and so we did a um we did a a class at lone star ruby conference in a couple other places i want to say called design eye for the dev guy or gal and it's quite a name which was yeah it was pretty funny and so what we wanted to do is like just help software developers who are just primarily in in code and back-end type stuff and not at all in the front end feel a bit more comfortable with early technologies like sas pre-pre-compilers stuff like that and this is early days of sas this is even before like the scss syntax so like this was super early days so one side small tangent would be that before there was the change log i actually wanted to do a sas podcast but nobody would do it with me so so i i died on that sword and instead decided to do this uh this show uh the change law because uh i had a partner who would be willing to work with me on it so there you go no one was really interested in the sas i was like why don't you just do a css show and there's css tricks and i'm like yeah but chris is nobody i'm just kidding right chris is not nobody he's the man yeah listen chris we love you that's right that was like 2009 though so like where css tricks is today to to where it was then oh yeah chris has done an amazing job so it just we were all early days and that was like before it's where it's at now and so there was just the field was more green there was a lot more opportunity you know in terms of like making carving right whereas now like we wouldn't start a front-end focused website or podcast like that like chris would do you know because somebody started doing it doing it well we would do something else that where there's a hole to fill not not to cramp in on somebody else's style yeah you know open source was clearly something that needed something yeah and it was moving so fast github i mean this the show began in 2009 and github had just become a thing in 2008 and a little bit more history going one layer deeper so on the web 2.0 show we actually met up with chris weinstroth and tp dubs tom preston warner uh three months after github was founded wow and we had them on the web 2.0 so if you want to go back and listen to some really interesting old days of github not owned by microsoft not bought for billions like dreamers like these were developers who were like wow we somehow found a way to tie in like this front end and this collaboration and get and like it was before all these visions and dream had come to fruition like they have before they invented the request and so that's to me that's super cool that that's what really got me into like loving this medium was because even with our show we can go back and like chronicle the paths of some developers you know we've had some people on four times three times several times we've seen not only their changes as uh as individual people but the software they command or the things they maintain the communities they lead it's just really interesting i love the fact that we get a chance to be kind of what that drill sergeant was to to me the encourager right we like to shine our light in places where it's not always being shined and just encourage people to press forward to congratulate them for working really hard maintainers who don't get any things we love to pat them on the back and say keep going you're doing an awesome job and just do what we can to put more uh focus on the things they're working on fun fact so github had their own podcast in the very very early days of github called get splosion which was chris wanstroth and tom preston warner and pj hyatt the three founders of github basically just sitting in a room and talking to each other it was very low rent and it was very raw and i think it's disappeared off the internet once they probably raised funding and started probably more corporate probably alive i used to listen to that it was very raw and i loved it i just thought of that when you talked about their early days show they actually had their own show about git and github and they really just hung out anyways yeah if you can find that send us links i'd love to listen to it again it's some interesting content but yeah it's probably gone oh i'm sorry i didn't interrupt one more layer to his story though in speaking to github and podcast we were actually syndicated for a while onto github.com explorer ah so for a while there like they you know this is early days too so they they were just they love what we're doing they love the change law they love what we're trying to do about open source and sharing you know all the things happening and they're like let us help you somehow and so they syndicated the the most recent five episodes were on github.com explorer now it's not there anymore so if you go there don't be disappointed i am but um you know if anybody at github wants to you know reignite i'm just kidding no that's some prime real estate right there yeah it was such an interesting time then too because that github was not at all the github it is today which doesn't mean it's bad or good it just means that it was interesting because we could work with the it was ran by developers and not like oh business people are bad but it was like people who want to help other developers do well and do cool things they were willing to share you know what they were doing and and prop up the show for a while there people actually thought the change was owned by github that's how closely things were and so it's just an interesting time i appreciate the time we were on explorer but it was just really interesting that they were able to share that and it was developers who ran it not some bureaucrats or vc that didn't have this humanity connection to us as software developers just trying to like at that time this show was just a hobby like it was after that it became a business for like a better terms yeah you know yeah and that's what i'm really excited to talk about next so of course there was kind of like a urban dictionary has this definition of this word called pod fade yes essentially a podcast will start publishing less and less frequently and maybe they won't admit to themselves that they're that the best days of the podcast are behind them but maybe they are kind of heading toward the door so to speak so often times with a pod fade there will be a long gap and there'll be one last episode in which the podcast announces that it's returning yes that is when you know you have a podcast apology sorry we've been so quiet we're back and that's that's the end but that happens a lot on youtube too yes we had that but we continued yeah so let's talk about that struggle for the soul of the changed log ah okay so um slight backstory on that too so wen and i both uh met this guy named uh josh cofer who was starting a non-profit he actually met win first and win and i were both freelancing as i mentioned and doing the change law podcast as a hobby fun thing just to do and uh and when was building his team for pure charity this this non-profit that josh koffer was forming to be a place for nonprofits to coalesce to get information on how to best fundraise how to lead their charges how to unify their followers their supporters for lack of better terms um william was like first you know one of the first picks i was a second hire after him so i guess i was first pick um he's like adam do you want you know do you want to do this this kind of thing and so next thing you know we're working for this you know this non-profit called pure charity and uh when was cto i think i was like you know ux design or something like that i don't remember what my title was doesn't matter the point was was that we were just sort of like fleshing out our careers a bit more and about two years pass and the majors call right wins in the farm club at pure charity the majors github calls and says hey when uh you want to come up to san francisco we want to talk to you about some things and so long story short he got called up to the majors he couldn't say no it wasn't it was we both loved we were doing it pure charity but he couldn't say no to it yeah and it was a you know like any podcast it's just a hobby you only have so much love for it and so much time for when you have family you know you've got your career you've got other things and so we was like hey i'm out of time i just can't do this anymore and i think that was around september 2012 and uh and and i was kind of bummed i'm like hey i get it i don't have a lot of time for it either and then i sat in this sort of lull for a while just thinking like you know it's not worth much but would anybody want to buy it like should i keep it going what should i do with it you know i know it's i know what it means to so many people and what it could mean if we just keep it going and so i was just really in this whole space where i was just questioning whether it made any more sense for me because i'm definitely you know more on the design front-end side than developer side and jared has to remind me all the time to drop my impostor syndrome and say dude your developer because i at least even right now i feel less developer than i had been before but i was always more on the front end user experience sort of like biz dev side of things relationship side of things how should it look how should it function how can we deliver it then the follow through then the doing part of software and i've i've worked with great people but it's just not where i shine i can do it but i shine better in other areas and so i was like am i an imposter by just keeping this thing going what can i do yeah man that is some hardcore imposter syndrome and i totally yeah there have definitely been deaths with free code camp as well uh where i felt so like a total imposter yeah um but thank goodness you didn't sell it because i there's no way that anybody could have taken it over and brought it to such heights as it is today but thank you um so that's something i'm extremely grateful for that you that you stuck with it um yeah so you stuck with it and and a phone call or tell us the story behind jared entering the stage i'll tee it up uniform and get okay my teep is super short he emailed win yeah and went forward the email to me that was it yeah so i was a listener and i was tracking the blog so win has an uncanny skill of finding new things the gems yeah he could find gems and you know over the years i've tried to imitate that and i've gotten pretty okay at it but i like to find things too you know a new open source project here a new technique a great blog post and so i was following the blog mostly i was i'm also a podcast junkie was back then still that's why i know about git splosion where most people don't even realize that was a podcast i'm like the github guys have a podcast i'll listen to it and so i was a listener of the show and i really appreciated the blog because i was in omaha nebraska doing my thing writing software for people and i very much felt like i was on an island so to speak in the open source world i i cut my teeth on unix and and linux networks and i was a vim guy early on i was just always in open source like i learned perl and then i learned ruby and then rails blew my mind and i was building rails websites and so i was in the open source universe i didn't even really realize that like there was much else even though there's this entire microsoft side of things that i just didn't people started talking about c sharp and i didn't know what they're talking about early on um and then it started to fade and the blogs were coming less and less often and the podcast was happening less and less and i was running my own uh a single person consultancy basically making uh web apps for people and i had known wynn because of ruby i believe i think he had a ruby gem that i used and i can't remember which one it was he actually was involved in the twitter gym for a while yeah he was um and i remember i had you know contributed to that and then basically followed each other on twitter and i started listening to his podcast and he started reading my blog or something anyway we were just mutual connections there and i didn't even know about adam very much except for he was the guy that was always talking to win win did a lot of the interviews on the show back then um i knew that adam was involved in the change log and when the changelog was winning adam but i didn't know who adam was and knew who win was and so when it started to fade out basically i had the capability of just helping out with the blog because i had my own business and so i could fill in gaps and i could do that kind of work and so i just offered i just emailed win i was like hey i see you guys are like struggling to keep it going can i help you know because i can i can blog once a week or whatever it is and so when had i think had actually moved on already i just it was all behind the scenes he was already working in github or something and so he just forwarded he's like hey man thanks for reaching out and he forwarded me to adam and andrew who was also a co-host at the time yeah um because andrew and i were together pure charade as well yeah andrew thorpe and so that's how i got involved was was through that yeah i didn't want to see it die a listener this could be you this is amazing so this this this reminds me of like the story of like you know judas priests how like the robert halford had to leave the band for whatever reason and they found a guy who was running the he he was the singer of a tribute band for judas priest okay and he became the singer of christ it's like a cinderella story and it sounds kind of like this was a cinderella story you're listening one day you're listening to the change log the next day you're on the change slot yeah it was very surreal the first time that i was on the show because i i wrote for the website for a while before i was on the show because andrew was at pure charity andrew moved on to stripe i think he went to yeah he went to work at stripe wasn't going to co-host anymore and uh eventually i came into the co-host role but i remember the first time i was on it was like a reunion episode with me you steve nick and kenneth reitz yeah kenneth reed and andrew was on the show as well yeah five of us and we were just kind of shooting the poop it's supposed to be live every week and it was the first and only live show yeah i could be wrong but but we had ambitions but it was very strange hearing my voice on the show that i've been listening to for all the times you know that was back in uh 2012 2013 time range was when i got involved so yeah well give us a little bit more background about yourself because to even get in the position where you were contributing to these these libraries uh like the twitter gym for example someone i used uh early on as a developer as well so i didn't even realize it until you said it but i've used some of your code um yeah how did you how did you ramp up what's your what's your origin story so it's somewhat humorous to me that you're asking both of us about our origin stories we used to do origin stories on the show that's true in fact you were on the show about four years ago we have got your your origin story as well and we stopped doing those over time because we found that they were kind of hit or miss uh the first one that i remember was kong or mash ape i think ahmad nasrid yeah he had an amazing origin story uh i missed that one i was so bummed yeah i interviewed him by myself and i was like adam this guy had a mate we have to ask everybody their origin stories it's so cool and then we started asking more and more people and it became to where like somebody would have an amazing one the other one would be very boring and straightforward and so that's what you're running into right now because adam just had his origin story from poverty and the military and all these things and my origin story is very status quo for somebody in america and growing up in the 90s i was raised by two parents who loved each other and loved me this coming up on their 50th anniversary in the suburbs of middle america uh pretty typical public school education you know went to college learned some stuff got into got into technology and here i am i mean there's not much there's not much to dig into that's unique or different um and so i don't i don't think we need to cover too much well the one piece of your history that i do like that's kind of interesting is um is the government job you have planned for you after school that's that's an interesting caveat that i don't know how much you want to share about sure that's an interesting caveat to your story yeah absolutely so there are there are some things in there that that we might be able to to dig into so i've always considered myself to be a cautiou a cautious opportunist and so when i see opportunities in my life i just kind of cautiously go into them versus either like rambunctiously going in or jump right in or go or not go in so like that's kind of where i've been and even with the changelog this was not like i decided hey this is going to be a new part of my career i was just more like i could contribute to the blog like i saw a need and i kind of started then it just like slowly slowly steamrolled and so that's the story of my education as well i didn't i wasn't into software i wasn't into technology i got my first computer i was 18 years old which is relatively late for a lot of developers the only thing i did on it was napster you know pretty much and then i play video games um a friend of mine in high school told me i should apply for a scholarship there's a thing in omaha called the walter j scott scholarship walter scott is a guy who's done very well for himself and uh has a scholarship for certain students to go into technology industry and then stay in omaha is kind of his deal that's cool i had never heard of it my friend said hey you should try this out it's an i.t thing and i was like i.t what's that it was you know internet things right i mean i was actually planning on being an architect that was but i wasn't like passionate about art you know in school they kind of like make you pick something and uh i had done pretty good on the cad machine like i could dr draw a thread you know i remember my my cad design teacher was like you're gonna make a great architect one day i'm like okay i'll be an architect and that was like the extent of my passion for architecture but i was like okay i could do that looking back i think i was just good at manipulating the computer to make a thread design not the actual design itself so i was probably just better at cad than i was at architecture because i i do have a knack for these things but i just didn't know it anyways my friend chad told me about this scholarship and my pre my other friend aaron had gotten the scholarship a year earlier it's for people who test pretty well on on scores and aaron tested very well and i thought if he could do it i could do it that was kind of my my attitude so i applied for the scholarship got the scholarship and it included you know like a computer and stuff like that full ride to you university of nebraska so that was really cool and that's really what got me into software at all i was management information systems i was it's which is kind of like computer science but it's not computer science it's like they try to sell as the best of both worlds of like business and computer science together i found out that's actually means like the least of both of those worlds right like you're not a computer scientist you're not a business person either and so it's kind of like just a lukewarm version of either of those other majors right don't recommend it just go computer science if you are going to go to a four-year school second that recommendation um or just start off recode campaign uh and i didn't really learn yeah in the second day i would encourage people to still go to school if you have the resources to go to school yeah i would too um well there's lots of routes so i actually i'll say this everybody needs something a little bit different and so for some people a free code camp is like 100 the way to go even if they have the resources for some people a uh a boot camp like an in-person immersive but still short thing is great way to get started they can go from there for other people they may need you know a four-year degree before they go into it your age matters your life circumstance matters absolutely and so there really is not like a a single solution to rule them all which is why i love how many options there are and how it's like an ecosystem anyways a little bit off topic i like that though i mean a lot of facets to how you can learn that's what's important right the important thing to communicate is there's not one way that that rules all your way may be different than mine or jared's or quincy's and it's just a matter of persevering through it getting over the humps and hurdles right that sometimes i mean that's why it's hard because hard things if it was easy everyone would do it it's hard because it's worth doing so persevere find some friends or your tribe to you know guide you through or support you through you know get get people around you mentors all that stuff so there isn't one way that's the best fit for everybody yeah so i cautiously walked into that opportunity and it worked out and that moved me off the architecture track and into the computer world so to speak i didn't really learn very much about computer systems in the first few years of my college it's just a unfortunate fact some of that was me a lot of that was the school my last year i found another potential scholarship and i liked scholarships because uh it's free money and uh this one was cool so the one a cool thing about the walter scott scholarship is it's uh stackable and there's actually a term i can't remember what it is but certain ones you get like a full ride and you're done you can't actually get other scholarships well for enterprising students who would rather get scholarships than like jobs like myself uh you could find ones that stacked and if you can get those then you're basically getting more money so i found another scholarship called the national science foundation scholarship for service and it was all about information assurance and so this was like a push into getting some of these cs people and mis people into software security so assurance that your software is information assurance yeah but it's like quality assurance and information security yeah matched up exactly it's like how sure are you and can you can we be sure about our systems and so it was very much a a a government thing um it was two years of schooling which stacked on top of my other scholarship with a concentration on information assurance which was a new thing at the university at the time i think it still exists but it's basically i learned penetration testing securing and hardening systems you know defense in depth all these security concepts um and then i was supposed to go into two attached to that is two years to work with a government agency upon graduation so it was really great i actually learned a lot in that program you learn the the really nitty-gritty of how systems work networks especially and how insecure they are and ways that you can pick those things apart um upon graduation there was a hiring freeze in the in the government and so we had a circumstance where you know sometimes the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing well on the right side of the government's hands they were creating a new scholarship for service to get all these new bright young minds to go work for a three-letter agency and on the left-hand side they had a hiring freeze on so we were the first class that did the scholarship there's 200 of us nationwide and there were no jobs for us but we had this agreement commitment yeah a commitment a two-year commitment and so it was kind of like make you peel potatoes for two years well they wanted us to wait sit around and wait really they expected you to wait for just two years before starting your career yeah sit around and wait so that was unfortunate so i was in this weird like uh no man's land where i was graduating i had this commitment but there was no job to actually fulfill a commitment and so what was i supposed to do well uh in that time frame this is like when i was in the 21 to 23 time reign time range uh at age 22 i became a christian and i started to attend a local bible church in omaha and i really felt like it was important for me to stay there while i was there i met the pastor who's also an i.t guy and ran a software company with a networking need and he was like i'll put you to work and even it's great really he's like yeah in fact you can work for me as long as you want and then if they come knocking then you can just leave like you know most people it's hard to find a job in that place because like by the way i might have to quit at any moment's notice and go work for the government he was like he did that for me oh stand-up guy yeah he's spectacular changed my life in many ways that guy his name is john malone and he also thought it was ridiculous that they were basically holding this commitment to us and so he helped me petition the school and the system and basically they let a lot of us just off our commitment because there's no jobs and so he was instrumental in you know providing for me during that time period and then also helping me to get that commitment raised and so i just kept working for him i was like well this worked out pretty well uh he helped me out when i was in a bind he's a software guy he from way back in the day he knows all the the nuts and bolts of like the old school software guys and he's got work for me to do so i just worked for him for a while um i was never really considered myself a programmer back then i was kind of like a networking scripter i consider myself a scripter it's funny how reluctant people are to consider themselves developers or developers like i'm not quite a developer i know like i took some of the developer like i took c plus plus and i took uh c programming which i actually liked more than c plus plus we can we could talk about that but and i learned pearl and as a penetration tester as a person who's like trying to break into systems and stuff or find holes or even as a script kitty like there's a reason why they're called script kitties because they don't have the skills of a cat but they got the scripts and so i would learn scripts i would read scripts i would write scripts i consider myself like an automator and so i i wrote a lot of perl scripts um and then i found the ruby programming language and i was like why would i write perl scripts when i can write ruby scripts kind of the spiritual successor to ruby yeah yeah i borrowed a lot of the great things from pearl and then discarded some of the things some of the warts um and so i started writing ruby i knew some pearl i knew some ruby i considered myself a networking guy like i ran some mail servers and i would automate a lot of things around that job so while i was working for john i automated a lot of the things that he had for me to do on the network and so i could either twiddle my thumbs at work because i had automated all my my responsibilities or i could consid continue learning my skit you know establishing my skills and so i was tweaking wordpress blogs mostly my blog it's kind of like pimp my blog early in the day yeah where i had this blog it was probably slightly better than adams in terms of like content because it was like a i was trying to write interesting things it wasn't what you said it's like family photos and stuff pretty much yeah a little bit more an occasional personal thought but nothing very profound and i was writing about software and just blogging and i really want is a wordpress site i really wanted my latest i remember when i started realizing oh i can just program websites there's like a flip in my mind and it was uh i wanted my most recently played itunes songs in the sidebar of my blog because back this is the blogosphere day yeah you were trying to share kind of the little things i wanted to pit my blog like i wanted cool stuff in my sidebar and so i had to basically start writing php like i wrote a wordpress plugin or something like that and it talked to the you know the the imac at my house i came here exactly the details and i got it done you know and that was really cool and then i was like okay what else can i do with my blog you know start like integrating the flickr stuff into this right all these masters not instagram flickr that's right back in the flickr days all the math and we were just mashing stuff up back then that was the cool thing open apis mash them up come up with something new i loved that stuff yeah and so that's when i started thinking you know what i could just do this for other people because uh it's pretty cool and i saw the power of the web platform really and i was like every business needs something like this or could or could be advantaged by having one like today it's kind of table stakes to have a certain you know web presence but back then we're talking 2006 it was not table stakes it was advanced it was a competitive advantage you know so i started helping people do that kind of stuff i learned ruby on rails and because i had this job where i was doing networking but also this boss who was like hey you've you've achieved all these goals that we need if you can go make money another way go ahead and go do that and so i started bringing basically freelance consulting clients into his business and operating on like a one-on-one basis with them and i did that for years and that's kind of from that mill eventually i i went out on my own and started my own entity uh doing very similar work bought my customers from him uh you know still great friends to this day it wasn't like that uh started doing it on my own and in that circumstances when i was like fly away a bird fly away yeah exactly you graduated yeah so yeah under those circumstances i could help out with the change log and so that's in 2012 is when i hooked up with adam and went you know you're hearing this somewhat for the first time right i mean and kind of i am too it's i'm kind of mind blown that what's interesting about the story of success right this overnight success actually took many years and then you when you dig into the details you get to see all the little things that sort of had to happen to make things yeah successful or happen right like if jared wasn't fortunate enough in those ways to have a good friend given that opportunity him thrive in it and then excel at it to a point where he can actually go off on his own and have that freedom and flexibility well geez i mean he would have never emailed wynn i would have probably pod faded forever right you know and it would have been just a dead dog yeah you're right i mean what i'm getting from hearing your respective origin stories is there are so many people along the way yeah who were almost guarded in a way yeah and cleared the path for you to go toward your destiny of uh running the change log together yeah one more aspect that jared's story that he's not sharing yet i'm sure he might is the same person john told him what enough communicator he was that's right and he's the person that sort of like gave that insight to jared so sometimes you have these these truths about you that you don't know right it's kind of weird to like know you but not know all of you and somebody else sees this thing in you and he shares this with jared that he's a really good communicator tell the story of course but you know and it sort of like gave jared a new perspective on right how he could be as good as he is in software and technology but then also a good communicator and to bridge those two yeah so that was one of the insights that john gave me uh at some point camera exactly when i've been working for him for a while i'd known him for a while and we were good friends and he saw my programming skills which are you know i would say average to slightly above average like i can i can throw down but i'm not gonna blow anybody away okay there's hundreds if not thousands of better developers out there maybe tens of thousands i don't know we don't yeah we don't measure these things point is is like could i be the best software developer in the world no but i can hold my own and then on the other side with communication skills and the ability to to write well to think you know off the top of your head to speak to people in ways that they understand uh am i the best at that no i'm not the best at that either but there's very few people that kind of play in both of those playgrounds i mean the stereo type of a developer which i believe we're finally starting to break out of that mold and i love it there's so many different kinds of developers now but it's like the the anti-social you know person in their basement very doesn't want to talk to people wants to just i just want to code all day and drink mountain dew like that stereotype uh there's some truth in stereotypes right uh generally there's truth and then specifically they're they're wrong they're false but the general truth there is that developers are not the best communicators and so there's very few good developers who can also communicate and so john said to me i didn't realize any of this i'm looking back at it realizing he said where you're going to succeed in this industry is that you can be you can bridge the gap between developers and communication skills and i was like oh cool maybe you're right oh cool and then it's like well a podcast about software development yeah i guess that does kind of make sense in retrospect so yeah he definitely made me aware of that as a possibility you know i didn't even think about it so yeah we've had you know i think everybody has influencers or enablers or you know that drill sergeant that says you're a leader now yeah uh i think everybody has those stories and sometimes it takes introspection and reflection to actually think about that you know because so much we're just like iterating forward yeah and not looking back so lots of people yeah thank god for him too i mean geez you know that's why i think it's so important if you're in that position that's why i made that point earlier and to make it again is that if you're in that kind of position to um to enable somebody what a blessing it is to enable somebody the feedback loop is nice it's a nice to have it's not a need to have in if you're in that position because just help people along the way i mean i can't even imagine how many people have listened to your show or our show or have been influenced by free code camp or the changelog or whatever we're doing that we've never even heard of that like their lives have literally changed and we don't even know yeah you know we just gotta show up every day do what we do you know if we say we're gonna do it do it if they say we're gonna be there be there and just help people to find respect you know compassion empathy and and sometimes even the benefit of the doubt you know yeah not everybody's bad and everybody's good but uh finding that balance and uh encouraging somebody and being that person that's that's what i that's what i love most about what we do is is being able to to influence people's lives yeah and to love on people and i know we're not we're not to that part of the interview yet but i'll just say the the impact that you've had with free code camp in the first five years we'll get to that later yeah i mean it's it's amazing to watch what you've done there and and the amount of people whose lives you've helped i mean it's it's astounding i mean i've read those numbers that you put in that blog post and i was just like wow that's this is some serious impact and like you know that tide is rising a lot of people's ships and it's it's really cool so thank you props to you on that thanks i'm uh doing my best just like you all right trying to be consistent yeah the three c's right yeah well why don't you just go since we mentioned the 3c yeah this is something that i i had kind of just kind of recognized whenever i thought about the recipe for success when it comes to producing a podcast or basically any sort of piece of content you have uh basically three c's you got quality content or just content produced on a consistent basis to a community of people so if you're producing content that's good that people want to consume enjoy share like whatever it might be on a consistent basis or at least something where you set an expectation you know hey i'm going to do a show every week and then that's your that's your rhythm that's your cadence and then if you wrap all that around to a community or either develop a community or do it for a community then you're going to have some success because that's all it takes you could be talking about knitting you could be talking about software you could be talking about uh cameras and lighting you could be talking about microphones whatever if you do that on that kind of rhythm that kind of basis with that kind of focus you'll find success and that's and that's not easy to do either no it's not the three c's is it's nice to remember them and it's it it is somewhat easy to say even though you throw the cue in there that makes you up but it's easy to say but especially the consistency part like you said quincy you're just trying to be consistent yeah and like even now we've transitioned into like a full-blown business and like we're established we've been here for 10 years but like consistency you know quality content is hard as well i feel like we've gotten better at that over the years and you can you can develop an eye for it and sometimes you still strike out or in our case an ear yeah or an ear for it um community is something that comes naturally to people who commune with other people yeah yeah you have to put effort into that and it doesn't come without effort but it's not as hard as consistency consistency consistency is so hard and that's why the pod fade is like a word in urban dictionary i would say for me i think that the harder thing is community because it's not like field of dreams build it when they come it's you've got to be there you got to show up every day you got to be invitational you're saying the consistency i think it plays the community that's right that's right man they're all three hard yeah so i find it i i find it personally for me it's been a little easier to be consistent with quality content and harder to be part of the community and develop that yeah that's just you know that's me just like with learning you have different paths for me that's the area where i fail more often i think or or don't thrive as well yeah well let's talk about how jared came on board and you had circumstances that were propelling you to professionalize the change yeah if you will well i think when win left it it certainly put a kink in my thought pattern for it like i had made some money um just enough to sort of like you know server cost pay the bills make it somewhat worth it it wasn't like we could leave uh our full-time jobs and even remotely consider doing that as a full-time thing you know we had some early sponsors we'd work with github early for different things when they were promoting github jobs um you know and even then we didn't have a keen eye on how to best partner with brands to help them share their messages in ways that developers really want to hear so relevance is one but then also not objectifying like oh you should get you know just i don't know just finding a way to humanize these businesses and help them reach developers in ways they just weren't able to in other ways like it's not a display ad it's not this or whatever and i think when it became a business the the one thing for me personally which is sort of embarrassing to even mention as i mentioned i was a freelancer for a while and didn't really have a in quotes job i was my own self-employer so to speak um you know i didn't do the best i could have done with filing my taxes properly and paying my taxes properly and you know thank god the government has an option where you can establish a payment plan and i did but that didn't mean that the tax debt was gone right away so i had accumulated a little bit of tax debt having essentially bloodied my knuckles as a freelancer i didn't do things so well learned learned how to do it better and then corrected those things but yeah and and this happens to a lot of freelancers the the us tax code is complicated yeah it is but lately uh you know well even as a nonprofit that doesn't have to pay taxes we still spend a huge amount of time yeah figuring out like how to report everything yeah big big event over here keep that designation right that's that's even it too like the difficulty of reporting it especially as uh someone who's only collecting 1099s uh that's really difficult it really is and like you're so focused on just like at least for me my experience was so focused on just showing up and doing that i felt like gosh i just could taxes be a little easier to do and so i just didn't do them for for like a couple years that's no big deal but the point was this what started to to move it into this full-time business you know even an option for it was you know one obviously we heard the baxter jared and all these things sort of orchestrating and coming to be but then two i had just been recently married my wife and i we met in 2010 we got married in 2012 and this is around that time i mentioned when stepped away late 2012 and i would say 2012 to 2013 was the years we began to to formulate what has become a business you know it been in place since 2009 didn't really become anything business substance until 2012 2013 and that's my wife saying hey you can't do my wife just help me as a man guard my time because as somebody who's just ambitious you will often just throw yourselves into things that you probably shouldn't say yes to you probably should say no more often and you know to help me understand that and guard me from that she said if you're gonna do this if you're gonna take time away from our relationship our future etc you got to find some way to make it make money you know make it worth it and so what was really interesting about that is having the heart to love on and care for a community and show up and do these things basically for free no one downloads a podcast and pays a buck right it's all for free but somewhere along the lines we've got to find a way to make a business model or develop a business model that can help us do what we plan to do which is create this awesome content and thrive in the community do it consistently like the 3c say but have a model that allows us to to operate that way and so that was the hardest part was figuring out what that model was it gets kind of easy because sponsorship for podcast seems to be the most typical uh especially now that it's kind of become a thing you know earlier 29 uh 2009 2012 even in that era there wasn't a lot of podcasts it was still early it was before serial and the big boom of podcasts and whatever so you know obviously it would make sense to build a business model around around sponsors now early version was like no sponsors members only kind of thing and in all honesty i would love to run a membership driven only kind of business that maybe not love it would be nice it would be fortunate to do that but it's just not it's just not enough to to do what we try to do and and so especially back we've tried some different models we've tried it yeah this is true this was pre-patreon yeah this was pre uh really the modern era of the web where i think people are more forward to support things that they love because they don't want them to go away um back then it was more random like it just wasn't something that people are used to doing yeah and so maybe now it would be more feasible whereas when we tried it right which was around the time that i joined 20 2012 i remember the announcement was i wasn't there yet it was like member supported only right and i was like really and i was even a die-hard listener i don't think i signed up so like it's really hard that's terrible yeah sorry man i signed up for five bucks it was hard to get people it was a hard sell back then maybe it's easier now but uh so so a membership program didn't work out the way you hoped it would but you were quick to adapt right well we had to i mean if we were gonna so if i was following my wife's advice hey if you're taking my time away from our time with you know as a relationship and growing our marriage then i've got to find a way to make this succeed as a business and i thought memberships would work i was really hopeful that it would i still as jared said i think we've we've now come into a new world where they're more possible and you also have this sort of new change where people want to support the things they love and i think we have a small amount of people globally that would want to give that to us and i don't want to take the opportunity away the problem i think was that we were relying on that completely as a business model and that just didn't it just didn't work as a solo business model they just it needed more more than that and i think for us i mean there's a lot of opportunity on the table there's so many businesses out there that are trying to reach software developers you know stable partners of ours like leno digitalocean fastly rollbar um git prime and help me if i'm forgetting some because i mean it's not like a long exhaustive list i'm trying to like thank everybody but like some really strong businesses that want to help brands like ours do what we do and at the same time reach an audience they couldn't otherwise reach there's that's something that's something we can latch on to uh fast that i mentioned in particular hey if you listen to our show you might have heard this phrase before bandwidth for change levels provided by fastly learn more at fasta.com you know we move fast and fix things here change a lot because of roll bar head to robot a comment check head to robot.com and check them out and uh you know was the last one we're hosting that's right that's right and so you know stole that i have that idea from lee laporte i mean gosh lee laporte is an icon in podcasting podcasting right tech podcasting right if you listen to their show you know net cash you love pass you trust from people you love that's right there you go yeah they just changed using podcasts now i think they yeah he was stuck on a netcast they were really tears he was stuck yeah he had a chip on his shoulder he got over it yeah yeah yeah but then catfly was one of their core partners i'm like well we if so if i want to build a business around this we've got to find some i can remember talking to you about this i'm like do you think we can get somebody to do this and give us money every month and and like other people that advise us that's probably not possible good luck well we did it you know and uh we find ways to support our business in in ways that just i'm astounded honestly and we're really fortunate we've done a great job you know forging not just sponsorships like that's the sort of the industry term that's known you know we're interested in sponsorship whatever but we look at it more like partnerships you know we thrive our business even personally we thrive on relationships and so we want to work with brands that know who we are know what we're trying to do want to support that but then also get paid a dividend by being able to in in authentic ways speak to the global audience we've been able to cultivate over these years right you know and do that in a way that doesn't objectify our audience or only come in for these reasons like there's it's got to be more to it than just that you know and we help them speak to software developers in ways that that that are relevant yeah i think it's worth pointing out that podcast advertising really works in ways that other forms of advertising don't really work yeah and so the medium is is suited very well for that style uh campaign because you are in you're going directly into people's ears you know week by week time by time and if you can be a staple and supporting a show that people love and are getting for free and so they i think as listeners i'm like i said i'm an old podcast junkie i know a lot of the sponsors who are supporting the shows that i love and i am fine with transferring a little bit of goodwill to that company it's like yeah casper supports this show you know we a lot of the mainstream tech podcasts have very the usual suspects of sponsors right casper squarespace audible like these are brands that have years and years of goodwill because they've been supporting the shows that i love and because they have their hosts the people that i love their shows talking about their brands it's just a very effective thing yeah and so people the reason why i think podcasts are uh such a vibrant ecosystem right now is it's very good for consumers because it's on-demand niche like listen to what you want none of the stuff you don't want it's really low overhead for consumers compared to radio in terms of ads like compare it to the radio ads where they're yelling at you for like seven minutes of the 30. yeah um and then on the on the actual sponsorship side they really work like these sponsorships work whereas display ads and other things just haven't had the roi like the roi is there for the companies that believe in it yeah we've been able to really help a lot of businesses like that like a recent example that i was really stoked about was kubecon so the clouded community computing foundation has this conference every i guess a couple times a year sometimes in europe sometimes united states and uh we've been very good friends with the linux foundation over the years and then that also bleeds into the cloud native computing foundation and their conference kubecon which we've gone to we love going there we're actually going back this year gerhard lazu is representing us this year so that's awesome but we have just ran some promos for them to promote hey if you're thinking about attending use our code save 10 percent get the early bird pricing for extended times whatever it might be and you know join this kind of community and and help them share the invitation with the larger community and their feedback to us was like your code was the most used over all the people that we used in these promotional ways and i just love that because for one everybody attending is to save ten percent but then two like it it's proof that we actually can help uh willing community people in in the software world to uh hear something on a podcast and actually take action and and it's not like i'm selling jared something he doesn't want with money he can't he doesn't have or even something generic right like if i'm listening to go time and i hear an ad for kubecon like i'm super interested in kubecon like oh great it's coming up it's going to be in brussels so i'm not sure where it is but you know answer that amsterdam go to that these are not burger king ads or right crest you know we've considered the impossible burger ad though no i'm just kidding i'm just kidding so anyway that was a joke it's proven to be a very viable model for for you know it really is a win-win-win just to use michael scott's phrase because the sponsors do and our partners win because of the results like that we win because we're making a living off of it and our listeners get free shows consistently quality content right and they you know we put out 60 to 90 minute shows and you're gonna listen to two or three ads in a 90-minute show we're not asking very much and those ads are incredibly pointed and valuable like it's content it's like oh that's interesting i i'm i'm interested in that so it's not annoying it's yeah so i think everybody wins i like the model and that's like what they found with advertising is if it's relevant then it's less irksome right and in this case with podcasts podcasts can be hyper targeted like this is a podcast about open source software right i mean you could never get that level of grading reality with like tv that's right yeah that's why some of the larger more mainstream podcasts struggle with the sales to the sponsors because they don't have the targeted audience they have huge audiences but they aren't targeted so you'll hear a lot of mainstream ones like even mainstream tech like the verge cast which is a pretty mainstream tech news and commentary show they will you'll hear them asking their listeners to take surveys and stuff because they have a more generic mainstream listener base they don't know exactly who they're talking to well when you have a show called go time about the go programming language and kubernetes and these things you know exactly who's listening to that show yeah and so you don't have to survey them you know that's the value of a niche yeah speaking of go time i think this is a perfect opportunity for me to ask at what point so you had the change log yeah that is the granddaddy of uh open source podcast we call it our flagship show that's a flagship show and now you have several you have several that were shorter period like request for commits which was one of my personal favorites yeah uh learned a ton from that one me too um but how did you go about creating additional shows and and how do those all work let me take this one go for it okay so we have been working with uh brian kettleson and eric st martin of of gophercon uh it was their second year actually i think the reason we even did the show it begins because brian kettleson hopped in our issues and and github in our pink we had a ping repo where we would say hey community if you have some ideas suggestions whatever we've since moved it to different ways but we used to have a repo on our github org called ping which is that's another win thing honestly he's so awesome but uh brian kelson reached out to us on our issues there and said hey if you haven't thought about it yet you should come to gophercon this is our invitation to you and that's what i love about brian too is he's like he is like the uh the mack daddy of like and you can i'm showing my age here too because that's that's a 90s thing he's the mack daddy of like inviting people in right i love that about brian and eric uh and he he reached out to us we had them on the changelog talking about gophercon they invited us up to their conference we went out there and did some fun stuff if you go to change.com films you'll probably see some cool stuff we've actually done some video work there with them and and and whatnot and so we just sort of fell in love with the go community you know they're really i would say different than other communities because they just they just seem very it's like once you i don't know how to describe it maybe you can help me jerry but just very very protective and very close tight-knit very tight-knit yeah enthusiastic yeah and it's like once you're in you're in and we just loved uh their you know that conference uh everyone who went through it we just loved how people collaborated and mingled together and had fun together it was just such a fun conference and i don't know if it was the conference and the community but we just sort of fell in love with that we're like well once we we always had desires to expand we're like well the next one we do makes sense to be a go podcast of sorts but jared you came up with a name so i mean take it take it from there yeah what an amazing name it is too it's go time it's go time yeah it seems obvious in retrospect uh naming is one of my favorite things naming things is hard as we all know as developers and so i love to do it because i like challenges and sometimes it takes a thousand bad names for one good one to be born and we've definitely been through those thousand bad names because we have a portfolio of shows now in addition to just the go thing happening we have with the changelog one opportunity a week to to spot to spotlight something and we it's very polyglot as you know as a listener we don't have i mean open source is kind of the crux of the matter but we even go beyond that and and we've even changed the word to software development in terms of the things that we talk about because uh even though open source basically permeates all software development it's bigger than just open source even now just because our interests have grown over the years that being said that's 50 weeks a year that's 50 shows a year if you take a couple weeks off and there's so much more things to talk about there's so much more things to spotlight and we had a lot of listeners who's like hey i love the changelog i would love to hear more but more about this topic or more about that topic because if we covered go or a specific language even for four weeks straight to be like well did this turn into a go podcast or are you still sort of multifaceted like you like you say you are and so you have to there's one way you can diversify you can either diversify and add more shows to that particular podcast and just diversify by i guess multiplication just picking some words dividing by multiplying yeah you know we could ship more shows a week long but then we would have to have like series and like people do seasons there's lots of different ways of slicing it but what we thought would be a lot cooler is instead of the two of us doing more shows because you hear our voices all the time anyways and we're here to spotlight the guest like we want more voices that's what we've always been about when we have the opportunities like more voices more people different voices than ours and so let's you know exp let's extend our network and our production skills and our the tastes that we have and the interest that we have to other people and let's enable them to do shows and so that's what really became the portfolio now some of us are on like i'm on js party regularly adam has a show called brain science that's himself and muriel reese and so it's not like we're not on those shows but we don't you know it's not like the change they're different shows they're different people and we've been able to expand the number of voices on our network to much larger than ours and so that's pretty cool i think yeah and one thing that i think is really cool is you figured out ways to take that kind of like cool fractal logo and create variations of like radial symmetry yep um each i mean i'm wearing the changelog shirt yeah this is my new one by the way my old ones right here that uh i got four years ago it's been washed about a hundred times but for everybody who's watching love it this is what it looked like this is in the you've even got a framed one over here uh but yeah adam sent me this after i was on the changelog that was your old school credentials right there yeah that's right the og og yeah but the way that you've branded them all and they've all got really cool short punchy names and uh and they have kind of a consistent sound and a big part of that cohesive consistent sound is brakemaster cylinder yeah can you tell us about brake master cylinder not much because we don't know much honestly what's the mysterious the mysterious great master cylinder well you know it's interesting because i obviously heard of brake master cylinder through gimlet media and the work they've done with reply all and startup and other shows so that's where i learned a barbecue master cylinder and just one crazy night on the internet like most things happen i was like just figuring out break master cylinder you know the kind of stuff they're into or whatever and i'll i turn up their website and there's like an invite to reach out and i didn't i thought was like typical contact me kind of scenarios where you reach out and they just never talk to you right there's no response well like the very next day brakemaster gets in touch and says i love what you're doing let's work together i didn't expect that uh that turns us into the scenario where jared and i are sort of riffing with breakmaster on some different ideas for brand new music for the changelog podcast and i think was a good time no time in rc and the reason why go time was so important so this was kind of a a milestone for for me or like okay we're going to do this for real because up until this point so the original change dog had the california song which is has a tight story with adam uh and a band that he knows and all that but then we also just had some like adam would go out onto i don't know sound forest or what are these websites like yeah like the the sound equivalent of the forest premium beat yeah and just buy something you know and you get it it's a royalty or it's a you pay a license yeah but it's not an exclusive license and so he would just pick music he likes we put that at the front of our shows that would be our theme song it was like that for a very long time and in fact when we expanded from just the changelog go time was our second show when we did go time adam found this song that was sorry it's all right don't worry it was uh beloved and it was probably on the first i don't know 10 to 20 episodes yep enough people were like don't change anything yeah so we had some resistance on that one but what happened was because it's just a sound clip that you can buy a license to anybody can do that and it showed up in a commercial what commercial was that disney yeah disney so somebody was tasteful one of the go time listeners is like why is the go time theme song on this disney commercial and we were like okay that was what it was like we have to get our own music yeah it was and it happened with our show or our uh music on the channel too it was a john deere commercial or a craftsman lawnmower commercial and it was like this grungy rock kind of uh and then also that that can put people off too if it's too rough it's not really inviting with everything about the music so what was funny about that was it become clear we weren't unique and right if we had licensed music we wouldn't be unique right so we started working with brakemaster cylinder and with the changelog and rfc which was uh a great show and had i think to this day the best the best music which we don't use now because that shows retired but we should somehow remix that uh it was green field like okay people knew the changelog song but we weren't trying to like they weren't in love with it so we could just start yeah and with new shows it's always brand new with go time the go time crew the listeners who as we said is a very tight-knit and enthusiastic and like very active audience they already loved this song and now we had to replace it with a custom song and so we asked brake pastor cylinder to basically like do a different version like make a remix of it make it break master but make it us but also make it kind of sound like the one that's already out there yeah and uh some people didn't even notice when we swapped it in but some people were mad some people yeah we always when brave master hands us anything to listen to i'm always like doesn't have enough bmc in it can you do it like these glitches like bmc's just break master children's is known for certain things yeah and we're like can you bring in some of these you know trademark break master cylinder stuff so we always love you know to speak very well of brave master cylinder we keep saying this name we don't know guy girl we're not sure if it's one person many people we've never met them we don't really have a first name basis at all besides maybe breakmaster that might be first name right just cutting off cylinders you know but they're in our slack so hey if you if you're out there you're like i want to talk to break master cylinder well go to change.com community doing that hop in our slack and dm or say hello that's just that easy but i'm always talking to breakmaster about different stuff we're working on or just catching up they'll just reach out and say hey how you doing and we'll have like a 20 minute conversation and like three weeks go by and that happens again or something like that so yeah but so easy to work with so not even like what i what often happens with creatives is they're very attached egotistically to what they've done like their creations are often a variation of their identity with break masters there's there's like a zero of that they just throw it out they're just like you don't like that cool let's keep breathing let's keep roofing let's go they're kind of yeah professional detachment from yeah artistic work always willing to like break master is the one of the scenarios where i can see they always deliver way more than you expect them to like they just want to keep delivering more and more value that's a that's a lesson to be learned always deliver more value to the people you're working with and if you can't code reviews are hard you're reviewing somebody's music that they're creating for you is incredibly difficult and it's custom and you don't even know we don't even have the language to describe you know and i i'm expecting from breakmaster's side similar to a code review or even a feature review with the user you can't spread that language too yeah you can't do that like you're almost offended by how juvenile you know the feedback is like yeah exactly so when you're trying to give feedback i can imagine from the other side like who are these fools you know like i don't like that hi-hat at eight seconds you know like whatever like how do you we're always like yeah it's not it's not grooving enough you know make it a little more poppy like the stuff you're saying it's very difficult so yeah very extreme grace and they're talking like time code and and uh and maybe even like majors or minors right or we're like take that wubble wubble take that wubble wubble out of there you know the naming is even cooler too like when brakemaster hands us new stuff to listen to it's always got these unique names attached to it and it's like this one with a little bump bump bump or something like like the the file name is literally named some really interesting stuff so it's just a a lot of fun work with breakmaster and and i'll say you know having having done all of our shows redone the song for the changelog and all that stuff like having only brakemaster cylinder stuff it would be a sad day in our history if we never got to have a break and i'm kind of getting a little bit weird about it but like if something ever happened to brakemaster and we couldn't ever work with them again for whatever reason whether it's they move on or something bad happens who knows i would be really it would be a day i'm worn like i love working with them and they produce the best stuff and we wouldn't use any other music besides breakmaster cylinder music that's a that's a pretty strong endorsement yeah yeah just because they're just so easy to work with they get our they get our dna they get our branding they get what we're trying to do and i just feel like they just add this this special flair that like you'd mention the artwork well there's a reason why because we we sat down in a room for two days basically in a bunker with jake stutzman and uh was it the guy's name micah yeah micah i can't remember his last name though like a frost or fost something like that can't recall but mike you're awesome too but we basically sat down and said hey who are we how can we understand uh what we want to be and how can we create a brand both a visual brand and a voice you know how we speak brand and you know from that we got our artwork we got these concentric circles we got this framework for developing new album art and then from that we also knew well if we're this unique here we have to be this unique in our music too you know the ways we audibly present ourselves yeah well it shows and and also the the design of the changelog.com uh that everything kind of reinforces that visual design that visual identity that you all have established for yourself and now i really want to learn more about the website my understanding is it's written in elixir it's snappy and it just has really good clear user experience like you know exactly what is going to happen when you click on different things and everything's pretty clear it for me it's been a real benchmark uh and and we've taken a lot of inspiration uh from it with with free code camp and and our recent um our recent efforts at at redesigning and simplifying and things like that so thank you yeah yeah who did most of the design like what's the story behind the platform so it's a everything's a team effort and i think uh one thing that you might notice through this conversation is that we do sweat the details we have a few sayings that we use internally one is uh slow down to move faster uh we also say uh what's the one stop slow well slow and steady wins the race yeah a lot of stuff about being slow slow down and check yourself and check yourself that's my favorite yeah so yeah because we can get uh we can get moving to we can get out over our skis a little bit well all too often in anything you feel like especially when there's opportunity and you're ambitious all too often do the opportunities trump your ability to say no right and the next thing you know you're going in places you don't really want to for other reasons and it's like if you feel pulled in anything you're doing beyond your capacity slow down and check yourself right that's what we said that's right i got to do the hand like that slow down and check yourself yourself because if you have you know some dna and some guidelines so if we know that we want to you know slow down to move faster or retreat to attack or to slow down or slow and steady wins the race if we have those as sort of like underlying mantras to ourselves well time we get pushed beyond those yeah slow down and check yourself yeah and it's worth reminding ourselves of these things because we are in an industry that moves so fast yeah and the the pressure is to i mean move fast and break things as the unfortunate you know slogan of a major player in our industry uh which we don't like that saying at all um so slow down and and move faster that way even when you think about software development practices right like thinking things through up front is slower but you also move faster in the long run setting up that test harness right before you move on to writing the code is slower but you all you move faster in the long run i mean people who are tdd advocates they will say the same thing like you think through things first and you move a little bit slower and it seems like you're not getting that head of steam but you know two weeks from now two months from now two years from now you're moving a lot faster and so like the brand is an evidence of that it's like we took the time we slowed down spent two days in a room and then many more beyond that you know that was like the foundation of like building this system and this design and then we can extend it over time we can move faster on new things we have all this stuff in place and so a lot of the website is a result of those initial branding discussions a lot of the design is done either by jake or by cody peterson who is a long time contributor uh and really co-laborer with us on the project he does a lot of our front end a lot of our design work and then added on myself whether it's giving feedback or cranking out the code that renders the pages so i've done a lot of the actual software work on building the elixir app but everything we do is team efforts i think one interesting thing to note is uh is the fact that jared said earlier i was a pearl guy then i was a ruby guy and so i built the site in elixir i mean that this doesn't equate but maybe you can sure why yeah i mean so i've always like i've always been a polyglot and i like programming languages i like the go programming language even though i don't write it on a daily basis i liked uh i like i like a lot of languages and so i've never found one that didn't have any redeemable qualities i even like aspects of php even though it has probably less redeemable qualities and with regard to syntax than many others slight dig i like php too we talk to a lot of people about programming languages i mean that's one of the things about our work is we're exposed to everything in fact i was just thinking about something that came mainstream recently and i was like we did a show on that three years ago like not boasting but just like reality like we are uncovering things before they blow up in fact we have a changelog nightly one of our emails that goes out every single night it's whole point is to it automatically just gets the most start repos on github before they blow up is the idea or like right as they are and maybe those things are going to go on the greatness maybe they aren't we'll pick through them and try to find someone that are interested in interesting yeah but it's an indicator so we're just just because of what we do and and and uh our show we're just at the forefront and so we talk to a lot of people about programming languages and uh some people assume therefore we're like deep into these things or we adopt everything and it's like no like 99 of the stuff we hang up the call on a wednesday afternoon i'm like adam i gotta check this thing out because we just spent 90 minutes with person who's got something cool they created yeah and i'm excited because i get excited about you know cool stuff uh jam stack i remember actually i think that was the one where jam stacks be coming to be like a mainstream top you guys rebuilt your stuff in jam stack we did the show on jam stuff two years ago at least two and a half years ago and that's just because i saw this matching magazine i mean they were the really the ones that were forfeiting that with netlify we had the lfi team on we talked about jam stack and now it's becoming a thing that but then there's other things that we talk about and they don't become a thing so that's just a fact of how the industry works point is we don't like then adopt all of the stuff that we talk about that would be you know impossible and ridiculous to do but there are certain things that you know catch your eye and almost nothing do i follow up on because we move on to the next week or the next show and we have other things to do but elixir actually did catch my eye and i tried it and i fell in love with it and i wanted to use it and so that's why i was writing an elixir and it extends from ruby like it takes yeah it takes a lot of information created by a prominent member of the ruby community and so it it looks rubyish when you look at it but the more you get into it yeah but it's not ruby it's interesting it's almost kind of like there's this uh dna that goes back to pearl through ruby and now to elixir yeah and the thing about the elixir uh combination there is it's like a i wouldn't call it a facade but it's more like a carrot on a stick like it's like uh it's like something that attracts you and you're like ooh this is interesting and then as you figure it out you're like actually this isn't what i thought it was but it's still very interesting it's almost like i mean calling it lipstick would be another bad analogy but there's something to it where the ruby relationship is there because jose who created elixir knows ruby inside out and he knows all the best stuff and so when you see it it almost looks like ruby code but then when you start to learn it you realize oh this is something completely entirely different and yet i feel at home even though i'm in a completely new paradigm which is functional programming yeah changelog.com of course is open source you've got a whole lot of contributors not only contributing to that platform itself but also contributors who are hosting shows yeah who are some of the key people within the changelog somebody to name somebody a name so many we've mentioned a few by name cody peterson is a key player on the website with the brand with the design work jake was crucial to developing the changelog brand guidelines and the album art bmc we talked about in great great depth gerhard you mentioned gerhart is going to kubecon on our behalf he's been working with us for a couple of years on infrastructure really helping us uh roll out since well i guess when we first brought the site on 2016 on node yeah exactly so i didn't really unders i didn't really know how to roll out an elixir app uh in a way that was uh old school i'm very old school like ssh into the box and like you know run uh to start apache or index by hand and that just uh isn't really the smart way to do things if you can do them better so gearheart has really helped us pave the way of like doing smart ways of rolling out uh our infrastructure over the years and uh is going to be representing us at kubecon which is very cool so thanks to gerhard um and then as you said we have more than just our one show now so we have a couple shows which are panel shows and we love the variety there so js party which is all about javascript and the web has nine regular panelists myself being one of them any particular episode has three or four people on it sometimes it was a guest so we just kind of like mix and match really borrowing from the the cheers model as i call it remember the show cheers yeah where you just want to go where everybody knows your name the idea there is is that you're at a party or you're at a meeting go time's the same way by the way now um you go to a place where you want to hang out with people and it's like it doesn't have to be the exact same voices every single time but there's like regulars and there's that familiar voice and it's a place to go where you're going to get variety but you're also going to get familiarity just like cheers when you go to the bar and go back and watch the show some episodes are out this person some are about that person and so that's really the model that we came up with for js party which is like they don't have to be the exact same hosts every single time but you should have regulars and so we have nine people who kind of just like mix and match and then we invite guests uh we could definitely name each and every one of those uh i just go good luck yes i don't even know i mean i know the names but yes i don't have them in my mind for us to book dj good job kevin ball goes by kay ball nick niecy who's a fellow omahan uh is on the show boy oh wait that's his uh tag line chris hiller yep christopher hiller bone skull he's the the one of the maintainers of the mocha js test library um divya sasidaran yep short div on twitter she's awesome she's on the show have we gotten to nine yet myself uh emma vaticand emma vatican yep and i think that rounds it out for now i was counting my rogers michael rogers yeah see i was counting on my fingers but it wasn't actually counting i was just doing the ritual yeah yeah and so i lost count rachel white who hasn't been back but she's trying to come back yep uh it's been a while she's been on but i love hearing from her as well she's got an awesome laugh i love her life uh and so much fun too i'll try go times geez i'm gonna probably stumble on some of these matt ryer of course uh i love matt uh john calhoun johnny borsuko carmen ando uh ashley mcnamara jbd that's six mark bates smart fates that's the cast i think so if i'm if i'm i might i think i feel like i'm missing one do you say johnny i did okay i should pull up the website well and obviously the original cast can't forget those guys carlesia pinto you got brian kettleson you got yorkshire martin now you know we started that show you know three how many years ago many years ago by 2015 maybe four 2016 we launched that show and you know we learned a lot of things from from ds party not to sort of explain why the cast is different but just to sort of like evolve that a bit we learned some things about js party and the fact that like this whole cheers motto that jared has just mentioned but it's it's really nice to hear more than just a few voices um and then also sort of what i look at is like representation of a community you know so rather than just you know one or two or three people that are always on the show why not have a rotating cast like we've learned from gs party but but one layer past that is like those are people that are out in that community sort of bringing their perspective to it and then even bringing in content or different topics that the three people or the two people or whatever don't always see it sort of gives you a larger more wider perspective and then also this opportunity of fresh voices more voices more representation and that's why that shows also evolved to sort of like borrow and learn from a lot of what jesus part has gotten right it's also worth pointing out as a podcast hack that in addition to all those things that we just described which are great virtues of that format is that we want to have great people on all of our shows and the thing about great people is they're very busy and so it's very difficult to get the same great people week by week at the same time to show up and do a show prepared and all the things are required to put together a good show so we learned that because we started those shows with less cat a smaller cast and so one of the things we adjusted it's worked out very well is like with three great people it's hard to get all three of those together all the time and so scheduling is one of the major challenges of podcasts another reason for pod pod fading with nine people so much easier we can get three people together out of nine yeah and and it's less pressure on us as panelists and even if they're unprepared or not as well prepared as they like to be it's not especially if you've got a lot of jelly or cohesion in the in the the folks involved it gets a lot easier to sort of like throw a show together last minute if if it came down to it right you know it's just a lot more flexible too yeah and less pressure on us as individuals so one of the things about the consistent evil podcast is let's face it you're just not excited to do it every single week or you have a conflict or that topic is not necessarily something you're into or that guest is somebody that's rubbed you the wrong way or what there's a thousand different reasons and if you're the only person that does the show well you're gonna do that show yeah right but if you have a cast of nine you know uh somebody could take a month off and the show goes on yeah and like we want the shows to go on and so that's one of the reasons that's the other reason why we've moved to in those particular shows a panel format also just to spread the burden because what would happen in this in that case isn't just that they couldn't show up is that they would feel guilty for not being able to right right and then that leads to a you know a spiral of burden burnout guilt all these things that sort of like plague us this sort of uh self voice saying you should do this or you should do that you should you know all these things that make you feel bad for not doing the things you want to do because you have ambitions you got a busy schedule or you got a new job or whatever it might be um we like that because somebody could be a panelist on one of our shows and take a quarter break you know like they've got a teaching thing or a new job spun up or they've got some travel planned no big deal it gets a lot easier to collaborate work with us because we're flexible you know we we're for lack of a better chance we say family first is the easy way to say that but yeah you know you both have kids yeah right so you can empathize with life like absolutely life period yeah i mean you got a sick kid you got vacation you got whatever you know going to see parents going to see family whatever it might be we want to bake that in so because i think what happens is you start to form relationships that get very rigid and very tested because you just can't measure up every time you're not excited about the topic you've got a busy schedule whatever it might be if you bake that flexibility into how things work now that those shows in particular work well now the change of jared and i essentially talking to somebody that has several shows where i can't show up or i'm busier or whatever might be it jarrah takes over no problem or i'll take a show by myself whatever but it's different for those shows that's not how we do those shows those shows that are more community-focused shows need that one it needs that community representation but then also that flexibility to enable people to say yes and be a part of it yeah there's something important there beyond changelog with regard to sustainability in your work because as you can tell we care about this work a lot and it's something that started as a hobby and was a passion and we're so passionate about the things that we're doing but we do not want to create a thing that then becomes our lives and defines us as humans and we wouldn't want that for any of our collaborators as well we live in an industry and we serve an industry that deals with burnout all the time yeah in fact i got sick of talking about i got burned out on talking about burnout because i just because all of our guests are people who are in this circumstance and they're all having the same terrible sort you know thing happened to them and uh you know it's a huge topic of conversation on our shows and in our industry in general because it's a thing that's happening on a way too frequent basis and we want to be in this for the long haul we we can't allow ourselves to burn out by going non-stop you know that's why it's one of the slow down to go faster right slow and steady wins the weights we have to remind ourselves that we it's okay to move a little bit slower because we have these other things yeah and so we try to maintain even though we have the complete flexibility flex flexibility and freedom to work all the hours or do whatever we want is like let's maintain a consistent schedule and not burden ourselves too much because that will first of all burn us out but also it's going to reflect onto the people who collaborate with us right and they're not full-timers right they're they have jobs they have open source projects they're coming on our shows because this is something they want to do yeah but you know that that can create like adam said the guilt and the shame the shame and like we don't want it we don't have anything to do with that stuff so so essentially through having just like a really like a lot of redundancy is the word i'm i'm hearing like you have a lot of people who can step in if somebody doesn't feel up for it or if somebody needs to take a break just by it's almost kind of like a a big distributed system in a way it kind of is yeah you've got like a pub sub system where right you publish and some people sub to that like they're like all right i'll take this gig here right coughing on this podcast yeah i mean for instance kubecon like we would love to be at kubecon the timing doesn't make as much sense adam's having a baby i've traveled a lot this year one of the things we do is we'll talk about conferences we limit our travel because that's another aspect like we love to go to conferences and be in the community love it a lot but we limit that ourselves because well every time we go to a conference we're leaving our family right okay so that's a circumstance where like we want to personally be at kubecon but that's not going to work out and so we have gerhard who's over in london doesn't get to come to the states as often it's going to be in san diego he'd love to have a trip to san diego and he's going to be there and and so that's a situation where it's like okay that makes sense and we've just kind of slowly you know built these relationships with folks where uh it's a win-win-win win but what's also cool too specifically with gerhart is that it gives us a chance to sort of like invite him in further to the fold like he's already worked with us and done tons of amazing things for us to help us with our infrastructure but from a content perspective we've had him on the show we've talked about change law's infrastructure but nothing specific to like giving him more opportunity so to speak yeah and so this was a chance for us to say hey we can't make it there and rather than being like oh we just won't go or you know we're stretching our limits and going and burning and trying to go like well who would be better to go for us and and also have other wins or win wins behind behind the thing so i mean i love the fact that one gerhard is ready to go and he's excited because i see him behind the scenes and the emails and stuff like that planning his trip and he's fired up right and so a year from now we may have a whole new thing we're talking about because of these you know the you know just like with the drill sergeant this invitation to come in gerhard's already a leader in other ways it's not we're inviting the leadership it's right it's the invitation into into the family deeper you know more things and we think of it like a family really i do and i know jared as well yeah that's great to give people opportunities to uh just take on more and more responsibilities and also just to travel yeah yeah and and truth be told he'll speak much better about kubernetes than i will yeah just saying so on the topic of conference just real quick you all do go to a lot of conferences yeah and i'm glad to hear that you have uh recognized that you don't want to go to all the conferences right because we want to go to all but we don't want to yeah yeah exactly yeah and the same thing with me like i just uh need to spend time with my family too and and the travel time and especially depending on where you're going the jet lag yep has consequences as well so what are some conferences that you all try to make it to regularly or what would you say yeah that's that's the first question i'll ask you another question about conversation in a second so i would preface by saying that our circumstances are unique similar to education where each person's different so when it comes time to like pick a conference go to a conference you have to ask yourself what are you trying to get out of the conference like what are your goals and that will inform which ones are a good fit because there's so many shapes and sizes for us i line it up with the change log the show which is broad and polyglot and open source focused and community focused and so we try to find conferences that are along those lines also because we only get to go to a couple a year you know we kind of say like maybe four a year once a quarter makes sense we don't always hit that fall time seems to be like there's lots of conferences in the fall so we tend to go a little bit more than is that we tend to go a little bit bigger conferences because we want to meet more people right we want to see more listeners or meet people that can become listeners and so uh staples for us i mean the the staple for us has been ozcon yeah yeah we've gone up o'reilly's oscon the last four years straight i think maybe three yeah yeah since 2016 every year yeah so oscar's the big one um it's always about kubecon we've been this will be our third year back and then um gopher gone go for con and all things all things open and and oscar and all things open have a lot in common i would say yeah gophercon is obviously a language-oriented conference so it's different than the other ones yeah and then kubecon is obviously kubernetes and all the cloud native which is a big thing yeah but it's not as like cross-sweeping as as as the open source focused ones so those are the ones that we always try to get to um non-interactive two we've i've went to that one one time kabal went there last year and i think nick's going there this year so this is our third time going to it's changed to the name of it so i think this year's iteration is just node i don't know if it's known interactive or not but it's always been just notice known as node interactive but since javascript and node and the js foundation and jquery foundation have sort of like changed and merged and stuff like that it's it had some naming changes too so awesome and my other question regarding conferences would be what would be your advice to somebody out there who's listening who has been a developer or is getting into software development because you all know a lot about different conferences out there yeah what would be a good first conference and what would your advice be to them if they wanted to attend one of those conferences so first i will small plug we have an entire episode of js party called the conference scene which we do we do an hour or four of us about this specific topic so go listen to that if you want the long-winded version sure short link to that yeah cool so short-winded and my advice would be pick something a small single track the cool thing about single track is that you don't have any decisions to make because the less you know the harder it is to make decisions what do i want to go you know and there's the fomo of like there's three tracks which i might miss the good thing a single track has a shared experience everybody saw the exact same thing and so it's a much easier to make conversation yeah because you saw the exact same talk that person did and you don't have to say hey did you hear what chris coyer said they're like no i was in the other track oh okay we can't be friends right so awkward yeah so single track is great for people just getting in like for your first conference smaller size is great because it's just less intimidating more one-on-one opportunities um so you know 200 people fought to 500 versus like a 5 000 person convention so 200 is really tight yeah 500 is a little bit more loose but still small enough mm-hmm uh and then you know other aspects is like regional is fun because you don't travel as far so like it's less of a the worst thing is like well i spent a bunch of money i took three days off of work and i traveled across the country and i didn't have a good time right it's a little bit less risk if it's like well i drove an hour and attended one so i there's a community aspect to the local conferences if you have a language you like like if you're into javascript then you're going to find a javascript conference in your local region that's a great option um that would be my advice mine is very similar okay small conferences are cool especially start i got fond memories of actually uh future of web apps also known as foa uh 2010 uh man met some awesome people allen branch steven bristol and several other people and like they've they were quintessential friends very influential i've gotten some of the best advice in my life from stephen bristol just because we literally met at a conference because we had a podcast called the web 2.0 show and they wanted to meet this these two dudes behind this show that didn't have a gigantic audience but just enough just enough is all it took and they became great friends and for a while there i was going to smaller conferences like that like lone star ruby conference a couple different uh javascript conferences i think js what was it uh texas js or something yes txjs was uh was started here that's somebody else uh on on jesus party started texas j house yeah uh alex sexton maybe yeah alex sexton um that's one more name for him i'm but the point is is just that i met some amazing friends like it maybe i was fortunate that you know just that conference i got to meet people at the same conference i also got to meet gary vaynerchuk and kevin rose we had a podcast about uh with them at that conference i happen to have lost my voice at that conference so i sounded like dmx and kevin said so which was pretty cool too but kevin rose gary vaynerchuk and a bunch of other fun people we've kathy sierra who's like a an icon in user experience and just i mean just amazing so i mean some really cool people over the years that uh you know it was a smaller conference maybe 500 people but you know i got to meet some really really good friends yeah personally so that's that's my personal experience from it awesome one piece of advice before we move on we those are advice on like which conferences to go to but when you're at the conference so nothing noteworthy ever happened when you stayed inside your comfort zone right you're not going to come back home and tell your significant other or your friends some great story because you went to a conference and you attended some talks and you didn't talk to anybody and then you went to the hotel then you flew home or whatever the logistics were right parties you have to actually push yourself outside of your comfort zone and it's not going to feel good because that's what comfort zone means right but this is your opportunity to meet you know people face to face in the flesh whether it's someone you look up to or somebody who is sitting by themselves and needs someone to talk to like if you're going to go to the conference like we can get virtual conversations all day long we get them and they aren't always that great as evidenced by the conversations that we have online but in conferences face-to-face you can have amazing conversations with amazing people but not if you just go and you're a wallflower yeah and so if you're going to go and you're going to put in the effort and the money and all these things you have to push yourself outside your comfort zone otherwise you're not going to get out of it which you can yeah i got one more uh extra on top of that not just that but we learned from eric holster this thing called the pac-man rule right so if you're you know this one i've never heard this no okay i'll give you the short version there's a whole podcast about it we'll point back to we'll add more links to the show notes but uh eric holster was a big fan of inviting people and including people and if you're if you can imagine uh being at an after party or some or in the hallway track whatever it might be and you got a circle of people and there's no openings you don't feel invited to come in right you don't get invited to come into that space so if you leave that wedge there that pac-man shape well there's room for one or two more and as they and the circle just get bigger and bigger but you always have that gap in there to invite people in so he gave uh talks about it he wrote a blog post about it we had a podcast about the talks and the blogs and that just you know inception now you're having a podcast about the podcast that's right that's right but the point is is like you know if you're at a conference describing jared's scenarios one more layer to that is like always leave space to invite one more into the ground if you're staying in a circle look around and see if you can make more of a pac-man shape because that invites one more person in yeah so that's a great tip yeah i've heard like kind of keeping your body language open where you keep your feet out yeah point your toes pointed out um that that also makes people feel more welcome also just saying hi yeah hey how are you that's a good tip yeah looking at people making eye contact with them yeah yeah well these are they seem like obvious things but they aren't easy and we've all been in the awkward circumstance where like you're approaching a circle and there's no gap there and you're like do i what you know do i just hang out until they let me ease in right there's all these awkwardnesses it's already hard enough to get outside your comfort zone and like approach somebody who may reject you or whatever the fears are but when there's no like openness from the group it's even harder anyways we're rambling on i mean it takes me it took me years to get comfortable just approaching developers at a developer conference and uh now when i go to some non-developer thing where you know nobody knows anything about me or and i'm just like some interloper right then i have to reapply all those strategies again to like break into circles and talk to people yeah so it's hard every time yeah it gets easier but it's never easy yeah it's good practice though yeah for sure we're also in in many cases distributed environments or very virtual environments so the awkwardness is going to be there it's going to be there so i guess just own it embrace it embrace it yeah speaking about speaking of embracing things uh you know you all have embraced a lot of changes right there at the beginning of the change log that's right name and you're heading into a new decade a new era of the changelog and uh you know it looks like the field is very open and you've got a lot of possible things you could do with the next 10 years what are some the ambitions or areas that you want to explore or charts you know courses that you've already charted that you're planning to head in that you can share with us i'm usually more visionary and have like some sort of cast but i feel like we're doing what we need to be doing right now and for me that's okay because i think we do a lot and you know i've got a growing family and so personally right now i feel like i'm a little short-sighted on my vision i like what we're doing i think there's a lot of things we can improve on we mentioned the fact that our co-base is open source uh every year we like to participate in oktoberfest we like to invite people in to contribute there's always room for more shows but we're also not trying to grow our podcast count tremendously i think over the next several years we might grow by one maybe two shows a year or basically as topics or interests you know kind of come to come to fruition i would um i would like to to maybe do a bit more on the membership side and then invite people in in that way because there's so many people to reach out and say how can we help you how can we support you and in all honesty the best thing we can say right now is like if you make lists of podcasts if you're on twitter if you tell somebody about your favorite things and we're one of those things that's the best way but for some people that's not enough right they they actually want for some reason to give you money or some sort of exchange of value and i think we got to find find out if it's not just money or some other ways we got to find some way to exchange value with our listeners beyond us freely giving our podcast to the world it's got to be something where they can come in and do something of value whether it's monetary whether it's contribution to the code base whether it's something involving in the community uh a lot of opportunity is also on the written side we'd love to find more people to share their big ideas uh through our platform so there's a lot of things i think in that area that would make sense to to to expand more growing by more podcast isn't that interesting to me right this very moment it's already hard yeah so i think we have a good portfolio i'm proud of it i think we serve a lot of niches i wouldn't say that we're comprehensive like every developer niche there are there are a couple of holes if i if you if you if you pin me down i could name a couple of holes in our lineup but um i think revisiting memberships at this point makes sense because of the kind of the sea change and the attitude towards memberships and i think we can provide unique value to a paid membership that we didn't provide back then i think there are people who would love to support us in that way especially if they get some add-ons and some maybe like an ad-free option or something like that create your own feed like these kind of ideas are things that we're tinkering with where we could revisit that and really serve more directly i mean i love the idea of like just directly serving your audience yeah you know every single time like the period security of that i don't think we would ditch our current model because this model works it's sustainable we've proven that out but we could augment and provide options uh so that's something that that we're interested in i think personally i agree with adam that i'm not like super stoked to add a bunch of new podcasts um maybe just focus on growing vertically versus horizontally at this point i in terms of my own interest i would love to do more writing um i've just in the last uh six months or so maybe even less been able to finally become full-time on changelog and slowly wind down my consulting company which was a long burn but we're like basically down there at that point so i can concentrate fully on changelog i have lots of things to say and and to write i just don't have often the time to write them and so i'd love to be able to execute on more of those opportunities and use use our writing as a way to uh really augment the shows and like bring people back to the shows so yeah let me let me say this to it real quick because you mentioned earlier with when jared came on to the team you know while you were speaking one thing i was thinking to an adjective to describe jared would be instrumental right like if it weren't for we didn't even talk about me going full time ever in this in this conversation which is it doesn't need to go that far but the point was was that jared was a source of encouragement for me he was like i was working at pure charity and so just a quick version of the story and this is basically me giving jared a long thank you is that uh an appreciation too because he's an amazing partner and i couldn't do this alone that this would not be what it is if it was adam solo uh it just wouldn't and i'm so thankful for jared but ages ago he was like dude we can do this you could do this you could do this whatever i forget the exact wording but but i've always been an entrepreneur but i wasn't like yeah i want to quit my job that's cushy because i was working for a non-profit it was amazing work i loved what we were doing i loved the team we were building i love what i was building i love what i was doing and then one day i just loved this a little bit more and i was like you know what you're right and then it for me a silent partner for me at least not a contributor to a show but a huge contributor to my life as my wife if it weren't for her if it weren't for jared encouraging me and saying you should do this we can do this and for my wife to agree uh and believe in me i wouldn't have done it honestly so thank you bro oh you're welcome and i'm glad that you made that leap because you know a few years later it's allowing me to make that leap i was already out there on my own at that point and so there was like i didn't have the the i mean we all know that resistance yeah of like when are you are you going to or do i or don't i or when do i and so i already had the confidence i was like you know i'm out here swimming in the water and everything's fine you know the water is warm out of stuff yeah and i was in that water and i was like i like that water too but now i've got this warm water and i just was less also you know newly married so it was just like timing but uh i i still have mad respect for pure charity the team that runs that i mean i still consider them all friends they do amazing things as a matter of fact a community member uh beverly nelson she's done some stuff with it's been a while she's been really busy but she is cto cto at pure charity she began i don't want to say just as a developer in a negative way but she kind of came in when we had a budding team she came and was very instrumental and i don't think then you know she would have believed that she would have been cto at some point now she's cto of pure charity that's awesome yeah and we love beverly she's amazing yeah well it sounds like you all have a lot of people who have been on the periphery or directly involved with the change log over the past 10 years and i want to wish you all a fun prosperous next 10 years to the life of the chinese vlog i'm going to be listening i know that a lot of the people in the free code camp community learn about open source and learn about software development in general and get introduced to a lot of the people whom you've interviewed uh you know dhh you had yehuda cats on a while back just a ton of really like developers developers um and they're able to uh get a lot of exposure to those people and a lot of inspiration for those people so i just want to thank you again for everything you're doing for the community and um you know long live the change log 10 years 10 more years of awesome learning that's right well quincy thank you you've always been a staple for us to you've always encouraged us and congratulated us along along the way too we're obviously huge fans of free code camp we can't say it enough and we just thank you for caring enough about us for one to drive from your place to my place here in houston we are in for lack of better terms adam's studio yeah uh you know so he came here we flew jared in forever i mean this is your studio that's right that's right well i almost called it like you know change like hq but it's not bad but you know we really appreciate you know the time that you've put into this too the research and just sharing uh sharing your community with ours honestly we really really appreciate that we can't thank you enough all right well hey adam jared it's been an absolute blast everyone uh still with us thank you again for listening to the free code camp podcast uh be sure to check the show notes where we'll have links to a lot of the different episodes of the change log that we mentioned here and and some of the articles as well also if you're not subscribed to the change log be sure to subscribe to it the free code camp podcast will come back in early 2020 we're just as i said doing a lot of other things but in the meantime if you can just tell your friends about the change log tell your friends about free code camp that would mean the world to us have a fun day and happy coding four years ago four years ago we talked to you and since then you have literally blown up in many good ways now if he literally blew up wouldn't he have exploded and his guts worn out okay figuratively literally jared's always i always do that to him he is although technically you're right literally can mean the exact opposite right well it depends what dictionary right in this case blowing up meaning that let's start over again gosh i was digging that flow oh you were yeah i would keep it then we'll keep it jared likes we'll keep it but but seriously four years ago we had a conversation with you much different free code camp today than four years ago what are you doing that's so great what are you doing that so well that has gotten you toward your ad not just you but the rest of everyone the contributors were pretty skeptical were we not i mean we tend to be at times skeptical we're paid to be yeah we're paying to be skeptical well there's lots of stuff that comes out and certain things last i think we're talking about that earlier in the other show by the way kind of a companion podcast going on right here so definitely listen to the other one as well links will be cross-posted that's right show notes check them out i mentioned that lots of stuff hits our radar and some things last and other things don't and i know one of the things we were talking about then four years ago now links in the show notes the original quincy larson episode apologies by the way it's been four years for us to get you back it should have been much faster yeah we usually have the be backs back sooner you're still here you've blown up you did not fail to sustain so so now you agree with you blew up i do okay good i do well i think the different stuff i'm guessing is that then was just one pillar right now you got many more people that happened why does that work yeah so 2014 uh almost exactly five years ago we launched just the curriculum itself we had a chat room right uh so free people coming to free code camp and they work through the curriculum and they would ask questions in a chat room which was originally hip chat and then it was slack and then it was getter we still use getter but now the main thing is the forum so the curriculum was the the original pillar of freco camp and now we have a second pillar which is the forum uh which is growing really rapidly and we've got a lot of exciting things going on there that i can talk about and then the third pillar is the publication uh freecodecamp.org news um so you find it interesting that that forums are cool again they're always cool-ish i mean to some degree sure like i think social media is quintessential community of the internet to a certain degree yes but then you have social networks and you got groups within those networks so it's like you know what is truly a forum so you're saying in this case a literal forum yeah a self-hosted place where people can have threaded discussions right over long periods of time that's indexed by google that has its own search tools that has accounts uh that has moderator tools all those things where the organization who's hosting that forum has control play control yeah if you contrast this with like you know a subreddit or if you contrast this with a facebook group a forum gives a lot more organization a lot more power to the organization and also means that you know the data stays on that server with that organization it's not being used for advertising curious how you host it what do you do yeah we so we use discourse which is a really popular form tool yeah created by uh jeff atwood and his is a partner sam i can't remember sam's last name saffron sam saffron thank you and they are really solid developers and they also know a lot about online communities with you know stack overflow being one of the bigger ones so uh a lot of the same defaults that they bring to the table are what we use so yeah what about literal hosting though like do you host it yourself what do you what's your what's your architecture aws or yeah so it's it's a docker image and we just we have it on digitalocean okay so we use a lot we publish this whole organization like visualization of free code camps architecture and discourse supports our instance so that's like that 80 bucks a month i see cool for us to have a hosted uh digital ocean i was asking that because this course does have like a like a service version right yes their own host so you're not hosted by them you host your own but they said they support it they support well in the sense that like we every six months there's some huge thing i start messaging them on their own meta discourse yeah like hey yeah yeah exactly yeah and we have ssh access but if if there's something catastrophic we you know we can ask them to go click flip the switches right so the buck doesn't stop at you in terms of the you host it but you got help well free code camp the forum is one of the bigger ones uh i think there are probably some big like i know blizzard and described so we're getting about five million views a month on the forum nice and it's pretty big i assume there's a lot of recurring active i mean there's lots of conversations yeah forum hits some people are just googling they find a solution in a forum but there's a lot of people that are actually like actively part of the community posting answers posting questions on the daily yeah at any given time there might be 60 80 100 people logged in using the forum so let me go back and collect ecliptic guy let me go back and clarify the skepticism because it wasn't that we were skeptical of the concept or the idea of free code camp it was really just like the will it continued to last because you're a non-profit there's lots of startups that are also non-profits they're just they don't want to be nonprofits but they are but we talked about the sustainability of like you pouring yourself into this we didn't know it was pretty new at the time all you had was curriculum and it was like is this going to be a round right we're also putting a ton of time into and it seemed like a lot of work and anytime you see those those things it's just the rest before maybe yeah for burnout yeah exactly or or uh goat farming in the horizon right right but you're still here you're still standing so i guess that's maybe the question is not extending he's thriving fair enough striving what have you found what's working what how did you get to this point you know you have a probably a team you have lots of i know you have lots of people that are working on it so how would you figure out that way yeah well last time i was on youtube were both asking lots of very similar questions about sustainability because we do yeah and and you since you've had the whole request for commits uh series which is phenomenal i recommend everybody check it out and i listen to that and nadia eggball and michael rogers and uh you know that was really helpful for me as well just thinking about uh open source and sustainability yeah uh since i visited we finally got the 501c3 status which is the u.s government's tax-exempt status code it's the same one that like doctors without borders and the red cross and all these big ngos have right so now if you donate the free code camp you can deduct it from your taxes and we ourselves don't have to pay taxes which is a huge savings absolutely yeah it makes a big difference so uh we were able to shift from just selling merchandise which was the only way we were sustaining free code camp which you know spoiler alert it was barely covering even the servers let alone you know payroll and other things and i i put a lot of my savings uh into it i put about 150 000 into free code camp which keep in mind i was a teacher and a school director that's like i was basically saving every half of everything i earned for like 10 years yeah that was the money that i had and we were gonna use that to get a house and or a down payment on a house in california um but did that keep you up at night like were you were you were you confident you were gonna find that that thing that works or were there nights where you're like you know what i'm just wasting my savings away well so i wasn't i never thought it was wasted because people were benefiting tremendously but i was worried that i it was not going to work out and i was going to have to go get a job but really that's like that's a very nice first world problem to have like oh my gosh if this fails then you have to go out and get a nice job as a software engineer right but i mean 10 years of your savings gone is beyond that what he's saying is that that doesn't outweigh the risk of of loss and i i guess to some degree the belief in what you were doing enough to keep going what you've done yeah yeah it could have been nice though yeah that kind of risk that kind of that kind of any fear anything like where you were like twitching oh yeah it was a long and and i had my first child about one year in it gets deeper uh so you know that was and we were living in a we were living in the bay area in a one-bedroom apartment yeah it was like 700 square feet and we had a baby in there and i was just on my laptop all day long every day just crunching trying to reassure my wife that we would pull through and everything would be okay now she had a job at a tech company doing accounting and she as a result we had health insurance so our position was already better than a lot of americans and we both had lots of options so i just want to emphasize that like we were coming from a position of great flexibility and privilege yeah that a lot of people do not enjoy so i don't want to sound like at all um because really i mean worst case scenario i i had like standing offers from different companies that would have probably hired me and all those things but free cocaine was doing great people were using it people loved it and i knew that we could make it work where there's use there's usefulness yeah so what what financially made it work finally like it's working now right yeah yeah we're break even essentially so what we did was uh as soon as it became clear that we were gonna get our tax exempt status not that we actually got it quite yet but before that we'd always been just shifting if you want to support free co camp here donate money instead to women who code or donate money to hack club or donate money to hacker dojo or some of these other non-profits that are helping in developer education because we really wanted to make sure that people were able to deduct things and and the money was going to in to a proper non-profit so once we got that nonprofit status you know retroactively all all the donations to us were tax deductible and i remember just holding my newborn son and holding up the the certification that i got from the us government and that was kind of the light at the end of the tunnel and from there we just worked really hard to get a whole lot of people doing monthly recurring donations to us which is beneficial not only because a lot of people can afford you know five twenty even twenty five dollars we had a few people giving like 250 a month a lot of people can afford that and uh it says it's monthly it gives us the ability to project out and budget and for an organization like us like we just need to be able to budget we're not trying to make huge fixed cost investments yeah we're just paying for servers we're paying for people to be working on free code game full time so let me throw a number at you here this comes from your five years of free code camp post which is on change dog news also in the show notes for those who missed it more than 40 000 free code camp graduates are now working in tech at companies like apple google microsoft amazon and spotify surely many other companies as well that's an astronomical number 40 000 those are people who've been certified through the program many of them have gotten certifications that includes everybody who's in our linkedin alumni network which is like 60 000-ish people who are working now in technical roles uh not everybody ultimately got the certification because if you get a job like you're a graduate all right let me explain the graduation certification it would be a ends to um or a means to an end once you have the end you're not gonna like well i really need my fcc certification right yeah a lot of people get the job and then they'll come back and gradually try to finish it what's that not that fcc this is yeah i mean of course not the federal communication just in case he was thinking like did they start what yeah when were you fcc this is audio and this is the airwaves the internet airwaves that's right yeah okay so but still i mean 40 000 people that is to me a huge amount i mean what does that feel like do you feel those numbers or they get so big at a certain point that it's kind of like another drop in the bucket i mean some some numbers are hard to actually like i don't know like reify in your mind well i'm you know extremely blessed and i just feel incredibly grateful that there are so many people out there who bother you know emailing me or tweeting at me or sharing these stories of their transitions from you know working in accounting being a trucker working in manufacturing uh all these different fields that they've gone from to doing software development and yeah so that's interesting it contextualizes those numbers when you're getting practically every day i get an email from somebody saying hey i just was able to do this you know thanks again and then i'm able to follow up and say like oh yeah can you tell me a little bit more about how you um how you made this transition or can you post it on the forum because a whole lot of people are in the process of trying to make this transition yeah and so the number isn't abstract i mean it's abstract that it's that large but i have so many concrete examples of that every day that drive home to me and so for me you know it's just it's a it's a dream come true i never would have imagined that we would have anywhere near the scale of people being able to uh accomplish new things and you know provide for their families in new ways and actualize themselves and be creative in new ways so yeah it's just been a huge honor and a huge blessing so one of the challenges that we've seen people facing coming out of non-traditional education backgrounds such as i have a free code camp certification or some sort other boot camp or i'm self-taught is that that hiring process is difficult for them uh for lots of reasons one of the reasons is that companies and organizations aren't always on board with hiring i mean more people are looking for senior developers than junior developers and uh people who going through free code camp sounds like they're having success getting hired do you help them on that side of things or is there like a community support i'm wondering like if there's like tips and tricks or how are people having that level of success like yeah i got through the program and i got a job because like you said the job is what most of us are after and so i'm just curious if there's like if the community helps on the job side or if it's just like once you're through the program you just are competent enough to get yourself a job yeah that's a great question we've kind of made a like a neutrality setup where we don't we don't specifically guide people to specific companies um we try we we thought about we built out of a job board and we were going to have it to where people could apply for jobs directly through free code camp but we just thought about like you know if somebody has a negative experience or if there are people out there who are you know that you read about a lot of these silicon valley companies that basically just pretend that they've got all this vc funding and things like that and then the funny never materialized these people have moved to this expensive city and and basically get stiffed on their on their paycheck uh you know we didn't want to be associated with any sort of like project like that so we just decided you know we're not gonna we're gonna leave the job board stuff and the recruitment stuff to the experts and we're just going to focus on training people now we do have interview preparation section uh that has hundreds of additional algorithm challenges uh we've got like we've updated a lot of the project euler problems uh rosetta code problems and made them interactive with like tests that you can run right in the browser instead of having to uh you know the old interface for project wheeler was it's like a 20 year old website but it's just like you enter a number and it tells you whether you're right or wrong it doesn't give you any more feedback than that and it just takes a long time to enter it so rather than having to do all that coding locally and then go and type a number into a web form and see if you're right uh we we just modernized it and made an interactive experience but so we've got lots of interview preparation stuff we've also got at this point probably hundreds of i got a job type posts on the forum and we've got lots of articles from people who transitioned successfully from other fields into tech who successfully got jobs at amazon or google or other places like that telling how they went through that process like especially the thing that people underestimate the most it's just the sheer numbers game that the modern job uh the modern developer job application process constitutes is quite often for like somebody who's finished free code camp or somebody who's gone to a boot camp to have to apply to hundreds of jobs and then they'll start to get uh interviews and then they'll start to get offers but we just try to instill in people the notion that this is hard this is not easy anybody who tells you it's easy to go out and get a developer job they're probably trying to sell you something because it's not easy that's right so we have all these resources and we have a supportive community who's there to share in your accomplishments and you can just read lots of anecdotes that realize the statistics that we all know that there are a tremendous number of developer jobs at all different levels uh certainly there are a lot of middle tier and senior jobs and the senior ones are the ones where the recruiters most actively go out and aggressively try to recruit people but there are definitely tons of small medium level businesses that just need somebody you know the church or the um local food bank or the other organizations that want to have a nice website or just need somebody to help set up like a facebook group or configure like a wix website or something like that from your vantage point can you see trends there in terms of it getting by no means is it easy but are we is it trending up in terms of those entry level opportunities in your opinion or is it just kind of been like a steady churn obviously this would be from your vantage point not like it's like based on numbers but so i could look at the numbers and we do have quite a bit of data that we've made public we for the last three years we didn't do it this year just because we've already done it so many times and there was already so much data it's a lot of work uh we we did what's called the new coder survey and it shows like how many you know it asks about 50 questions we had like 30 000 respondents this is really nice huge data set yeah significant from a statistical standpoint um and if you dig into that you can see like how many months of experience people had before they you know started applying for jobs or how long they've been working in for jobs and you can you can sort of play with the numbers and figure that out i don't have like a really well informed answer on that a lot of what i hear is just at the street level people like saying that they got a job or people saying they haven't gotten a job yet um it's in reality is messy and every employer is different every country is different too they you know european uh and i say european that's really like a collection of city states right um and then you know you go to india you go to china you go to all these other countries where free cooking is really big and and the market's completely different i've been to startups in like shanghai uh where i walk in the room and half the people working in the developer bullpen are free cocaine grads wow right so so there are definitely jobs out there uh for people it's just a question of what those jobs look like and how many applications you have to make and how many people are competing for those same jobs i will say this though getting a job i think a lot of people think it's all about your skills but it's really about three things in my opinion it's about your skills it's about your reputation and it's about your network whom you know if you know the right people you can get in even with subpar skills subpar reputation if you have a great reputation you may not be the best developer but people know who you are from your blog posts or from your youtube channel for your podcast or or just from your open source projects that you've contributed to everyone wants to de-risk a choice right and the rate the risk of choice is by some sort of assurance or certainty right so if you have a decent reputation you can kind of bet that you're a decent person yeah de-risking is exactly what i think employers are trying to do they're sure they're just trying not to make the catastrophic choice that results in them having to terminate somebody yeah pay a whole bunch of severance and then go through the entire job all over again yeah and it's it's costly it's funny that uh who you know comes so it makes sense but we try to be in a world where it's not about who you know because it's it almost seems unfair and yet it totally still is the facts right right that's what i mean like so if you don't know the right kind of people you can't build your reputation properly or at least maybe add to an area where you have less reputation you have somebody vouching for you for like a better term if you have a network it's a network of people to some degree associating with you they're they're fine they're therefore kind of adding to your reputation that you're trustworthy that you're right somebody worth betting on or taking a risk on yeah and this is why like the local markets are so important yeah people focus so much on silicon valley and like the hyper competitive like trying to get a job offer from google or facebook or amazon but if you go to a lot of communities like we're here in houston right and i live in i live in the dallas metropolitan area and jared lives up in omaha like these are all completely different tech ecosystems with different employers different hiring cultures um different circles of people that meet together for tech talks and and events and different professional groups i mean like if you learn your local meta and if you're content to stay in the city you're you are in currently um there won't necessarily be like a clear road map for you to get to that job but if you pound the pavement and if you get to meet people i think that things will work out for you because you're already doing a lot more work than most job applicants plus like you said uh many companies that aren't traditional software companies need software people and so as you know the old saying go software see in the world every company is becoming a software company well there's a lot more competition to work at the software company right they need developers because they develop software for a living but a lot of companies that just need like one or two people and maybe their bar is a little bit lower the competition is going to be less maybe you have a friend who works there like there's just lots of those would you might consider non-traditional software opportunities where it's like well maybe they're not a software company but they have software needs and i bet you can pitch in there maybe even more so than you could at the place that has 100 developers already yeah if uh if getting a developer job is hard does that mean that it's got something broken in the system and if if you say yes what is that and if no then move on so if it's hard to get a job that way what's it's somewhat of an indicator that there's a broken system yeah i mean there's broken processes something's broken what makes it so difficult aside from reputation network skill it's it's hard here in the us again and i have lots of friends in china and in india and places like that where i think it's comparatively easy not in every city in those countries but in a lot of markets it's just much easier to go out and get a job uh in the us we have like a combination of like benefits and like the legal framework and all these things make hiring and firing very difficult so because it's it's difficult to bring some it's costly to make a mistake yeah really so that makes employers really risk-averse even in a field where there's so much demand and also employers to some extent are operating under pattern recognition so they're like oh this person has worked at this company right that's like the biggest indicator of your likelihood of success who have you worked for and are do they have similarly stringent uh hiring requirements uh so if you've worked at google there's a very good chance that you're going to be a good employee at you know xyz corp as well so um i and these are things that i think there's a great she writes a lot of articles for pre-cocaine's publication as well uh alien lerner she does interviewing.io and she's written a ton of articles that are much more data driven on this but i i wouldn't say hiring is broken that's kind of a strong word but i would say there are very clear ways in which things can be improved without having to completely overhaul you know the way that we handle labor in the united states for example uh just pair programming or doing more take home assignments rather than doing whiteboard uh challenges would be one i think fairly obvious improvement because that is heavily biased toward recent college graduates who just spent a whole bunch of time but basically going ad nauseam through uh algorithms for like tests and stuff like that it doesn't work as well when you're hiring somebody who's who's been out of the job market for a while if they just had a kid or somebody who has just been working for a long time but hasn't interviewed for jobs recently your mission isn't to get people hired it's to educate would you say that would you agree with that or is it kind of part of both sides so you know you don't really help place so you're not it's sort of part of it's it's implied by your efforts so our official mission is just to help as many people as possible learn to code i think it's written at the bottom of every single page in our footer that's our official ngo's mission yeah that said virtually everybody who uses freecodecamp dreams of one day becoming more technical now whether that's actually being a software engineer yeah or just you know being a designer who can code or a marketer who can code or somebody who wants to build like a cool interface for their drone that they're flying around as a hobby yeah somebody who wants to build an alexa app just to impress their kids you know there are so many different use cases for programming knowledge but it's all a net positive i like to say that you know back in the 1600s you didn't need to be able to read to go out and work right but the people who did sit down and take the time to learn to read were infinitely not infinitely but they were dramatically better off as a result same thing in the 1920s if you learned how to drive a car suddenly you had all these new opportunities open to you and more recently like the 1990s people really learn how to use spreadsheets they learned how to use word processors they learned how to use like these slide based tools like powerpoint and that opened up so many opportunities for people so yeah you can get by without it you could be you know a congress person a congress person in 2019 who doesn't know how to type and just relies on the secretary to do the typing for them right but real life like you're better off just gathering those additional skills and i think that soon people will awaken to the fact that being able to code is very helpful and it does give you a whole lot of additional options so figuring out the financials is one aspect of sustainability another aspect is making it so that quincy doesn't have to do all the work and surely you have a team at this point and lots of people contributing so like to hear the different roles who's involved in the and then as a follow-up to that how you inspired them to get involved in free code transmission absolutely yeah so freecodecamp currently we have a lot of active contributors um and i'm extremely grateful for all of them and we're getting ready to maybe by the time this episode goes live we'll have our uh top contributors for 2019 we've got some really nice backpacks that we're going to ship to them to recognize their efforts to say 2019 top contributor it's got the free code camp logo and and these are the same backpacks that we sold a few months ago we're actually running a second run of those two since we're going to be printing some these top controller ones but there are seven people who work for free code camp full time including myself and they are all generalists in the sense that they all wear a lot of hats everybody comes up through free code camp as contributors after a few years of contributing if they seem to be particularly capable or particularly passionate then and we have the resources then we will bring them on and so currently the team is is again me doing just everything like i do support and i also do uh i'm overseeing a couple different projects within then we have beau carnes who is running the frico camp youtube channel which recently became i think the biggest programming channel on youtube it's got 1.4 million subscribers now there's a channel called the new boston that hasn't been updated like four or five years and they have more subscribers than we do but other than them i think we're the biggest uh so beau runs that he creates a lot of the videos he does a lot of the editing for our contributors and uh beau also is working with a curriculum so beau worked as a teacher for i think five or six years prior to joining free code camp a public school teacher up in michigan we have abby abigail renomeier she is based in portland and she worked as a archaeologist before she has like a totally different background but she had been editing thousands of articles for the free code camp publication and she kept doing it and i was like hey you want to do this full-time so she's been doing that she also runs the podcast so if you've listened to the free co-cam podcast there's a good chance you've heard her interviewing people and then we have ahmed abdul sahab he's in turkey i recently immigrated to turkey and he is doing some exciting things over there uh he does a lot of the design like when we overhauled freco camp's visual design uh he did a lot of that work and he also does a lot of just like the day the in and out code maintenance um then we have murgesh mahapatra who is in bengaluru or bangalore and he does pretty much everything regarding the core code base and like all the servers and he uh he's the person we call if something catastrophic happens and then we have uh christopher koishigawa who's in south korea and he was working as a teacher for the last six years and started contributing a whole lot to our to our interview prep section and so we brought him on so he and bo are working together on the updated curriculum which i can talk about in a minute and then we also have uh mia lu who is based in hangzhou in china and she's running the free code camp china team and we basically have like a completely parallel organization in china and we've got chinese language forum chinese language publication and chinese language curriculum and that's you know hundreds of thousands of people using that so i think i got everybody it is hard to always remember everybody on the spot yeah as we experienced recently as well so that's amazing you have a parallel organization in china just curious in terms of the free code camp alum or even just the users i mean your team is spread abroad and so is where's your biggest audience like do you have the foothold in india is it india india and the united states are like neck and neck sometimes india gets there are more people in india sometimes there are more people in the us uh and then nigeria's third and china um and then is that based on just visits or how do you how do you use logged in use yeah like time on site yeah right so you have chinese translation do you have translation into other languages as well or just yeah it was a great question what we're trying to do is just really make sure that we have everything rock solid in chinese and chinese is bigger than most of the other world languages combined uh it's second only the english if you look at wikipedia usage and this is what we used for our metrics i like to to plan internationalization we looked at how wikipedia was being used and and we looked at like the world language usage for different uh translations of wikipedia um and then we looked at like the total number of speakers of those languages that were using the internet actively um china is just exploding in terms of people adopting technology and they're very enthusiastic about it and a lot of them are getting great jobs and there's a lot of money going into just a lot of different aspects of like um artificial intelligence like machine learning essentially yeah um the real machine learning and also the ifs and then statements and stuff like that um and then also there is a whole lot of um expertise in china uh india a lot of the great indian engineers stay here and a lot of the chinese engineers go back to china and create companies so uh you know i'm trying to think of some uh some names of famous engineers who've left like google or have left like teaching at stanford uh who've gone back to china but there are a lot of really promising companies over there so we wanted to do china first um i personally maybe i'm a little bit biased because i lived in china for like five years my wife's chinese and i'm just very optimistic about the future of china they've over the course of the past 30 years they've taken hundreds of millions of people from subsistence art agriculture and they've transformed into a manufacturing center in the world and now they're transforming into much more services and creative based economy and learning the code is going to be a big part of that for sure can you speak to the the need for native language curriculum like specifically with what i've heard at least with china is that there's you know this desire obviously a massive amount of people there but most of the documentation a lot of the books tend to be are more likely to be in english can you speak to the the need for native language curriculum yeah well it's always easiest to learn in your native language just one less thing you need to worry about uh a lot of people more than a billion have chinese is there they're mainly more than a billion yeah yeah i mean if you include if you include like written chinese like there are a lot of right spoken dialects on earth six point five seven billion people yeah you're behind it's like seven and a half or eight yeah yeah it'll be eight and like ten or fifteen stats machine here okay but the point is is that that's quite a lot of people i mean more than a billion people yeah that's a massive amount of people that's like i'm gonna say one half facebook but i can't remember facebook facebook i think is 2.5 billion gosh that's crazy yeah it would make sense too it's interesting too to hear your insights on the choice to use a massive um global site like wikipedia as an example to say a smart you know why did you choose where did you choose first under what circumstances because in a lot of ways what you're doing is creating a wikipedia for like a better terms for software developers right curriculum is very much like that wikipedia has been a huge influence on us and of course wikipedia is mostly open source as well and they're also a non-profit so right in many ways if wikipedia hadn't proved out the concept that you could have a donor-supported commons of learning material in their case more encyclopedic in our case more procedural skill focused uh learning you know free co camp probably we wouldn't have attempted it because we needed that proof of concept i'm not the kind of person who's going to throw their entire livelihood behind like a totally wild guess but i sensed i guess correctly in retrospect that there would be demand there and that people would be people who were graduating from free code camp and going out and getting these great jobs would turn around and donate back to the organization and it would be sustainable do you see somebody utilizing free code camp and maybe a boot camp as well or some sort of intensive is there is there a scenario where it's only free code camp i know you're not trying to do that because you're very community minded and oriented but is the is the intention to be free co-camp alone or is it sort of like a companion to other learning opportunities so i've always viewed pre-co camp as a core curriculum if you will and a lot of coding bootcamps do use free codecamp as either part of their curriculum or they'll use it as their pre-course work and we have a really good relationship with a lot of coding bootcamps and i'm very excited about the future of coding bootcamps really anything that can drive down the cost of adult education the hardest part about that too is is curriculum development yeah right like if you have to start from scratch every time you want to start up another boot camp opportunity in your neck of the woods whether it's here in the states or elsewhere abroad you know if you can shrink that time from you know desire to teach to teaching it's a it's a leg up on on opportunity yeah i'd agree it's the hardest part but it's not the most important part the most important part is the interpersonal relationships that you know a teacher professor has with their students and that students have with one another and uh you know the counselors that help you prepare for the job search and all the other things that a university or a coding boot camp or um any sort of adult education program can add like the value added the curriculum itself really if you think about it very few people actually design curriculum in the sense that most universities have textbooks yeah right and like everybody like you go to econ 101 and everybody has you know the same textbook regardless which university you're studying at uh for the most part so yeah free code camp can be a free interactive textbook that these organizations can use and of course it can be used on its own just like i could go to a library and crack open a textbook and learn economics or i can learn you know how to program and see just from a textbook or from some sort of static resource the the main advantage with freecodecamp of course is it's experiential it's project focused and things stick a lot better when you're actually building how do you keep it fresh how do you keep it relevant current and maybe the naysayers saying oh your curriculum is not current enough or it doesn't is not idiomatic enough yeah how do you how do you push back the haters basically well we just focus on fundamentals uh we're not going to be covering bleeding edge tools for the most part like i believe that everybody needs to just get a really strong foundation first and most of what constitutes foundational knowledge as a developer stuff that was figured out in like the 60s and 70s and in the case of mathematics sometimes hundreds of years ago thousands of years ago right so what we're teaching is just the most ubiquitous tools that are the most generally applicable i think node.js is to a large extent one kind of the web server war if you will uh and uh javascript is useful for pretty much any kind of web development uh we're getting ready to introduce python as well as a core part of the curriculum so currently it's six certifications each certification requires you to build five projects and get all their test passing so we're adding four additional python focused certifications uh so right now our certification just for people who aren't aware front end specific we have the responsive web responsive web design we have javascript algorithms and data structures then we have front-end libraries data visualization with like d3js primarily and then we have the the full stack focus ones which are apis and microservices and information security and quality assurance so we're going to add four additional python ones that will be either at the end of that or we'll be we'll kind of break up those but we're adding uh we're adding scientific computing with python we're adding data analysis uh we're adding information security with python and we are adding machine learning using tensorflow keras and potentially scikit-learn so we're adding lots of tools but these are not tools that are like groundbreakingly new these are things that academics and practitioners in the field have been using for years what about things like the small things like i think of the javascript syntax and the updates to the language i mean the nice thing about web development is mostly additive like new technologies add on top of html and on top of css with trends in javascript i think the the big change between callbacks to promises to async away like those are things that do get outdated do you just like churn it out and keep it updated or do you not fight those battles what do you do there so we we just update uh like if if one thing like for example css variables we're probably going to rip out our sas section at this point because css is getting so many of the core features that like those pre-processors yeah and they're taking sass out yeah it's about time i told you nobody want in this show never mind yeah and then like like we still have a bootstrap section but probably just going to teach flexbox and grid and stuff like that so so we do go through an update and like like you just asked specifically as new features are added to es6 or es2019 or whatever they're calling it this year right um we'll just go and update the individual lessons and we kind of update them in situ and add additional lessons if necessary the entire curriculum is about to become completely project oriented this is something we started at the beginning of the year we're rewriting our lessons to all be building projects so instead of learn javascript and here are 200 javascript lessons that are tangentially related go through them it's learn javascript by building a role-playing game yeah nice and so you'll build like a role-playing game you learn basic javascript from that you'll learn typography from building a usda nutrition label you know you'll you'll learn all these different things through projects and currently the curriculum is like 30 certification projects and a whole bunch of lessons soon it'll be 30 certification projects and also a whole bunch of practice projects like 30 or 40 practice projects so those will all be interactive with tests the entire time and you'll build the projects one line at a time one passing test at a time it's so much easier to learn when you have some sort of like concrete expectation or visual in mind you know like giving somebody a goal and not just abstract thoughts of like oh here's you know as you said 200 different tangential lessons on javascript it's more like here's what we're learning in order to build something like this that you've seen in the real world you may have even used in the real world you know nutrition labels for example what was that one for those tables uh learning typography typography yeah yeah like visual hierarchy yeah that makes sense yeah so we've got i mean this is all of course open source it's only github so if you want to see exactly how our curriculum is coming along you can check it out um and we're gonna keep plugging away at it like i said chris christopher koei shigawa and beau carnes are working on this basically full time doing instructional design they're both trained classroom teachers who've also learned uh web development on their own through frico camp over the years and through other resources so should be really really solid and even if it's not totally solid when it launches that's the great thing about open source it'll gradually accrue a whole bunch of improvements and eventually it will be great eventually great it's like eventual consistency exactly greatness so in addition to the refresh of the curriculum you also launched a brand new refresh to the learning platform you're now buzzword compliant because you're on the jam stack yeah you want to talk about some of the new infra and the code and what you're doing there yeah absolutely so jam stack javascript apis and markup is what jam stacks stands for my friend matt billman over at netlify coined that term in a bar at some point i don't remember the exact story but um he uh he's been a big proponent of just like the security and the performance boost that you can get from just you know doing everything at build time and then just serving like the static files essentially right so now free coke if you go to freecodegame.org and you go into learn app uh pretty much everything is pre-packaged and you get the entire application uh it just loads and it'll work offline it won't work offline perfectly right now but we're working on getting it to be like a offline first app so there are a lot of advantages and a lot of those advantages have to do with the fact that we don't have to sorry that little thing threw me off text message okay yeah uh a lot of those advantages just have to do with the fact that we don't spend as much money on servers yeah we can cache everything has that been like a substantial difference for spending like i mean it's been like 5 000 bucks a month on servers what are you spending now that you're on jam i think we're spending like 4 000 but we're still doing a lot of the optimizations gradually it'll reduce yeah wow yeah eventual greatness eventual greatness curious why you know if you have such a massive global audience why and this is just the the uh partnership personality in me comes out as like why you wouldn't reach out to someone in that business to establish some sort of partnership and make that zero or very low if anybody is listening who's like in a position to grant a whole lot of credits yeah or uh do something we'll take them yeah we'll take them we use all that we can get from like amazon azure google cloud like we use all the credits we can get we we just need a lot are you uh picky on platform are you picky as long as it's reliable so okay azure is where a lot of our stuff is hosted digital oceans where some of us hosted we we have to be very mindful about what services we we look at where like how critical they are so far azure in my experience has been incredibly reliable and aws is really reliable too um but we decided to like locate most of our database and our servers in azure because they gave the most generous credits candidly they give they give every non-profit like 3 500 4 000 a year in credits and that that's a big big head start and so we locate everything in the same data center it reduces latency so if we had like a significant offer of credits we might be able to relocate the entire stack for like learn over to a different place but we'd want to we wouldn't want to do a piecemeal just because the introduction of latency and additional security risks and stuff like that but either way with the new stack you've definitely been able to shrink said budget so yeah and this is just day one like this is the very beginning is there a stack though i mean isn't that the point of jam stack as you do it when you build and then well you said most of your stack is we still have like servers that like are these like things that are like apis yeah yeah so whenever you complete it whenever you complete jam a lesson for example that writes back and if it can't establish connection with server just stores in like local memory or i think local storage is what we use and then when it re-establishes connection then it pushes so we're building out all that kind of uh you know redundancy and and targetedness right very cool so any drawbacks on the jam stacks so far like things that you're like oh we didn't see this one coming caching validation is always challenging like you you push a bunch of changes and they're cached on cloudflare or netlify cdn or something and you just have to wait till it propagates or hey try refreshing and we're working on figuring out a way to do that so we don't have to tell people try doing a hard refresh you know web developers least favorite phrase yes try refreshing because we hate saying that because like it's like it means turn it off and on again right it's kind of like the yeah i kind of failed at the cash invalidation part hard refresh you have to teach people how to hard refresh versus regular refresh yeah i've been there yeah i've done that so that's that's been the biggest drawback but i mean a whole and then like like i think netlify was like under like a ddos attack the other day and like we we had some some uh like uptime issues with that but again it's like they're doing the best they can they're a pretty small organization compared to like the awss of the world um we just want to be there to support them and uh we're just grateful that like you know netlify discourse a whole lot of other organizations have given us in-kind uh sponsorship in a sense they're not giving us money but they are giving us like servers and services that makes a big difference yeah so the third pillar of what you're up to we've talked about the learning platform the forums we touched on at the very beginning of the conversation we haven't talked much about the publication yeah yeah that's a big part of free code camp is we have freecodecamp.org news and we have hundreds of authors who are publishing articles there every week not not like active we don't get hundreds of articles every week we're going for quality over quantity it's not an open publishing platform where you can just like sign in and start publishing with uh with the publication you have to apply and we're really selective i think like we had five percent selectivity so most people they'll submit a whole bunch of writing samples we'll force them to read our style guide and all that stuff make them jump through all the hoops if they want it badly enough then we'll give them a conditional account like a contributor account and then they can write drafts and we can look at those and if the moment we see one of the drafts that we're like yeah this is ready to go this is solid we do a little bit of editing publish it and then we give them full access to our google analytics so they can see exactly who's reading their articles like basically everything google analytics tracks and we've got a bunch of additional custom filters and stuff making it really simple for them uh that's the only tracking we use by the way we use google analytics because at this point it's the only like server-side analytics are great but you just don't have enough information for the authors to be able to understand their readership this process of collaboration or lack thereof if there isn't any on the edit process how do you handle that do you have sort of baked in processes where you're giving them feedback and suggesting edits or do you make the edits and say this is how it is how does that how's that relationship yeah we make the edits for them uh and then we tell them what else we made generally uh if usually the edits are are seemingly unimportant but actually really important like the headline is by far the most important thing to the point that i'm practically the point where i was just like i'm just going to write the headlines for you because like that's all 90 of people see especially in the age of like apple news and reddit and all these aggregators people just scroll through headlines and that's their news like very few people actually click through do you actually say anything like a headline is a suggestion from them and it is let's say for like a better terms it's um it's uh in your hands at the end yeah what they write may actually become the headline but it's actually just a suggestion yeah we're clear that like essentially they're they're writing and to save a whole bunch of back and forth a bunch of communication overhead that slows things down we just apply the edits ourselves yeah um and people understand that they appreciate it because they understand that we care a lot about quality and we want to get their article read by as many people as possible the way we do that of course is after they they publish it uh we publicize it through our twitter account which i don't know how many followers it has a lot is it like it has a high level of engagement let's let's say that like generally when we tweet something it gets retweeted like 10 to sometimes 100 times and uh we also um have a huge linkedin alumni network and we get like 2 million impressions a month just off linkedin posting things on linkedin so and then of course i have my email blast that i send out and i've got like a mailing list of like 2.5 million people so a lot of people click through and read those articles that i choose for the weekly email blast so it's worth it we're giving them a megaphone to reach a whole lot of people and to really raise their profile in the developer community and they take that opportunity seriously yeah what kind of pieces are you looking for because i know i remember in your post you mentioned like journalistic kind of stuff eventually or i don't know eventually we'd like to have explanatory journalism where we take like net neutrality for example i wrote uh maybe like 10 000 words about net neutrality and it put everything in context right during the peak of like people asking about net neutrality and curious about it and it was it put it in a historic context with all the other mediums that preceded it the other media that preceded it like radio cable stuff like that and uh so that would be kind of like the archetypal like if i was going to lead by example i'd say we should be writing in-depth articles like this um and there are plenty of other publications that write really like new york times uh the wall street journal a lot of them will just have really in-depth articles that put things in a historical context it's not just like this happened and this happened this happened it's like this happened and here's why that's significant from a historical perspective or here's what that means so explanatory technique uh technology journalism explanatory technology journalism that's that's kind of our aspiring goal one of our goals is to get people to actually come to freecodecamp.org every day and have something new and exciting that they can learn right now people just blow through the curriculum and they get a job and they're like awesome yeah free coq i use that back in 2017 i hear that all the time yeah we're still doing a lot of exciting stuff we're still here i was gonna ask you about that because it's one thing to you know if your mission is to educate as a primary mission and you mention the three pillars it's going to be very difficult to keep a captive audience because of what you just said so it's very easy for people to be transient given that their goals and their means have been covered and they're gone yeah so you know it makes sense i almost want to ask you like you got curriculum you got the forum and then you have publication you know how much thought that you put into that because it's pretty smart because you're you're answering my question without even answering it by uh by this publication being there and free code camp news being there because you're bringing them back whereas before they didn't have a reason to come back and now they do and you're sort of keeping them captive when yeah when before they were just you know they've they've learned they've gotten their job they've moved on and they've said hey i learned about it back then and that's it now yeah and there's always more stuff to learn right like i learned a lot about quantum computing in the past few weeks i learned a lot about uh you know micron length semiconductor manufacturing and stuff like that right so there's always new stuff that's coming out i mean technology by definition is new so there's always new stuff and just being able to explain how you know you orchestrate with kubernetes or how a docker container works what's the difference between a docker image and uh you know a docker container right or a docker instance i can't even remember all the different terms associated you need an article do you have um you've mentioned a free code camp mission but do you it seems like the roles of these pillars are distinct so do they have their own agenda that feeds into a sort of main or corporate agenda like why these three yeah yeah so we are strong believers in content i think that uh one of the biggest tragedies is that so much of the rewards of the web have been accrued by platforms that are basically just aggregating other people's content if you look at like facebook and all these companies uh they're benefiting from providing the basic infrastructure you could argue that you know medium fits that boat quora they just create the software everybody else comes and adds the content and people don't care about the infrastructure that much they really are there for the content right it's it'd be like you saying like netflix should accrue 100 of the value because they created such a great streaming platform and like the hollywood movie company shouldn't get anything because hey they just created the content content's free right or cheap but content is it content is not a commodity really good con and content is incredibly valuable and if you look like there's the information for example it's like this news publication that charges like hundreds of dollars a year to get a subscription the economist historically has always charged like 150 200 a year right for a subscription and i think we're going to see more and more of these publications that are like this is really high quality so we're not going to give it away for free at the same time there are publications that do give it away for free yeah like pro pro publica and uh you know the guardian and places like that and that's because they're fully donor supported they can do that and free code camp of course being fully donor supported by you know small individual donors we're a grassroots organization we can do that we can make everything free and we can provide tons of content from our community and from ourselves like like paid staffers like me who are writing articles and things like that yeah so let's talk about donations real quick and then we'll switch gears because they do want to talk about meet up you mentioned platforms yeah so five bucks a month let's just say i go and sign up for recurring i'm in i like your mission i got the cash i'm gonna give you five bucks a month where does that money go yeah great question so first we've got seven people uh okay first let me talk big numbers so so everybody understands free code camp's 2019 budget was 373 000 that may sound like a lot of money but i know developers in silicon valley who personally make more money than that a year sure that is maybe payroll for like three or four people right um and we're figuring out a way to like stretch it across seven people and we're also paying you know tens of thousands a year in servers so the answer is like 100 of that gets consumed by the by what is traditionally called programs when you analyze a non-profit there's fundraising there's administration and there's programs and we don't really have administration we don't do fundraising we just that we have quincy larson saying please donate to our non-profit please sir you know right we don't have a pr firm we don't have a marketing department uh you could argue that we could do better and we could raise more money but that introduced a lot of complexity to the organization and right now everybody who works at free code camp came up through free coq right never cleaner yeah i get it and i would say like i know a lot of non-profits that do the fundraising side and of course it's a it's it's akin to like a bootstrapped company getting vc funding i mean there's like some analogs there but it's different but you could at least i mean but the small the hardest way is the individual recurring donations versus having a person on staff maybe it's you or maybe it's somebody who's really good at going around to the big donors yeah to the foundations maybe that's the reason why well part of it was his response my point is you could get like a one million dollar grant maybe yeah but we'd be beholden to those organizations and also like that would kind of spoil us that's why going out and fighting in the field to like earn people's donations regular people people who are just working day jobs have kids feeding paying mortgages but they're like hey yeah i can spare five bucks for free co-camp a month or yeah it's the end of the year and i can just give them a thousand bucks or ten thousand bucks what about those companies though they're reaping the benefits of your work that's fine it's like a you know a positive externality for them right it's consumer surplus for them but there's uncaptured opportunity there i mean you could argue the same thing with wikipedia i mean how much value do you think wikipedia has bestowed upon the world by making it to where i can get good factual information within seconds from a relatively objective arbiter of truth yeah there's a whole lot of value that is not captured but that's that's kind of the point yeah but then they also have to put jimmy whale's face on wikipedia for like one month every year and bug the dog do out of their users when they could just do these other things such as some tasteful ads you know no use no no i i'm just no problem with advertising i think it's a great model especially for podcasts but but also you know like if you if you don't have the invasive ad networks and stuff i think i think ethical advertising could be uh i think i know you've decided to go pretty much ad free like across the board i think it's an admirable decision that being said we're back i cut you off on the donations thing like you pretty much that whole five bucks is going right towards programs yes and uh there's no fluff there's no like there's nothing else it's all right there we are extremely lean we're living lean uh i mean we we did we have in-depth discussions about whether to like pay for like a 20 a month service because it's like oh really yeah yeah i mean things are we just want to operate really efficiently like a lot of my heroes like you know sam walton for example kind of walmart on this notion of thrift and you can argue that like walmart has um not been the best employer or the best uh patron of of different communities that it's been in but you it's hard to argue that it hasn't been good for the end consumer because they've managed to drive down the prices of so many things absolutely and save people an incredible amount of money like especially families these are corporations that could probably make a lot more money uh but they're choosing to kind of be broader and more resilient to changes in the economy and things like that um that's a trade-off yeah it's it's a trade-off but with free code camp we're never going to capture all the value we don't even if we can capture like just to give you an idea less than point one percent uh i'm sorry it's it's about point five percent of our monthly active users donate yeah so it's it's just a fraction if if i can get a little bit better right well you're going to my next question and so let's talk about scale how do you what are the conversations you have with yourself yeah or anyone else in the team about like okay if when you said your budget was 375 000 a year or you're 787 right last night never this year this year this year 373 sorry 373. so is that is that equate to revenue and i guess the second question might be you know when you talk about growth of revenue or income dollars however you describe it in non-profit senses um what are the ways in which you make that number grow yeah so we just get more people using free go campus as simple as that the more people that use free code camp a certain percentage of them will go out and get great jobs and turn around and donate like sometimes we hit you know like a windfall like i was saying earlier uh we had somebody who donated ten thousand dollars earlier this month john wong sean wang um he's a uh he went through a free code camp he works at netlify and he had money at the end of the year and he wanted to donate to a high impact charity free coat camp just to put our efficiency our capital efficiency in perspective we have delivered 1.1 billion minutes of instruction this year that's the equivalent of 2 000 years of learning in one year we've done that for 373 000 that's the equivalent of 50 hours of instruction for every dollar spent now you're putting in terms i like to hear so if you go to like five bucks feel a lot bigger yeah so your five bucks each month is essentially paying for an entire classroom of people to learn that's that's interesting i i like the fact too that uh that i lost my thought that uh i'll get in just a second well i lost it all right i'll get it back in just a second yeah uh one thing that uh is important to note also is that these people are able to do it for free and the scale that we're operating at you know it's not only self-paced and free and fully interactive it's just incredibly cheap like to put that 50 hours per dollar in perspective in the united states the average cost of having a child in a public school is 10 per hour per child so free code campus several orders of magnitude more efficient than like and granted they're trying to accomplish totally different things we don't have classrooms we don't have a teacher with a student-teacher ratio of like 17 to one or whatever we just do instructional design and people work through it at their own pace but it's because of those concerted decisions that we're able to be dramatically more right efficient these are all conscious decisions we've made because our ultimate goal is scale our ultimate goal is helping as many people as possible for as little money as absolutely necessary which brings me back to what i forgot i like the fact that you're focused on those two metrics you grow the number of free co-camp you know i i guess interested people users however you want to describe it and then that obviously impacts the ratio of donors and you can sort of like grow that one to grow this one or you can grow this one too i mean like meaning you know if you grew the amount uh from five percent point five percent 25 says that yeah okay geez if you double that if you double to one percent right i mean so you can sort of focus on those two metrics either grow the total captive audience or grow the you know the ratio of donors that's i like the simplicity of focusing on two things rather than so many other things yes to grow to scale yeah yeah and that's why i'm reluctant to bring in like you know a fundraising expert or uh right you know to try to court like personally fly around and meet with the ceos of all these different houses if you can get by without it it's obviously better than not have to do that and it seems like you're on that path you have these two numbers uh the higher leverage one is honestly the percentage yeah but uh you seem to be pretty good at growing the top end funnel at this point yeah all these people using it you've also been very patient so based on four years ago we talked to you and you're also and i don't want to use this word too loosely but you're not greedy right like there are some people that just and maybe it's i don't know really how you describe greed where it's not um egregious or so like where it's overly greedy yeah you know like yeah level yeah right you know you can have capitalistic ambitions and not be greedy you know you seem to have a patience that is uncanny well i avoid that i'd where it's not not everybody has the kind of patience you have like i don't i don't i couldn't do what you've done yeah well i managed you know for-profit companies before i started freako camp like as a school director essentially like it was a private uh intensive english program and you know i had to make sure that we had like a a good even day and you know all those metrics that matter so and i i have kind of a traditional business background in addition to my education background uh so i can understand the physics of business so to speak and that's really helpful because that gives me some perspective and it's kind of like if you're a jazz musician if you don't know how to play you can just do chromatic skill play whatever it doesn't sound good but if you do know how to play you know exactly how to break the rules and how to bend the rules to make it sound really cool uh so that's like to some extent the fact that i'm older i'm you know i'm going to turn 40 next year that gives me a huge edge because i've got the like the life experience i had run a lot of organizations before free code camp so i knew like the people part of it and the budgeting part of it so i guess in some respects one of the reasons i'm more patient is i'm more confident in the state of the world and how things work and fit together and also you know i had my wife who has the patience of job and she had a job with benefits and and we had health insurance for our kid and for ourselves and so i didn't need to you know run out and buy that ferrari or whatever it is that you know startup people do when they when they exit like free code camp will hopefully go on forever and hope hopefully at least for the rest of my life which i'm hoping to live to be you know 90 100 like uh hopefully i can continue to be involved in leading or helping somebody else lead the organization for the rest of my life so everything is long term this is not a problem that's going to magically solve itself you look at how long it's taken to get people to you know to even get literacy to the rate it is yeah after 400 years right um this is going to be an ongoing challenge to teach people about technology we probably have people coming into developer land at a faster rate than the birth rate at this point just a thought a thought exercise think about which one's actually happening faster so i think maybe converting more developers then we're birthing them at this point so huge massive forward-looking opportunity as well and impact so let's do a hard cut to uh can i ask one question before the hard cut yes real fat i don't think it'll take you long to answer this one it's probably really easy even for you have uh have you gotten offers or people venture capital anybody that's come to you and said quincy i will buy what you got i would give you know whatever have you got something like how often do you get i'm not gonna say the names but we've had some big companies that like have approached us um for like aqua hire i guess i don't know how it would work i mean this is before we got the tax exempt status uh but once we got that people just left us alone because it you can in theory unwind an ngo like if somebody wanted to acquire the red cross it'd be like this bureaucratic you know nightmare and you spend so much time i'm sure but it is possible to convert yeah but that's never going to happen here uh and i'm grateful that you know those organizations saw value in free code camp but that's not where we're going like we don't want to be you know free code camp by acme corporation yeah or something like that right i just would imagine the offers are a plentiful and the temptation is is uh is very i mean it's not really for me it could be i mean for some depends yeah i i'm just a simple dude like i like hanging out with my kids i like reading books and uh going for runs you know i mean i don't know because i'm in this very fortunate position where i live in a really advanced country with rule of law order like you get more money it's almost like an insurance policy right like if i get cancer i'll be able to pay for all my chemotherapy and my radiotherapy uh or any surgeries necessary right if my kids get cancer i'll be able to pay for that so money at some point like just becomes a score a number that uh in theory you can dip into if you really need to i don't think that that really applies to me i'd much rather just be a normal person and have a normal kind of middle class middle american life then be cruising around in a ferrari in san francisco or something yeah yeah our left go ahead okay hard left turn so closing in closing we're going to talk about this topic because you're not busy enough with free code camp you decide you know what we want to do we want to disrupt we want to disrupt meet up with an open source event planning platform for not just for developers but for everybody to be able to just set up their own instance with a docker container tell us about yeah a chapter and why you're doing this and uh how it relates to at least relates to the current you know to the recent changes in media i'm not sure if it's actually inspired by that if you're already working on it and you're like oh this is opportunistic tell us the story of chapter real quick yeah so meetup was acquired by wework a couple years ago wework as we all know was not worth as much as they said it was pretty disastrous uh reversal reverse ipo yeah yeah it's it's one for the history books but anyway we work of course uh and as of october when i made this announcement uh it was a few hours after meet up and announce that they were enacting this new policy that they were going to charge everybody a two dollar rsvp fee whenever they rsvp'd for an event now free code camp grudgingly has 40-ish meetups on meetup most of our study groups are organized on facebook because it's free but some meetups will pay the 20 a month to have a meetup page which i think is ridiculous that it costs that much money but it does and people are willing to pay for it so we quickly did some back of the envelope calculations and based on the number of events we had it would have cost us like twenty thousand dollars extra every year not just to us but to the entire community in aggregate if they were all paying and that's two bucks is essentially yours to potentially get as a donation so just yeah oh there's just money in their pocket that they shouldn't have to spend to rsvps for the platform the infrastructure that hasn't changed the only notable thing that meetup has done in the past 10 years was get acquired by wework they have been exactly the exact same website yeah in terms of product in my humble opinion and i say this is somebody who's been using meetup for that yeah i could say that as well because there's like i recently as part of this was like i thought i closed my account i double checked on it i didn't know like i'm closing because i thought i did before i think when they were acquired by we work it was just like i never knew they got acquired i just this was the first i had heard i mean i just been a yeah a grudging meet-up user as well just more from the they've done some other stuff too i i can't recall what but it was like you know what i you know if i'm if it wasn't like oh i'm canceling you know uh meet up from my life it was more like i don't use the platform anymore i don't find value in it and i'm like wow if i if you leave a profile somewhere at least your data is still there so there's still this um opportunity for them to use you when you've since gone away so my thought was like i'm gonna pull my account and not do that anymore well what i love about the open source community is like we don't have to put up with that stuff if we don't want to that being said somebody has to step up and like throw some code on the table or a spec on the table yeah you know that's one of the things we talked with uh siege bot about what they're doing with the federated you know replacement for the package management uh what's it called a camera with the name of it all of a sudden yeah and tropical topic yeah you know and just the fact that it's like well we could all sit around and complain hey as people who talk in the microphones a lot some something that we do is the easiest thing for us to do is to complain yeah we complain quite a bit but in the open source world it's like hey we can actually solve some of these problems and that's why i was just impressed by the announcement and you guys at least beginning of an effort to say you know what meetup has value these this is the thing that needs to exist but it's not like it's irreplicable or replaceable so it's not that complicated so yeah we quickly made an announcement like i thought about it really hard i just decided yes this is important enough this is going to make a big enough difference for just us that it's worth having self-hosted chapter management tool i mean that's what it is it's for multi-chapter organizations so we're not trying to boil the ocean and just say we're all events everywhere just like meetup is right we're just focused on like you know the ymca or the boys and girls club of america or rotary club lions club some of these other organizations that have lots of chapters they can just have their own server they can have full control of the data and people can go there and set up events and and they can have chapter organizers and uh then they can have some discovery within their own organization and they can just have a little subdomain or sub directory that's like you know ymca.com chapter or women who code org slash chapter or something like that right so as far as how i was coming along i tweeted out this kind of somewhat angry tweet by quincy larson uh relatively emotionless tweet standards um and a lot of people were like yeah that's messed up you know like it was like a i think it was a tweet of the screenshot of like the meet up their announcement cheerful announcement oh great news i'm worried is everybody right yeah this is actually gonna slightly reduce your cost as an organizer and pass like massive costs onto the community but anyway uh a lot of people retweet it and i had a little link to a discord room which uh discord is not open source course but it is pretty convenient for just organizing an impromptu thing i've used it for hackathons and stuff um so everybody jumped in there and we got like a thousand people jump in most of them just of course promptly left and forgot about it but some of them stayed and we started brainstorming like what kind of tools are we going to use what what's the user story you know what are they going to look like who are the roles and we quickly got a lot of stuff ironed out like at the schema got uh like an api documentation up got an api up um so now we're just building a lot of the additional functionality we need for our mvp but soon it'll be out and of course it won't be amazing right off the bat but eventually it'll be great i love this of course it won't be amazing there's a theme but eventually it'll be great that's right i like that theme for the show eventual greatness so how do people get involved i mean typical github flow like find chapter in the show notes and like get involved because it's a thing that uh we could all could use and if you could use it and you want to have seems like to me pretty easy entry low hanging like collaborator fruit like hey here's a pretty open project that's still getting itself figured out that's the best time to get involved because like huge impact like you can be you can be a big contributor early on uh check out chapter from the free code camp crew yeah is it would you say it's a meet-up alternative though well i have a question if if the answer is yeah then i gotta call it i mean it's for our purposes yeah as a as an ngo that has lots of chapters around the world absolutely like we're not gonna use meat up anymore you're solving your own problem first and hopefully this the problem you have is is multiplied by many others yeah well i'm confident it is yeah sure it is but even if only we used it internally it still be it's just fine twenty thousand dollars in savings and also the pride of us being able to go in and tweak things and not having all of our user data just be like owned by wework and they're desperate you know cash squeezing efforts so what about more traditional meetups so like we have the nebraska javascript meetup it's just a very typical javascript meetup is chapter it's not multi-chapter it's just like well we do a meetup ever and you can you can run like you can run your own instance it's just 20 bucks for whatever five bucks to get like a tiny little server that'll run it yeah we're trying to like make it as compact as possible like instead of using uh elasticsearch for example we're just gonna use postgresqueries um so little tweaks like that that just reduce the number of services we have to have running in it in a docker container yeah has the idea of federated ever yeah made it into the into and how did that go i mean not necessarily from a technological perspective but just like a way that you can opt into being part of a shared discovery network right exactly right because the main benefit of meetups yeah exactly discovery yeah right that's the that's the only benefit i mean if you if you have your own organization you already have a mailing list of tons of people your people know your website and they're visiting it already then you don't need to worry as much about discovery but it's it's still a nice thing to have well you still go there and check your interests too so if a new group comes up near you geographically let's say my interests are javascript and ruby well anytime anything touches those two areas then i'm going to get notified so it you wouldn't want to just prop up your tent without an audience and no opportunity for discovery yeah yeah you wouldn't i was curious about that i mean this could eventually come to a displaced meet up in a lot of respects but that's not our goal at this point even though initially i was like so angry at meetup i was like yeah let's let's just create a made-up killer but that's not how i think like when i'm thinking clear-headedly and i don't see red um i think i think practically what can we do for our organization what can we do for our community and this is a right scope right scale tool right that's going to work for them well it's been five years four since we last talked five since the inception this is your fifth year anniversary uh similar question in the companion podcast you asked us which was hey what's the next five years like for you what what's the future hold for you are you lack of visionary like i am currently or are you visionary and you've got lots of ambition i have an incredible amount of things i'd like to do a lot of it comes down to how much we have in our budget because we don't want to overextend ourselves we're a tiny organization we want to make sure everything we do we do properly and that we're not spreading ourselves too thin so if we can continue to grow our budget we'd like to do a lot more explanatory journalism and explain a lot more about technology and put tech news in context through really in-depth primers we'd like to create a lot more really good first party courses and we'd like to create a lot more interactive curricula we'd love to be able to figure out a way that we could pay for servers so that we could actually have linux focus challenges uh get focused challenges all these things that require like file file systems essentially right like you can only do so much in the browser just you know for example we're able to do python because mozilla just released a giant library that's a significant update from like brython or some of these other browser-based python tools but we'd really like to be able to actually have full development environments like on a server that is showing up on freecodecamp that you yourself have your own little mini you know compartment on the server it costs a lot of money yeah so yeah if we if we're able to increase the budget we're going to just keep doing what we do with those three pillars we're going to keep growing the number of people on the forum and by extension in irl events and we're also going to just keep creating articles and videos and we're gonna keep expanding the curriculum gosh we haven't even talked about that side of the publication your youtube channel i mean we're on there right now theoretically so subscribe we do have a youtube channel click the bell for notifications every time you like like and subscribe yeah click the bell that's right youtubers they always it's like subscribe and the bell right why did why did youtube do that they want you to have to subscribe twice i've never hit the bell in my life you know actually it's kind of like a double opt-in you subscribe because you're interested what's the bell give you it like makes notifications i don't care that much that you know i have a video like i'll come watch it on my own terms thank you very much no one's that important well that's where the double opt-in is i mean i get it from the from the creator's side like yeah i would love to have the bell for my channel but i don't want to have your bell for my feed keep your bell all right keep your bell well quincy man it's it's a journey it's been it's been fun watching you over these last five years uh the numbers speak for themselves i think the fact that you're you can educate at such a efficient rate makes it total sense for people who are who have you know the funds and have benefited from free code camper know people who have you know that five bucks seems like it makes a lot of sense so you know one more time to pitch to our listeners if if you appreciate the work they're doing and you want to help educate the next generation of coders out there whether they're young whether they're young or old or what part of the world they're in yeah uh no better way than to do a recurring donation to free code campaign when he says better no better there's no more efficient way right and the leverage is amazing yeah yep and uh yeah thanks for sitting down with us we really appreciate you and all the work you're doing thanks again for having me back it's been a privilege talking to you gentlemen thanks quincy same herehi i'm quincy larson i'm the teacher who founded free code camp five years ago and i am thrilled today to bring you this video it's very different from what we've been publishing on freecodecamp's youtube channel for the past five years we've been publishing in-depth tutorials and full courses on python java javascript kotlin a whole lot of different topics and we've also been covering important libraries like pytorch pygame tensorflow things like that so uh hang on mike i need to give my kid a little push hi quinn you ready higher lee all right i'm going to get back here where it's less windy so um we are going to be uh in this episode interviewing some of the most interesting people in open source that would be of course adam stokovic and jared santo from the legendary changelog podcast if you haven't heard the change log it is the preeminent podcast on open source software and pretty much every major open source maintainer has been on there at some point dan abramoff dhh yehuda katz and then of course a whole lot of maintainers you haven't heard of they have hundreds of episodes and this is their 10-year anniversary so uh i drove down to houston texas hung out with them in the studio and we recorded five hours of interviews okay i interviewed them for like two and a half three hours then they turned around and interviewed me for like an hour and a half all of that is going to be on this video i've added timestamps below so you can jump wherever you need to go in the video uh and just a quick heads up this is not a visually stunning video this is three people sitting in a studio talking into microphones i would encourage you to consider doing the dishes maybe uh going to the gym maybe driving to work doing other things while you watch this video because just sitting there staring at the three of us sit in our chairs for five hours would not be the best use of your time so listen to this in the background while you do other uh things that don't use your brain fully so you can still pay attention to the interview and um enjoy i think you're gonna learn a lot and i learned a lot about uh both adam and jared they had never done an interview like this where they talked about their background adam was in the military jared was like a recipient of several scholarships and he has some interesting stories behind that and that's how he was able to go to school and then just how they got into software development what kind of freelance projects they've been doing the story behind the changelog all this stuff it's so fascinating and uh so again enjoy the video and remember like after this we're gonna go straight back to publishing full-length courses uh this is just a one-time video so uh but i think you'll really enjoy it and have fun happy coding everybody hey welcome to the free code camp podcast we have a very special podcast today we are interviewing the founder of the changelog and his sidekick so i'm going to introduce them properly in a moment but i just want to welcome you this is a special episode of the freecodecamp podcast because we're technically on hiatus for the rest of the year while we handle a whole lot of other burning fires but i have been a huge fan of the change log ever since i started my developer journey back in the early 20 teens and this show has been a huge window into the world of open source development for me and i've learned so much from somebody the masters of open source development by listening to the changelog and today i am thrilled to flip it and ask a whole lot of questions to the creators of the show and celebrate their 10 year anniversary how many podcasts you know of that have not gone on to ten years not very many no all right so first uh adam stokovic the founder of the change log and the host for the past 10 years uh and jared santo who has stepped in and been a huge force in the change log over the past few years and we're going to learn a whole lot about them let's go first adam i just want to learn a little bit about you like sure what was your early life like adam you want to go back to like the beginning beginning like early life i mean like eight five what year if there were any really formative experiences in your childhood go for it but uh yeah i would say for me probably the one thing that wouldn't seem obvious is i grew up poor like from a town that people either go to jail become alcoholics you know just not a lot of hope and i came from a place where i would say that to be where i'm at today if people see me that i met and went to school with years and years ago just don't believe it you know um my dad died when i was really young so it was a big part of my life to have a father figure missing in my life my mom was amazing she uh she raised me my brother uh single mom you know and i love her she's uh she's since passed away in 2008 but she was always my encourager always my believer in me and uh and quite honestly she's the reason why i'm at where i'm at because i guess ages ago when blogging was cool right back in like 2003 2004 cool right yeah when it became when it was the the era of blogging the vlogo sphere right yeah it's the blogosphere um i had a blog right and it was i didn't live right next to my mom anymore i had moved and was enough i was about five hours away so i had to have a blog to you know keep up with family it was where we posted our family pictures and just did whatever and i shared my thoughts and i got really into web design through wordpress and the theme kubrick if anybody remembers kubrick i do i work over here uh that was an entry point for me that's how i learned css by like looking at that css and be like what is margin what is padding all that stuff and so i got really curious about web design and you know just all that stuff and got really into it and then i got really busy at work and just sort of like didn't have enough time because it was just a hobby for me at the time and my mom's like you know you're not doing this anymore why not you know this and that and i'm like i just have time for it's no big deal whatever she's like but you're really good at it and like she's like you're really good at it you shouldn't stop you shouldn't quit you're really good at this you should find a way to do this more and you know it was literally that moment when she said that that i sort of internalized that as like huh okay mom says i should do it i should do it and literally if if she didn't say that and i know how silly blogging would have been at that that time it was not even a cool blog it was just yeah my family blog it was like nobody should ever read it not interesting thoughts at all but she's like you should keep doing this and that's that's probably one of the most formative things for me i would say to get me to hear there's a couple other things of course too but that specifically around web design web development and like pursuing it deeper was that moment yeah so you touched on the fact that you were working and you were working in another field and just pursuing software development as a passion let's back up a little bit to you know high school you're in this town where generally people don't go on to bright features how did you break out of that sheer luck sheer luck god's will um i would just say gosh man i just you know i look back on those times so i was the person that didn't have any money for college and my friends many of my close friends had some sort of plan because their parents were fortunate enough to have money the bank and make that plan for me i didn't have that plan i didn't even have great grades in high school i was terrible and not because i wasn't smart but because i just didn't have anybody really assigned for my mom and a couple others like really helped me to apply things and when i graduated high school i barely graduated it was terrible like i missed so many days of school the last year of my high school year like i just didn't want to be there anymore i wanted to move on to whatever was next and when i left high school this is like going super deep but when i left high school i i kind of told myself you know i need to make a plan and so the cool thing to say would be i'm taking a year off you know prior to going to college i just didn't have any money to go i didn't have a plan like how am i going to get there and so uh i spent the next year after high school sort of like making some sort of plan i worked at uh this place called reese brothers where they did telemarketing hey i was a telemarketer once at one point in my life i actually may have called you at one point to ask you about at t long distance it was probably like 10 cents or whatever and i can give you a great deal if you bought today hey that's how that worked uh but yeah i was a telemarketer got done with that and then i became a pizza guy i started to like toss pizzas and flip them and spin them there was a local mama pop local mom pop pizza joint what's it called i forget but it was amazing amazing they had this thing called a red top it's amazing pizza and then my roommate at the time because i'd moved out of my home and uh went and got an apartment with a buddy of mine and all that good stuff well he was in the national guard and i come from a family that has you know all of the all of the men in my family have all been in the military my dad my grandfathers my brother my uncles so it wasn't like this legacy thing but i was like hmm i gotta do something maybe i'll make enough money to buy a car i was really motivated by money in the car and like some sort of like uh money for college and so the sgli bill was an option then and so i was like well all right i'll go in the military so i went to the military full-time uh in 1998 and so i was in the army for three and a half years they had this special program where you can go into uh it was training plus three years or something like that and so i went in for training which was about six to eight months and then three years of service so it's around three and a half almost four years not quite four years so typically the term of service is four years that's why i'm making a big deal about it because anybody listening would be like i thought four years was the minimum well i kind of got off a little bit there by shaving a few months off but went to bosnia you know did all sorts of cool stuff in the in the army went over in europe uh gosh that's a lot of fun so i mean the military jared knows i've told jared this story at least but the military for me was um there was a moment when i was in this thing called ait advanced individual training everything in the military is an acronym so there's always like something you know you got art you know ucmj you know that's the the rule set essentially the the government for lack of better terms the the laws um what am i getting at so when i was in eit the drill sergeant like i was just i was even though i went in the military i was trying to like do something i didn't really apply myself to be the best soldier i was still sort of like figuring it out and i wasn't doing a great job i was late not prepared not the best at physical fitness you know so i was like the lower echelon of soldier and so one day i'm standing in the in the third uh the third line of formation and the drill sergeant says stokoviak front center your first squad leader now and so that means that you're now the leader of the first squad and there's like usually like you know three or four squads so like three different lines so if you think of a formation it's the rows or squads and so if you're on the if you're on the the if you're facing the formation on the far left side that's the first person and that's the person that's in charge of that squad so i got i got basically made under the person who is in charge of the unit i was the second income command for lack of it better terms and i didn't do anything to deserve it or earn it he just gave it to me and uh and like from that day on i was like i'm a leader now i have to be a leader how do i be a leader how do i lead how do i what's it look like what does a leader look like how do they talk how do they walk how do they act and so it sort of reshaped my formation of what it meant to lead i started to uh you know press my uniform shine my boots you know they call it dress right dress in the military be very you know you know all the angles are squared and whatnot so i just i just i guess i was given an opportunity to lead which is why i'm a huge advocate for you know just helping somebody that doesn't even think they deserve it or know how to do it give them a chance you know encourage them into a leadership position and uh i was not the best i probably failed a lot and that didn't matter though because because where i'm at today as a man as a dad as a father as a leader of any sort is because of some of those moments we must have seen a lot in you if he gave you that responsibility so it's possible that i don't think he did honestly i don't think he did i i don't think i deserved it at all he wasn't like oh he looks good let's get him up here i think he was just like rando and i was just having a draw and i think i was telling jared this story of the day like he's like would you would you say would you would you thank him today or something like that yeah well we were talking about people who influenced us in our lives and the question is should you go back to that person because you don't you don't appreciate it then i mean sometimes you do but especially as a young person we just don't appreciate what we have the opportunity is given to us and the question is well now that we have we look back and i say we're talking about a teacher of mine shout out to mr kasner in uh high school there he is a guy who like i was like wow i didn't realize it but you're he was a good teacher and he impressed things upon me and the question was well would you go back to that person if you could and just thank them because now you have that appreciation and that was what i was asking you and i would and i was like well you know what i did today i was googling drill sergeant hillard you know the person's name that that did this and i was like what's what's really interesting as somebody in that position he probably has no idea he changed my life and i mean like yeah this these things happen out there that we don't get that feedback loop like as software developers and people who you know deal with teams and flows and frameworks and systems we we crave that feedback loop and it's a it's a built-in mechanism into the human brain to desire and need that feedback loop right to have relationship is a key humanistic feedback loop find a human in solitary confinement whether they're in the you know in the caves or in you know um in prison or something like that you find somebody super alone you're going to find somebody seriously dealing with some mental issues because of that solitary that because of that that soleness and uh yeah i don't think he he has any any idea that uh he influenced my life so well which is crazy to me yeah the the feedback loop is very loose in the real world especially among i mean who knows were you able to find him on google are there so many as a matter of fact i kind of got scared for a second because i did find an article from the base i was at that was tragic and i started reading through it and thank god his name wasn't in it it was something else you know sad about the situation but i was like gosh here i am looking for this person and something bad happened to them or whatever you know you find somebody's obituary you know and it's kind of terrible too because like if you're out there and you're listening to this you're thinking man there's somebody who influenced my life try to thank them if you can because i mean the last thing i would want is to find that person's obituary and it'd be too late you know if i could find them somehow some way i would be like thank you so much for sharing leadership with a crap soldier like me because wow it changed my life it's a great reminder i'm gonna have to put that on my to list because i've got a lot of people myself who have steered me in the direction a lot of teachers a lot of employers and managers yeah um so you get back from the army you did your three years and and your uh your education before that um did you end up going to school or what did you do from there that's funny um so that's actually the next part that got me to where i'm at closer to today i was i would say at least so here specifically geographically in texas so um for a little while there i lived in canada and that's a really long story and i don't feel like going into that but i went from the military to florida because a good friend of mine that i grew up and went to high school this is one of the people who had a plan had parents with money and they sent them to college to school and so instead of going to school i went to the military this person my good buddy uh donald kilgore you know donald yeah we work with dk quite a bit he uh he went to film school in orlando florida at a place called full sail really well known for audio visual directing film all that good stuff and so i left the military with like this sgli bill thinking i'm gonna go to florida and i'm gonna go to film school i'm gonna go to audio school so i i'd wanted to do either directing of films or getting to like audio stuff around films i loved it i didn't know how to do it but i like the idea of it which is so ironic of what i do now at least one component of my job and uh yeah i never went to school i never went i never ended up making it there which is kind of an interesting story if you want to go there i can i can take it to like the next i would say if we had to like uh fasted my skill set one of my biggest skill sets is sales and just relationships and partnerships i love that kind of stuff and i'd mentioned uh reece brothers and doing telemarketing well i'd always been i'd always like to help people and so i think when when you say well sales is really just trying to help people solve their problems it's not about getting jared to buy something he don't want to buy with money he don't have you know it's it's about he has a problem i can help solve that problem that's sales to me and that's what we do we solve people's problems in a lot of ways and so um i uh kind of a long story about i'll make it really short i had a friend who was trying to be a dj and we were at uh a club early in the day kind of like seven o'clock times people are into the club you know it's not the time you want to be a dj and so we were there i see him talking to this guy at the bar i see him go back and do his thing and i go over and introduce myself because i'm i'm like if you're a friend of my friend you're a friend of mine kind of kind of person and so i went over and i introduced myself as hey i saw you talking to my buddy dion my name is adam etcetera or whatever and long story short this person's name was sean hughes another person that i would love to see again and thank uh because that day he was i was at a crossroads of like what i was doing which was basically nothing i had no real ambition at the time i was like i'm really hating what i'm doing now i'm thinking about getting the car sales so car sales right i love selling hey people need cars i can help you solve your problem by getting a great car whatever but car sales is generally not the most fun sales job it's got a lot of just a lot of achiness to it so yeah you know it doesn't have a great uh a great reputation for being a great job you can make a lot of money but it may not be the best job for you and so long story short i meet sean he's like don't get into car sales i've been in the car sales it's terrible don't do that i tell you what come in on monday this is friday come in on monday to my office he's selling a great young man got a great head on your shoulders i got something i'm working on at a company called muzak i'd love to interview you for this thing we have going on so that's another like huge moment my life where i went from like no direction to direction i go in on monday meet with sean it's a great office it's a legit job or you gotta dress nice right and you get a computer like you know to be like i'm not talking to a pos which is a point of sale system or you know which is nothing wrong with that it was just the next direction for me um because at the time i was i was a server i was serving you know waiting tables doing that kind of stuff in orlando making good money because lots of hospitality around that area but yeah this guy man hired me into this position it was an lapd program called leads appointments deals proposals so more acronyms not in the military this time but leads appointments deals proposals that's what it was all about i was basically inside sales for account executives and i learned the ropes of this business if you haven't heard of muzak if you've been into say old navy or banana republic or any sort of like upscale retail environment they put the sound systems in they put the music in and that's what i learned how to do like this sort of like um a soundtrack to evoke an emotion right i started getting into user experience this whole aspect of design and stuff like that music had a really good brand design i always thought it was elevators that's where it began okay so it began in like the early 1920s gotcha as a combination of music and kodak because the person who founded muzak it was a whole different era but he loved the he loved he loved music and he loved kodak so he just put them together music there you go not the silliest uh company name origin sorry yeah you could do worse you could do worse and so you know i got into sales there i started making good money and uh yeah that's that's i never made it to school though so the interesting to answer sort of a long-winded version of like did you go to school the answer is no but i found a really awesome job that helped me learn all sorts of skill sets that i literally use today yeah to help build our business yeah and i guess to some extent like they used to say going to the military was like an alternative to going to school because you learn a lot of the same things right you learn how to uh structure how to operate and structure and everything um and by the time you'd already traveled around the world and done a lot of things to expand your horizons anyway yeah i'd seen i was used to traveling i was used to being a vagabond for lack of better terms you know just pack a bag and go somewhere or take a few things only very i've slept in some really weird places and i've also showered and not showered in some really weird places so i've actually the longest stretch i've gone for not showering is about three and a half weeks what wow we were on a field problem and you were lucky it was just like a certain kind of field problem where we had to it was simulating a real world in-battle environment kind of thing and we were learning because we're going to bosnians we had to train so when you go in the military you just don't know how to be a soldier and how to do these things and go overseas and do different stuff you have to train to do these things so we went to training to learn how to you know go overseas and kind of simulate that now i showered over there which is awesome but during this what they call them field problems during this field problem yeah i didn't shower i mean a wash rag to myself maybe a little bit like a legit in the shower shower i might be pushing a little bit at least two weeks maybe three weeks yeah and i don't know if i could do it like it was tough i'd be knocking myself over every time i lifted my arm everybody smelled yeah i was gonna ask if it wraps around like it's bad for a while but eventually you just kind of get used to it it goes back to normal yeah it's kind of like uh yeah after a while it just sort of like normalizes i will say that when the field problem is over and we all got back to the barracks the first few in that immediately went and showered came out from their shower and then everybody else is still coming in you're like oh my gosh you guys smell so bad like it was it was pretty bad at that point you can smell the difference and the line for that shower must have been like tightly packed everybody's like anticipating the hot water yeah yeah this i may forget that i don't really know but i'm sure you blocked it out there's always a line it's like a line to brush your teeth even yes yeah yeah so how did you transition from doing sales for music and you said doing some some kind of in the direction of user experience design yeah choosing music and and trying to evoke specific emotions and communicate certain things how did you explain the process of transitioning from that to getting more and more passionate about tech and ultimately um doing what you're doing now yeah it's it's interesting that uh one of the things that made me realize i was more geeky than i'd ever thought i was because i was never like i guess just when i grew up computers weren't around everywhere to sort of like easily stumble into or more easily get into you know and so you almost had to really try and so at the the first time i had a phone was at this job they gave me a cell phone it was next tell that told how long ago it was it was a next telephone phone a next telephone it was crazy and the very first time i had my own laptop was at this job the ver the first time i like really used a computer for anything that was not like online chats or just whatever dinking around was at this job so i'd kind of gotten into there's a uh i don't know if it's still around but it was called act and act database it was like a maybe you know this you've seen it jared but it was a databasing system for like a basic crm and that i started to tinker with that i was never really good at it but i started taking some classes around it and just realized that i had this sort of inkling into like a geek or what i considered a geek at that time geeky things you know and uh muzak had a really interesting brand a really clean design a really uh a real focus on uh how they say things and it's funny one thing we actually have that's a behind the scenes repo on github it's it's a a repo we call one voice so that jared and i can sort of like say the same things and sort of define the same things around our business to say when we talk to somebody around a partnership or a sales opportunity or you know our guest guide various things are in this so that jared and i can have you know and begin to develop one voice for whomever sort of leads commands and interacts with you know these levels of our our business and so that's something that they had they actually had this entire book called one voice and i was like that's really interesting how much you think about uh the emotion that you want to invoke as a part of your brand you know who you say you are really mattered to music and they could have just been they had some really good branding people right and people believed in it but hey i drank the kool-aid man i was all in it so that that's kind of what got me into it but um i'd actually i mentioned at some point i moved to canada uh i moved to canada uh as part of my job and they had an affiliate there and i was working in canada and uh long story short this is when george bush was president the americans did not have a great reputation abroad whether it was canada europe wherever else at least from from my perspective because people would not buy from me because i was an american right so i like was an amazing salesperson killing it like i think at age 21 when i was working at muzak in the united states i was making like 80 90k a year in sales like i was just doing it for like full-time sales for like less than a year almost barely two years if that so i was really killing it i was like top five in the country for you yeah and then going there and it's nothing against canadians but i i was i i felt really um i don't know how to describe it i just felt i i just felt like really sad that that these people would not buy for me because of where i'm from and because i have an american accent and i'm not canadian and don't say hey i love canadians they're amazing and i was like okay i just can't make ends meet so long story short i i went there to to work for this company there and i just couldn't cut it and so i knew somebody who who ran this it business which is really where my story of technology and like true web and software and stuff became a thing and like networking because this business was called it weapons they were i.t weapons you get it right okay it was pretty cool it was pretty cool they did citrix they did vmware they did like watch uh watch guard like so they did hardware and software they would do large scale citrix implementations and this is when it was all about uh thin client fat what's the other server yeah like the you did all of it on servers so citrix was like you know you had a thin client that was you know kind of stupid and all that was just a terminal to right your server and so everything was server based and it's just an interesting area this is around 2003 2004 2005 time frame so that's kind of the error then i learned about servers what they were all that good stuff and it's it's just pretty crazy to think like this job at it weapons started to open up doors into into software hardware technology and at one point i didn't even know what a server was like i hear it i hear people say server but like what's a server so so ultimately of course you went on to found one of the most important uh podcasts about software in my opinion and yet you were working in sales yeah there must have been a pretty big transition there yeah just just give us some broad strokes about how how you went about getting more technical this was kind of interesting too because i i kind of stumbled into it right like when i was working at i.t weapons i was learning more i was starting to take over the website for it weapons and i was starting to deploy it and stuff like that which was like basically just dragging and dropping an ftp it was really you know it was those days kind of thing it was a self-built php kind of just a rendering kind of situation so it was really interesting that that's like how much things have changed um i started getting more and more responsibility there around that kind of stuff and sort of like defining where the brand went how we spoke uh we would have in office um kind of like conferences for lack of better terms where i would organize them i would like get the people there to speak from citrix from watchguard from you know from vmware or whatever and i would coordinate people and i would coordinate the clients and just kind of like start layering on all these different things of like biz dev design sales you know all that kind of stuff and then a buddy of mine which ultimately came here to texas i was in canada a buddy of mine started reaching out to me about like i don't know why he asked me these things but like he's like hey i got this issue with this webpage i'm making can you help me and i just started to solve his problems and he's like hey can you just build these things for me i've got some clients and like so next thing you know i started to just like moonlight and freelance in web design and developments i would design it i would develop it i would ship it i would support it and i would help you know to some degree even land the deals you know so sort of like full full spectrum of like identify people to work with understand what their problem set was design something to fit it and then build it and make it and ship it and support it and after a while he was like do you just want to because he's a good buddy of mine i grew up with him i was kind of telling you that some of my friends had plans he was the one that had a plan went to school and he was the one that went the full sale his name is donald kilgore love donald he's like you just want to like become a partner in my business and help me do this and so we did started landing some really big clients i think probably the biggest deal we landed was like twenty or thirty thousand dollars and i was like for a website that was a big deal it was an rv dealership here in texas called demontron they're really well known around here they have chrysler jeep ford whatever and they have an rv place and so we built out and this is actually leading into rails too because this is like 2005. david had recently just said whoops and we were all watching you know i'm saying right right david had him on our hands that's right david hartman video details vlogging in five minutes yeah and so we had we had built this version of uh of de montron and we didn't really like how it was functionality and so that's when rails was really cool i started getting into that more i reached out to some people and kind of put together a team i was on the front end and they were building up the back end we built out this really awesome site in rails and i think i just kind of stumbled into it because i wasn't trying to be even though i know i said my mom said i'm really good at it i wasn't really thinking i would be a web developer i kind of like just was doing it was into like biz dev i really like to create and develop relationships and i just see that as like one more way to do it because one i could do it well no one else was really doing it i had an opportunity i can cultivate clients i can do a lot of these interesting things and the door just opened up yeah and i imagine a lot of the job was communicating with the clients and understanding their needs and you know you've got to watch out for hours even like like on the phone for hours talking through things and figuring things out and and a lot of iteration a lot of feedback from them so it's really fun so would you say rails was one of the key inspirations for you starting a podcast around open source i mean rails is one of the most important open source projects it's brought so many people into the fields it revolutionized yeah a lot of uh crud based web apps were built for sure so a little piece of the history is so the person that i hired to work with me on the rail site his name is josh owens he's pretty prominent in the javascript and i believe like meteor space now um i think he still lives in in ohio i can't recall maybe columbus area um he had a podcast that began in 2004 called the web 2.0 show so i don't know if you know this quincy but at one point the web was just 1.0 and then then it became 2.0 and that just meant that we had gradients and like rounded corners what version are we on at this point who knows you know yeah who knows don't use an html5 and css3 right there you go that's right and so he had a show a podcast called the web 2.0 show it was one of the very earliest first technical or tech or software focus podcast and at that time you didn't have to do much because you just had to be a podcast you could be terrible quality sound wise great content it didn't matter you had all the listeners because there was no one else doing it and so his partner had quit and this is how i got into podcasting and more specifically how i got into like talking to people that weren't just like my buddies nearby about software technical related things and so i became his uh his co-host i think in like late 2005 early 2006. i literally been podcasting since like 2005. i can say 2005 because at least like november 2005 not all the whole year but i can claim 2005. yeah wow so you were on the ground floor yeah podcasting as a medium yeah yeah i mean in a lot of ways i mean i can remember using a really crappy uh snowball it was like a white microphone it was crappy to me because you can see the mics we're using now and over time i had to learn about audio too things that i never even really cared to learn about that you sort of had to had to be forced to learn these things just by way of producing audio and now you have to deliver a show that sounds really good we used to get away with it before we can like not that we wanted to but we could ship something to our listeners that wasn't immaculate sound quality you know but now we kind of feel like we're because of what listeners desire and demand and because so many people are doing it well and it's also a lot easier to produce it well you know now we i couldn't think of like shipping like if you go back and listen to the web 2.0 show you'll hear what i'm talking about yeah yeah even even some of the earlier episodes of the changelog listening to them i mean there's it's just night and day yeah today in the production quality it's it's funny you go back and listen to episode number one and then even go from one to just 100 just go on the on the hundreds go to one 100 200 and 300 what would like 367 will ship this week i believe so yeah the way the way the change all came about was was uh i was working with a buddy named netherland and when netherland win netherland kind of like the netherlands but netherland and uh i think he used to say that too uh he goes by penguin p-e-n-g-w-y-n on on twitter to look him up but uh he was at an interesting space because he ran a consultancy uh called squeegee now wins got some really interesting witty humor so it was called squeegee because he liked to like clean things and make things nice and their brand was like a lot like you might imagine like a cleaning products brand so like kind of like and shiny and it was really interesting i loved uh i love that aspect about it but he was in this crossroads because he had just decided to leave his consultancy and sort of like go a new direction and so did i and so we were sort of both in this sort of like let's establish our name for ourselves let's kind of like you know etch out some new territory and obviously i had a background in at least doing something with podcasting and stuff like talking about things and i was like what if we were both talking about how fast open source is moving and i'm like you know what people just need is they just need like a a way finder through the version so if something changes if you know rails 1.0 versus 1.8 or whatever it might be you know somebody just needs to sort of like chronicle the change log of a of a of a software product or software open source whatever like someone needs to sort of like tell that story that's what what's missing what happened here and what happened here and what's happening between people don't have that and so i was like what if we just did a show called changelog so it was just changed like a first and one was like what about the change law this is like the opposite of the facebook facebook that's right change log 2 the change log sounds more definitive yeah and so we were the change log and as a matter of fact it's really funny because it began as we still own these domains yeah when did you get changelog.com because that's a really good domain yeah it took it took a couple years and it wasn't very expensive there's a story behind that it had the changelog.com yeah it began it's changelogshow.com and that was actually what our original uh google account was set up under our email was actually adam at changelog show and then we aliased the changelog.com and then eventually i'm like you know what we just need to shorten it to just change log on twitter and wherever we can and so we only really did that because they became available to us somebody uh on twitter gave that handle to us thank you i can't recall your name but we wrote about this it's never heard about somebody on twitter actually responding did they just voluntarily or they just gave it to us yeah they were they were in software and said they liked what we're doing they're like i see that you're going to use it for good things it's not like you just want it because you're some jerk or whatever and so they knew we had good intentions um changelot.com was owned by somebody else in software and they i don't think they were really interested in selling it until i made him an offer and then he agreed to it we go we got chainsaw.com for a thousand dollars wow a thousand dollars yeah what year was that uh i want to say like 2015 maybe not that long ago yeah maybe 2014. man what 2014. these are some really chill people because i mean that's a great deal yeah he could have he could have seen like well the writings on the wall you've been doing this for a while you're probably going to keep doing this you're you know i want more than a thousand bucks but it sounds like he believed in the mission if you want to give you that kind of price yeah i don't think he believed in the mission i i think he just saw us as someone who could do something with it that wasn't just i guess i don't know just something useful and we were willing to give him what what he desired which was a thousand bucks and we ended up using cdu s-e-d-o to do the sort of the whole um in you know what's the uh the escrow kind of situation where we put the money in there he's able to collect the money or whatever and then it's it's a nice easy way so i recommend if you're gonna buy a domain from somebody i don't have all the details but that's how we did it i would use i would do it that way if you don't know the person do it with some sort of like exchange scenario somebody in the middle that can facilitate it and i don't know if they would actually like press charges that they didn't follow through but there's something there's some sort of commitment well if with an escrow in the middle they can hold the funds yeah yeah i mean it's especially if it's like an international transaction which court you go to yeah dispute things you know yeah exactly smart but change law.com was pretty cool we we even had it was a big move you helped you did all that tell us some of the technical parts of that i mean what was the five years ago just like a lot of lottery a lot of redirect lottery before we dig in all that so of course i listened i had to listen to the first episode of the change log for uh doing the research did you like it i mean it was it was pretty rough i pulled it up on like i've got a i've got a podcast tool that just makes it really easy to pull up uh old podcasts i don't know how they archive it because even when i go on like itunes and try to scroll all the way down it doesn't go all the way back which kind of it's disappointing jerry can share some reasons why at length and in detail but yeah yeah but uh i was able to find it and pull it up and uh we'll link to it in the show notes if you want to give it a listen just to hear that it's really easy to com slash one yeah oh really yeah it's really easy that's a good path um but uh yeah so david berwin i'm sorry neverland yeah sounds like a really cool guy he ultimately went to get a job at github right yeah there's some story there too we can go into a little bit of that so um when i became uh close friends we had actually done some uh some teaching together so when was more developer less designer and less front end but he really had a an eye for aesthetic and an eye for design and he loved to always tinker and he was and if i had to describe he was always like a a minimalist approach to things but not you know he wasn't the kind of developer like i can't touch css or he just loved to like dive into things and he just thrived at that and so we did a um we did a a class at lone star ruby conference in a couple other places i want to say called design eye for the dev guy or gal and it's quite a name which was yeah it was pretty funny and so what we wanted to do is like just help software developers who are just primarily in in code and back-end type stuff and not at all in the front end feel a bit more comfortable with early technologies like sas pre-pre-compilers stuff like that and this is early days of sas this is even before like the scss syntax so like this was super early days so one side small tangent would be that before there was the change log i actually wanted to do a sas podcast but nobody would do it with me so so i i died on that sword and instead decided to do this uh this show uh the change law because uh i had a partner who would be willing to work with me on it so there you go no one was really interested in the sas i was like why don't you just do a css show and there's css tricks and i'm like yeah but chris is nobody i'm just kidding right chris is not nobody he's the man yeah listen chris we love you that's right that was like 2009 though so like where css tricks is today to to where it was then oh yeah chris has done an amazing job so it just we were all early days and that was like before it's where it's at now and so there was just the field was more green there was a lot more opportunity you know in terms of like making carving right whereas now like we wouldn't start a front-end focused website or podcast like that like chris would do you know because somebody started doing it doing it well we would do something else that where there's a hole to fill not not to cramp in on somebody else's style yeah you know open source was clearly something that needed something yeah and it was moving so fast github i mean this the show began in 2009 and github had just become a thing in 2008 and a little bit more history going one layer deeper so on the web 2.0 show we actually met up with chris weinstroth and tp dubs tom preston warner uh three months after github was founded wow and we had them on the web 2.0 so if you want to go back and listen to some really interesting old days of github not owned by microsoft not bought for billions like dreamers like these were developers who were like wow we somehow found a way to tie in like this front end and this collaboration and get and like it was before all these visions and dream had come to fruition like they have before they invented the request and so that's to me that's super cool that that's what really got me into like loving this medium was because even with our show we can go back and like chronicle the paths of some developers you know we've had some people on four times three times several times we've seen not only their changes as uh as individual people but the software they command or the things they maintain the communities they lead it's just really interesting i love the fact that we get a chance to be kind of what that drill sergeant was to to me the encourager right we like to shine our light in places where it's not always being shined and just encourage people to press forward to congratulate them for working really hard maintainers who don't get any things we love to pat them on the back and say keep going you're doing an awesome job and just do what we can to put more uh focus on the things they're working on fun fact so github had their own podcast in the very very early days of github called get splosion which was chris wanstroth and tom preston warner and pj hyatt the three founders of github basically just sitting in a room and talking to each other it was very low rent and it was very raw and i think it's disappeared off the internet once they probably raised funding and started probably more corporate probably alive i used to listen to that it was very raw and i loved it i just thought of that when you talked about their early days show they actually had their own show about git and github and they really just hung out anyways yeah if you can find that send us links i'd love to listen to it again it's some interesting content but yeah it's probably gone oh i'm sorry i didn't interrupt one more layer to his story though in speaking to github and podcast we were actually syndicated for a while onto github.com explorer ah so for a while there like they you know this is early days too so they they were just they love what we're doing they love the change law they love what we're trying to do about open source and sharing you know all the things happening and they're like let us help you somehow and so they syndicated the the most recent five episodes were on github.com explorer now it's not there anymore so if you go there don't be disappointed i am but um you know if anybody at github wants to you know reignite i'm just kidding no that's some prime real estate right there yeah it was such an interesting time then too because that github was not at all the github it is today which doesn't mean it's bad or good it just means that it was interesting because we could work with the it was ran by developers and not like oh business people are bad but it was like people who want to help other developers do well and do cool things they were willing to share you know what they were doing and and prop up the show for a while there people actually thought the change was owned by github that's how closely things were and so it's just an interesting time i appreciate the time we were on explorer but it was just really interesting that they were able to share that and it was developers who ran it not some bureaucrats or vc that didn't have this humanity connection to us as software developers just trying to like at that time this show was just a hobby like it was after that it became a business for like a better terms yeah you know yeah and that's what i'm really excited to talk about next so of course there was kind of like a urban dictionary has this definition of this word called pod fade yes essentially a podcast will start publishing less and less frequently and maybe they won't admit to themselves that they're that the best days of the podcast are behind them but maybe they are kind of heading toward the door so to speak so often times with a pod fade there will be a long gap and there'll be one last episode in which the podcast announces that it's returning yes that is when you know you have a podcast apology sorry we've been so quiet we're back and that's that's the end but that happens a lot on youtube too yes we had that but we continued yeah so let's talk about that struggle for the soul of the changed log ah okay so um slight backstory on that too so wen and i both uh met this guy named uh josh cofer who was starting a non-profit he actually met win first and win and i were both freelancing as i mentioned and doing the change law podcast as a hobby fun thing just to do and uh and when was building his team for pure charity this this non-profit that josh koffer was forming to be a place for nonprofits to coalesce to get information on how to best fundraise how to lead their charges how to unify their followers their supporters for lack of better terms um william was like first you know one of the first picks i was a second hire after him so i guess i was first pick um he's like adam do you want you know do you want to do this this kind of thing and so next thing you know we're working for this you know this non-profit called pure charity and uh when was cto i think i was like you know ux design or something like that i don't remember what my title was doesn't matter the point was was that we were just sort of like fleshing out our careers a bit more and about two years pass and the majors call right wins in the farm club at pure charity the majors github calls and says hey when uh you want to come up to san francisco we want to talk to you about some things and so long story short he got called up to the majors he couldn't say no it wasn't it was we both loved we were doing it pure charity but he couldn't say no to it yeah and it was a you know like any podcast it's just a hobby you only have so much love for it and so much time for when you have family you know you've got your career you've got other things and so we was like hey i'm out of time i just can't do this anymore and i think that was around september 2012 and uh and and i was kind of bummed i'm like hey i get it i don't have a lot of time for it either and then i sat in this sort of lull for a while just thinking like you know it's not worth much but would anybody want to buy it like should i keep it going what should i do with it you know i know it's i know what it means to so many people and what it could mean if we just keep it going and so i was just really in this whole space where i was just questioning whether it made any more sense for me because i'm definitely you know more on the design front-end side than developer side and jared has to remind me all the time to drop my impostor syndrome and say dude your developer because i at least even right now i feel less developer than i had been before but i was always more on the front end user experience sort of like biz dev side of things relationship side of things how should it look how should it function how can we deliver it then the follow through then the doing part of software and i've i've worked with great people but it's just not where i shine i can do it but i shine better in other areas and so i was like am i an imposter by just keeping this thing going what can i do yeah man that is some hardcore imposter syndrome and i totally yeah there have definitely been deaths with free code camp as well uh where i felt so like a total imposter yeah um but thank goodness you didn't sell it because i there's no way that anybody could have taken it over and brought it to such heights as it is today but thank you um so that's something i'm extremely grateful for that you that you stuck with it um yeah so you stuck with it and and a phone call or tell us the story behind jared entering the stage i'll tee it up uniform and get okay my teep is super short he emailed win yeah and went forward the email to me that was it yeah so i was a listener and i was tracking the blog so win has an uncanny skill of finding new things the gems yeah he could find gems and you know over the years i've tried to imitate that and i've gotten pretty okay at it but i like to find things too you know a new open source project here a new technique a great blog post and so i was following the blog mostly i was i'm also a podcast junkie was back then still that's why i know about git splosion where most people don't even realize that was a podcast i'm like the github guys have a podcast i'll listen to it and so i was a listener of the show and i really appreciated the blog because i was in omaha nebraska doing my thing writing software for people and i very much felt like i was on an island so to speak in the open source world i i cut my teeth on unix and and linux networks and i was a vim guy early on i was just always in open source like i learned perl and then i learned ruby and then rails blew my mind and i was building rails websites and so i was in the open source universe i didn't even really realize that like there was much else even though there's this entire microsoft side of things that i just didn't people started talking about c sharp and i didn't know what they're talking about early on um and then it started to fade and the blogs were coming less and less often and the podcast was happening less and less and i was running my own uh a single person consultancy basically making uh web apps for people and i had known wynn because of ruby i believe i think he had a ruby gem that i used and i can't remember which one it was he actually was involved in the twitter gym for a while yeah he was um and i remember i had you know contributed to that and then basically followed each other on twitter and i started listening to his podcast and he started reading my blog or something anyway we were just mutual connections there and i didn't even know about adam very much except for he was the guy that was always talking to win win did a lot of the interviews on the show back then um i knew that adam was involved in the change log and when the changelog was winning adam but i didn't know who adam was and knew who win was and so when it started to fade out basically i had the capability of just helping out with the blog because i had my own business and so i could fill in gaps and i could do that kind of work and so i just offered i just emailed win i was like hey i see you guys are like struggling to keep it going can i help you know because i can i can blog once a week or whatever it is and so when had i think had actually moved on already i just it was all behind the scenes he was already working in github or something and so he just forwarded he's like hey man thanks for reaching out and he forwarded me to adam and andrew who was also a co-host at the time yeah um because andrew and i were together pure charade as well yeah andrew thorpe and so that's how i got involved was was through that yeah i didn't want to see it die a listener this could be you this is amazing so this this this reminds me of like the story of like you know judas priests how like the robert halford had to leave the band for whatever reason and they found a guy who was running the he he was the singer of a tribute band for judas priest okay and he became the singer of christ it's like a cinderella story and it sounds kind of like this was a cinderella story you're listening one day you're listening to the change log the next day you're on the change slot yeah it was very surreal the first time that i was on the show because i i wrote for the website for a while before i was on the show because andrew was at pure charity andrew moved on to stripe i think he went to yeah he went to work at stripe wasn't going to co-host anymore and uh eventually i came into the co-host role but i remember the first time i was on it was like a reunion episode with me you steve nick and kenneth reitz yeah kenneth reed and andrew was on the show as well yeah five of us and we were just kind of shooting the poop it's supposed to be live every week and it was the first and only live show yeah i could be wrong but but we had ambitions but it was very strange hearing my voice on the show that i've been listening to for all the times you know that was back in uh 2012 2013 time range was when i got involved so yeah well give us a little bit more background about yourself because to even get in the position where you were contributing to these these libraries uh like the twitter gym for example someone i used uh early on as a developer as well so i didn't even realize it until you said it but i've used some of your code um yeah how did you how did you ramp up what's your what's your origin story so it's somewhat humorous to me that you're asking both of us about our origin stories we used to do origin stories on the show that's true in fact you were on the show about four years ago we have got your your origin story as well and we stopped doing those over time because we found that they were kind of hit or miss uh the first one that i remember was kong or mash ape i think ahmad nasrid yeah he had an amazing origin story uh i missed that one i was so bummed yeah i interviewed him by myself and i was like adam this guy had a mate we have to ask everybody their origin stories it's so cool and then we started asking more and more people and it became to where like somebody would have an amazing one the other one would be very boring and straightforward and so that's what you're running into right now because adam just had his origin story from poverty and the military and all these things and my origin story is very status quo for somebody in america and growing up in the 90s i was raised by two parents who loved each other and loved me this coming up on their 50th anniversary in the suburbs of middle america uh pretty typical public school education you know went to college learned some stuff got into got into technology and here i am i mean there's not much there's not much to dig into that's unique or different um and so i don't i don't think we need to cover too much well the one piece of your history that i do like that's kind of interesting is um is the government job you have planned for you after school that's that's an interesting caveat that i don't know how much you want to share about sure that's an interesting caveat to your story yeah absolutely so there are there are some things in there that that we might be able to to dig into so i've always considered myself to be a cautiou a cautious opportunist and so when i see opportunities in my life i just kind of cautiously go into them versus either like rambunctiously going in or jump right in or go or not go in so like that's kind of where i've been and even with the changelog this was not like i decided hey this is going to be a new part of my career i was just more like i could contribute to the blog like i saw a need and i kind of started then it just like slowly slowly steamrolled and so that's the story of my education as well i didn't i wasn't into software i wasn't into technology i got my first computer i was 18 years old which is relatively late for a lot of developers the only thing i did on it was napster you know pretty much and then i play video games um a friend of mine in high school told me i should apply for a scholarship there's a thing in omaha called the walter j scott scholarship walter scott is a guy who's done very well for himself and uh has a scholarship for certain students to go into technology industry and then stay in omaha is kind of his deal that's cool i had never heard of it my friend said hey you should try this out it's an i.t thing and i was like i.t what's that it was you know internet things right i mean i was actually planning on being an architect that was but i wasn't like passionate about art you know in school they kind of like make you pick something and uh i had done pretty good on the cad machine like i could dr draw a thread you know i remember my my cad design teacher was like you're gonna make a great architect one day i'm like okay i'll be an architect and that was like the extent of my passion for architecture but i was like okay i could do that looking back i think i was just good at manipulating the computer to make a thread design not the actual design itself so i was probably just better at cad than i was at architecture because i i do have a knack for these things but i just didn't know it anyways my friend chad told me about this scholarship and my pre my other friend aaron had gotten the scholarship a year earlier it's for people who test pretty well on on scores and aaron tested very well and i thought if he could do it i could do it that was kind of my my attitude so i applied for the scholarship got the scholarship and it included you know like a computer and stuff like that full ride to you university of nebraska so that was really cool and that's really what got me into software at all i was management information systems i was it's which is kind of like computer science but it's not computer science it's like they try to sell as the best of both worlds of like business and computer science together i found out that's actually means like the least of both of those worlds right like you're not a computer scientist you're not a business person either and so it's kind of like just a lukewarm version of either of those other majors right don't recommend it just go computer science if you are going to go to a four-year school second that recommendation um or just start off recode campaign uh and i didn't really learn yeah in the second day i would encourage people to still go to school if you have the resources to go to school yeah i would too um well there's lots of routes so i actually i'll say this everybody needs something a little bit different and so for some people a free code camp is like 100 the way to go even if they have the resources for some people a uh a boot camp like an in-person immersive but still short thing is great way to get started they can go from there for other people they may need you know a four-year degree before they go into it your age matters your life circumstance matters absolutely and so there really is not like a a single solution to rule them all which is why i love how many options there are and how it's like an ecosystem anyways a little bit off topic i like that though i mean a lot of facets to how you can learn that's what's important right the important thing to communicate is there's not one way that that rules all your way may be different than mine or jared's or quincy's and it's just a matter of persevering through it getting over the humps and hurdles right that sometimes i mean that's why it's hard because hard things if it was easy everyone would do it it's hard because it's worth doing so persevere find some friends or your tribe to you know guide you through or support you through you know get get people around you mentors all that stuff so there isn't one way that's the best fit for everybody yeah so i cautiously walked into that opportunity and it worked out and that moved me off the architecture track and into the computer world so to speak i didn't really learn very much about computer systems in the first few years of my college it's just a unfortunate fact some of that was me a lot of that was the school my last year i found another potential scholarship and i liked scholarships because uh it's free money and uh this one was cool so the one a cool thing about the walter scott scholarship is it's uh stackable and there's actually a term i can't remember what it is but certain ones you get like a full ride and you're done you can't actually get other scholarships well for enterprising students who would rather get scholarships than like jobs like myself uh you could find ones that stacked and if you can get those then you're basically getting more money so i found another scholarship called the national science foundation scholarship for service and it was all about information assurance and so this was like a push into getting some of these cs people and mis people into software security so assurance that your software is information assurance yeah but it's like quality assurance and information security yeah matched up exactly it's like how sure are you and can you can we be sure about our systems and so it was very much a a a government thing um it was two years of schooling which stacked on top of my other scholarship with a concentration on information assurance which was a new thing at the university at the time i think it still exists but it's basically i learned penetration testing securing and hardening systems you know defense in depth all these security concepts um and then i was supposed to go into two attached to that is two years to work with a government agency upon graduation so it was really great i actually learned a lot in that program you learn the the really nitty-gritty of how systems work networks especially and how insecure they are and ways that you can pick those things apart um upon graduation there was a hiring freeze in the in the government and so we had a circumstance where you know sometimes the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing well on the right side of the government's hands they were creating a new scholarship for service to get all these new bright young minds to go work for a three-letter agency and on the left-hand side they had a hiring freeze on so we were the first class that did the scholarship there's 200 of us nationwide and there were no jobs for us but we had this agreement commitment yeah a commitment a two-year commitment and so it was kind of like make you peel potatoes for two years well they wanted us to wait sit around and wait really they expected you to wait for just two years before starting your career yeah sit around and wait so that was unfortunate so i was in this weird like uh no man's land where i was graduating i had this commitment but there was no job to actually fulfill a commitment and so what was i supposed to do well uh in that time frame this is like when i was in the 21 to 23 time reign time range uh at age 22 i became a christian and i started to attend a local bible church in omaha and i really felt like it was important for me to stay there while i was there i met the pastor who's also an i.t guy and ran a software company with a networking need and he was like i'll put you to work and even it's great really he's like yeah in fact you can work for me as long as you want and then if they come knocking then you can just leave like you know most people it's hard to find a job in that place because like by the way i might have to quit at any moment's notice and go work for the government he was like he did that for me oh stand-up guy yeah he's spectacular changed my life in many ways that guy his name is john malone and he also thought it was ridiculous that they were basically holding this commitment to us and so he helped me petition the school and the system and basically they let a lot of us just off our commitment because there's no jobs and so he was instrumental in you know providing for me during that time period and then also helping me to get that commitment raised and so i just kept working for him i was like well this worked out pretty well uh he helped me out when i was in a bind he's a software guy he from way back in the day he knows all the the nuts and bolts of like the old school software guys and he's got work for me to do so i just worked for him for a while um i was never really considered myself a programmer back then i was kind of like a networking scripter i consider myself a scripter it's funny how reluctant people are to consider themselves developers or developers like i'm not quite a developer i know like i took some of the developer like i took c plus plus and i took uh c programming which i actually liked more than c plus plus we can we could talk about that but and i learned pearl and as a penetration tester as a person who's like trying to break into systems and stuff or find holes or even as a script kitty like there's a reason why they're called script kitties because they don't have the skills of a cat but they got the scripts and so i would learn scripts i would read scripts i would write scripts i consider myself like an automator and so i i wrote a lot of perl scripts um and then i found the ruby programming language and i was like why would i write perl scripts when i can write ruby scripts kind of the spiritual successor to ruby yeah yeah i borrowed a lot of the great things from pearl and then discarded some of the things some of the warts um and so i started writing ruby i knew some pearl i knew some ruby i considered myself a networking guy like i ran some mail servers and i would automate a lot of things around that job so while i was working for john i automated a lot of the things that he had for me to do on the network and so i could either twiddle my thumbs at work because i had automated all my my responsibilities or i could consid continue learning my skit you know establishing my skills and so i was tweaking wordpress blogs mostly my blog it's kind of like pimp my blog early in the day yeah where i had this blog it was probably slightly better than adams in terms of like content because it was like a i was trying to write interesting things it wasn't what you said it's like family photos and stuff pretty much yeah a little bit more an occasional personal thought but nothing very profound and i was writing about software and just blogging and i really want is a wordpress site i really wanted my latest i remember when i started realizing oh i can just program websites there's like a flip in my mind and it was uh i wanted my most recently played itunes songs in the sidebar of my blog because back this is the blogosphere day yeah you were trying to share kind of the little things i wanted to pit my blog like i wanted cool stuff in my sidebar and so i had to basically start writing php like i wrote a wordpress plugin or something like that and it talked to the you know the the imac at my house i came here exactly the details and i got it done you know and that was really cool and then i was like okay what else can i do with my blog you know start like integrating the flickr stuff into this right all these masters not instagram flickr that's right back in the flickr days all the math and we were just mashing stuff up back then that was the cool thing open apis mash them up come up with something new i loved that stuff yeah and so that's when i started thinking you know what i could just do this for other people because uh it's pretty cool and i saw the power of the web platform really and i was like every business needs something like this or could or could be advantaged by having one like today it's kind of table stakes to have a certain you know web presence but back then we're talking 2006 it was not table stakes it was advanced it was a competitive advantage you know so i started helping people do that kind of stuff i learned ruby on rails and because i had this job where i was doing networking but also this boss who was like hey you've you've achieved all these goals that we need if you can go make money another way go ahead and go do that and so i started bringing basically freelance consulting clients into his business and operating on like a one-on-one basis with them and i did that for years and that's kind of from that mill eventually i i went out on my own and started my own entity uh doing very similar work bought my customers from him uh you know still great friends to this day it wasn't like that uh started doing it on my own and in that circumstances when i was like fly away a bird fly away yeah exactly you graduated yeah so yeah under those circumstances i could help out with the change log and so that's in 2012 is when i hooked up with adam and went you know you're hearing this somewhat for the first time right i mean and kind of i am too it's i'm kind of mind blown that what's interesting about the story of success right this overnight success actually took many years and then you when you dig into the details you get to see all the little things that sort of had to happen to make things yeah successful or happen right like if jared wasn't fortunate enough in those ways to have a good friend given that opportunity him thrive in it and then excel at it to a point where he can actually go off on his own and have that freedom and flexibility well geez i mean he would have never emailed wynn i would have probably pod faded forever right you know and it would have been just a dead dog yeah you're right i mean what i'm getting from hearing your respective origin stories is there are so many people along the way yeah who were almost guarded in a way yeah and cleared the path for you to go toward your destiny of uh running the change log together yeah one more aspect that jared's story that he's not sharing yet i'm sure he might is the same person john told him what enough communicator he was that's right and he's the person that sort of like gave that insight to jared so sometimes you have these these truths about you that you don't know right it's kind of weird to like know you but not know all of you and somebody else sees this thing in you and he shares this with jared that he's a really good communicator tell the story of course but you know and it sort of like gave jared a new perspective on right how he could be as good as he is in software and technology but then also a good communicator and to bridge those two yeah so that was one of the insights that john gave me uh at some point camera exactly when i've been working for him for a while i'd known him for a while and we were good friends and he saw my programming skills which are you know i would say average to slightly above average like i can i can throw down but i'm not gonna blow anybody away okay there's hundreds if not thousands of better developers out there maybe tens of thousands i don't know we don't yeah we don't measure these things point is is like could i be the best software developer in the world no but i can hold my own and then on the other side with communication skills and the ability to to write well to think you know off the top of your head to speak to people in ways that they understand uh am i the best at that no i'm not the best at that either but there's very few people that kind of play in both of those playgrounds i mean the stereo type of a developer which i believe we're finally starting to break out of that mold and i love it there's so many different kinds of developers now but it's like the the anti-social you know person in their basement very doesn't want to talk to people wants to just i just want to code all day and drink mountain dew like that stereotype uh there's some truth in stereotypes right uh generally there's truth and then specifically they're they're wrong they're false but the general truth there is that developers are not the best communicators and so there's very few good developers who can also communicate and so john said to me i didn't realize any of this i'm looking back at it realizing he said where you're going to succeed in this industry is that you can be you can bridge the gap between developers and communication skills and i was like oh cool maybe you're right oh cool and then it's like well a podcast about software development yeah i guess that does kind of make sense in retrospect so yeah he definitely made me aware of that as a possibility you know i didn't even think about it so yeah we've had you know i think everybody has influencers or enablers or you know that drill sergeant that says you're a leader now yeah uh i think everybody has those stories and sometimes it takes introspection and reflection to actually think about that you know because so much we're just like iterating forward yeah and not looking back so lots of people yeah thank god for him too i mean geez you know that's why i think it's so important if you're in that position that's why i made that point earlier and to make it again is that if you're in that kind of position to um to enable somebody what a blessing it is to enable somebody the feedback loop is nice it's a nice to have it's not a need to have in if you're in that position because just help people along the way i mean i can't even imagine how many people have listened to your show or our show or have been influenced by free code camp or the changelog or whatever we're doing that we've never even heard of that like their lives have literally changed and we don't even know yeah you know we just gotta show up every day do what we do you know if we say we're gonna do it do it if they say we're gonna be there be there and just help people to find respect you know compassion empathy and and sometimes even the benefit of the doubt you know yeah not everybody's bad and everybody's good but uh finding that balance and uh encouraging somebody and being that person that's that's what i that's what i love most about what we do is is being able to to influence people's lives yeah and to love on people and i know we're not we're not to that part of the interview yet but i'll just say the the impact that you've had with free code camp in the first five years we'll get to that later yeah i mean it's it's amazing to watch what you've done there and and the amount of people whose lives you've helped i mean it's it's astounding i mean i've read those numbers that you put in that blog post and i was just like wow that's this is some serious impact and like you know that tide is rising a lot of people's ships and it's it's really cool so thank you props to you on that thanks i'm uh doing my best just like you all right trying to be consistent yeah the three c's right yeah well why don't you just go since we mentioned the 3c yeah this is something that i i had kind of just kind of recognized whenever i thought about the recipe for success when it comes to producing a podcast or basically any sort of piece of content you have uh basically three c's you got quality content or just content produced on a consistent basis to a community of people so if you're producing content that's good that people want to consume enjoy share like whatever it might be on a consistent basis or at least something where you set an expectation you know hey i'm going to do a show every week and then that's your that's your rhythm that's your cadence and then if you wrap all that around to a community or either develop a community or do it for a community then you're going to have some success because that's all it takes you could be talking about knitting you could be talking about software you could be talking about uh cameras and lighting you could be talking about microphones whatever if you do that on that kind of rhythm that kind of basis with that kind of focus you'll find success and that's and that's not easy to do either no it's not the three c's is it's nice to remember them and it's it it is somewhat easy to say even though you throw the cue in there that makes you up but it's easy to say but especially the consistency part like you said quincy you're just trying to be consistent yeah and like even now we've transitioned into like a full-blown business and like we're established we've been here for 10 years but like consistency you know quality content is hard as well i feel like we've gotten better at that over the years and you can you can develop an eye for it and sometimes you still strike out or in our case an ear yeah or an ear for it um community is something that comes naturally to people who commune with other people yeah yeah you have to put effort into that and it doesn't come without effort but it's not as hard as consistency consistency consistency is so hard and that's why the pod fade is like a word in urban dictionary i would say for me i think that the harder thing is community because it's not like field of dreams build it when they come it's you've got to be there you got to show up every day you got to be invitational you're saying the consistency i think it plays the community that's right that's right man they're all three hard yeah so i find it i i find it personally for me it's been a little easier to be consistent with quality content and harder to be part of the community and develop that yeah that's just you know that's me just like with learning you have different paths for me that's the area where i fail more often i think or or don't thrive as well yeah well let's talk about how jared came on board and you had circumstances that were propelling you to professionalize the change yeah if you will well i think when win left it it certainly put a kink in my thought pattern for it like i had made some money um just enough to sort of like you know server cost pay the bills make it somewhat worth it it wasn't like we could leave uh our full-time jobs and even remotely consider doing that as a full-time thing you know we had some early sponsors we'd work with github early for different things when they were promoting github jobs um you know and even then we didn't have a keen eye on how to best partner with brands to help them share their messages in ways that developers really want to hear so relevance is one but then also not objectifying like oh you should get you know just i don't know just finding a way to humanize these businesses and help them reach developers in ways they just weren't able to in other ways like it's not a display ad it's not this or whatever and i think when it became a business the the one thing for me personally which is sort of embarrassing to even mention as i mentioned i was a freelancer for a while and didn't really have a in quotes job i was my own self-employer so to speak um you know i didn't do the best i could have done with filing my taxes properly and paying my taxes properly and you know thank god the government has an option where you can establish a payment plan and i did but that didn't mean that the tax debt was gone right away so i had accumulated a little bit of tax debt having essentially bloodied my knuckles as a freelancer i didn't do things so well learned learned how to do it better and then corrected those things but yeah and and this happens to a lot of freelancers the the us tax code is complicated yeah it is but lately uh you know well even as a nonprofit that doesn't have to pay taxes we still spend a huge amount of time yeah figuring out like how to report everything yeah big big event over here keep that designation right that's that's even it too like the difficulty of reporting it especially as uh someone who's only collecting 1099s uh that's really difficult it really is and like you're so focused on just like at least for me my experience was so focused on just showing up and doing that i felt like gosh i just could taxes be a little easier to do and so i just didn't do them for for like a couple years that's no big deal but the point was this what started to to move it into this full-time business you know even an option for it was you know one obviously we heard the baxter jared and all these things sort of orchestrating and coming to be but then two i had just been recently married my wife and i we met in 2010 we got married in 2012 and this is around that time i mentioned when stepped away late 2012 and i would say 2012 to 2013 was the years we began to to formulate what has become a business you know it been in place since 2009 didn't really become anything business substance until 2012 2013 and that's my wife saying hey you can't do my wife just help me as a man guard my time because as somebody who's just ambitious you will often just throw yourselves into things that you probably shouldn't say yes to you probably should say no more often and you know to help me understand that and guard me from that she said if you're gonna do this if you're gonna take time away from our relationship our future etc you got to find some way to make it make money you know make it worth it and so what was really interesting about that is having the heart to love on and care for a community and show up and do these things basically for free no one downloads a podcast and pays a buck right it's all for free but somewhere along the lines we've got to find a way to make a business model or develop a business model that can help us do what we plan to do which is create this awesome content and thrive in the community do it consistently like the 3c say but have a model that allows us to to operate that way and so that was the hardest part was figuring out what that model was it gets kind of easy because sponsorship for podcast seems to be the most typical uh especially now that it's kind of become a thing you know earlier 29 uh 2009 2012 even in that era there wasn't a lot of podcasts it was still early it was before serial and the big boom of podcasts and whatever so you know obviously it would make sense to build a business model around around sponsors now early version was like no sponsors members only kind of thing and in all honesty i would love to run a membership driven only kind of business that maybe not love it would be nice it would be fortunate to do that but it's just not it's just not enough to to do what we try to do and and so especially back we've tried some different models we've tried it yeah this is true this was pre-patreon yeah this was pre uh really the modern era of the web where i think people are more forward to support things that they love because they don't want them to go away um back then it was more random like it just wasn't something that people are used to doing yeah and so maybe now it would be more feasible whereas when we tried it right which was around the time that i joined 20 2012 i remember the announcement was i wasn't there yet it was like member supported only right and i was like really and i was even a die-hard listener i don't think i signed up so like it's really hard that's terrible yeah sorry man i signed up for five bucks it was hard to get people it was a hard sell back then maybe it's easier now but uh so so a membership program didn't work out the way you hoped it would but you were quick to adapt right well we had to i mean if we were gonna so if i was following my wife's advice hey if you're taking my time away from our time with you know as a relationship and growing our marriage then i've got to find a way to make this succeed as a business and i thought memberships would work i was really hopeful that it would i still as jared said i think we've we've now come into a new world where they're more possible and you also have this sort of new change where people want to support the things they love and i think we have a small amount of people globally that would want to give that to us and i don't want to take the opportunity away the problem i think was that we were relying on that completely as a business model and that just didn't it just didn't work as a solo business model they just it needed more more than that and i think for us i mean there's a lot of opportunity on the table there's so many businesses out there that are trying to reach software developers you know stable partners of ours like leno digitalocean fastly rollbar um git prime and help me if i'm forgetting some because i mean it's not like a long exhaustive list i'm trying to like thank everybody but like some really strong businesses that want to help brands like ours do what we do and at the same time reach an audience they couldn't otherwise reach there's that's something that's something we can latch on to uh fast that i mentioned in particular hey if you listen to our show you might have heard this phrase before bandwidth for change levels provided by fastly learn more at fasta.com you know we move fast and fix things here change a lot because of roll bar head to robot a comment check head to robot.com and check them out and uh you know was the last one we're hosting that's right that's right and so you know stole that i have that idea from lee laporte i mean gosh lee laporte is an icon in podcasting podcasting right tech podcasting right if you listen to their show you know net cash you love pass you trust from people you love that's right there you go yeah they just changed using podcasts now i think they yeah he was stuck on a netcast they were really tears he was stuck yeah he had a chip on his shoulder he got over it yeah yeah yeah but then catfly was one of their core partners i'm like well we if so if i want to build a business around this we've got to find some i can remember talking to you about this i'm like do you think we can get somebody to do this and give us money every month and and like other people that advise us that's probably not possible good luck well we did it you know and uh we find ways to support our business in in ways that just i'm astounded honestly and we're really fortunate we've done a great job you know forging not just sponsorships like that's the sort of the industry term that's known you know we're interested in sponsorship whatever but we look at it more like partnerships you know we thrive our business even personally we thrive on relationships and so we want to work with brands that know who we are know what we're trying to do want to support that but then also get paid a dividend by being able to in in authentic ways speak to the global audience we've been able to cultivate over these years right you know and do that in a way that doesn't objectify our audience or only come in for these reasons like there's it's got to be more to it than just that you know and we help them speak to software developers in ways that that that are relevant yeah i think it's worth pointing out that podcast advertising really works in ways that other forms of advertising don't really work yeah and so the medium is is suited very well for that style uh campaign because you are in you're going directly into people's ears you know week by week time by time and if you can be a staple and supporting a show that people love and are getting for free and so they i think as listeners i'm like i said i'm an old podcast junkie i know a lot of the sponsors who are supporting the shows that i love and i am fine with transferring a little bit of goodwill to that company it's like yeah casper supports this show you know we a lot of the mainstream tech podcasts have very the usual suspects of sponsors right casper squarespace audible like these are brands that have years and years of goodwill because they've been supporting the shows that i love and because they have their hosts the people that i love their shows talking about their brands it's just a very effective thing yeah and so people the reason why i think podcasts are uh such a vibrant ecosystem right now is it's very good for consumers because it's on-demand niche like listen to what you want none of the stuff you don't want it's really low overhead for consumers compared to radio in terms of ads like compare it to the radio ads where they're yelling at you for like seven minutes of the 30. yeah um and then on the on the actual sponsorship side they really work like these sponsorships work whereas display ads and other things just haven't had the roi like the roi is there for the companies that believe in it yeah we've been able to really help a lot of businesses like that like a recent example that i was really stoked about was kubecon so the clouded community computing foundation has this conference every i guess a couple times a year sometimes in europe sometimes united states and uh we've been very good friends with the linux foundation over the years and then that also bleeds into the cloud native computing foundation and their conference kubecon which we've gone to we love going there we're actually going back this year gerhard lazu is representing us this year so that's awesome but we have just ran some promos for them to promote hey if you're thinking about attending use our code save 10 percent get the early bird pricing for extended times whatever it might be and you know join this kind of community and and help them share the invitation with the larger community and their feedback to us was like your code was the most used over all the people that we used in these promotional ways and i just love that because for one everybody attending is to save ten percent but then two like it it's proof that we actually can help uh willing community people in in the software world to uh hear something on a podcast and actually take action and and it's not like i'm selling jared something he doesn't want with money he can't he doesn't have or even something generic right like if i'm listening to go time and i hear an ad for kubecon like i'm super interested in kubecon like oh great it's coming up it's going to be in brussels so i'm not sure where it is but you know answer that amsterdam go to that these are not burger king ads or right crest you know we've considered the impossible burger ad though no i'm just kidding i'm just kidding so anyway that was a joke it's proven to be a very viable model for for you know it really is a win-win-win just to use michael scott's phrase because the sponsors do and our partners win because of the results like that we win because we're making a living off of it and our listeners get free shows consistently quality content right and they you know we put out 60 to 90 minute shows and you're gonna listen to two or three ads in a 90-minute show we're not asking very much and those ads are incredibly pointed and valuable like it's content it's like oh that's interesting i i'm i'm interested in that so it's not annoying it's yeah so i think everybody wins i like the model and that's like what they found with advertising is if it's relevant then it's less irksome right and in this case with podcasts podcasts can be hyper targeted like this is a podcast about open source software right i mean you could never get that level of grading reality with like tv that's right yeah that's why some of the larger more mainstream podcasts struggle with the sales to the sponsors because they don't have the targeted audience they have huge audiences but they aren't targeted so you'll hear a lot of mainstream ones like even mainstream tech like the verge cast which is a pretty mainstream tech news and commentary show they will you'll hear them asking their listeners to take surveys and stuff because they have a more generic mainstream listener base they don't know exactly who they're talking to well when you have a show called go time about the go programming language and kubernetes and these things you know exactly who's listening to that show yeah and so you don't have to survey them you know that's the value of a niche yeah speaking of go time i think this is a perfect opportunity for me to ask at what point so you had the change log yeah that is the granddaddy of uh open source podcast we call it our flagship show that's a flagship show and now you have several you have several that were shorter period like request for commits which was one of my personal favorites yeah uh learned a ton from that one me too um but how did you go about creating additional shows and and how do those all work let me take this one go for it okay so we have been working with uh brian kettleson and eric st martin of of gophercon uh it was their second year actually i think the reason we even did the show it begins because brian kettleson hopped in our issues and and github in our pink we had a ping repo where we would say hey community if you have some ideas suggestions whatever we've since moved it to different ways but we used to have a repo on our github org called ping which is that's another win thing honestly he's so awesome but uh brian kelson reached out to us on our issues there and said hey if you haven't thought about it yet you should come to gophercon this is our invitation to you and that's what i love about brian too is he's like he is like the uh the mack daddy of like and you can i'm showing my age here too because that's that's a 90s thing he's the mack daddy of like inviting people in right i love that about brian and eric uh and he he reached out to us we had them on the changelog talking about gophercon they invited us up to their conference we went out there and did some fun stuff if you go to change.com films you'll probably see some cool stuff we've actually done some video work there with them and and and whatnot and so we just sort of fell in love with the go community you know they're really i would say different than other communities because they just they just seem very it's like once you i don't know how to describe it maybe you can help me jerry but just very very protective and very close tight-knit very tight-knit yeah enthusiastic yeah and it's like once you're in you're in and we just loved uh their you know that conference uh everyone who went through it we just loved how people collaborated and mingled together and had fun together it was just such a fun conference and i don't know if it was the conference and the community but we just sort of fell in love with that we're like well once we we always had desires to expand we're like well the next one we do makes sense to be a go podcast of sorts but jared you came up with a name so i mean take it take it from there yeah what an amazing name it is too it's go time it's go time yeah it seems obvious in retrospect uh naming is one of my favorite things naming things is hard as we all know as developers and so i love to do it because i like challenges and sometimes it takes a thousand bad names for one good one to be born and we've definitely been through those thousand bad names because we have a portfolio of shows now in addition to just the go thing happening we have with the changelog one opportunity a week to to spot to spotlight something and we it's very polyglot as you know as a listener we don't have i mean open source is kind of the crux of the matter but we even go beyond that and and we've even changed the word to software development in terms of the things that we talk about because uh even though open source basically permeates all software development it's bigger than just open source even now just because our interests have grown over the years that being said that's 50 weeks a year that's 50 shows a year if you take a couple weeks off and there's so much more things to talk about there's so much more things to spotlight and we had a lot of listeners who's like hey i love the changelog i would love to hear more but more about this topic or more about that topic because if we covered go or a specific language even for four weeks straight to be like well did this turn into a go podcast or are you still sort of multifaceted like you like you say you are and so you have to there's one way you can diversify you can either diversify and add more shows to that particular podcast and just diversify by i guess multiplication just picking some words dividing by multiplying yeah you know we could ship more shows a week long but then we would have to have like series and like people do seasons there's lots of different ways of slicing it but what we thought would be a lot cooler is instead of the two of us doing more shows because you hear our voices all the time anyways and we're here to spotlight the guest like we want more voices that's what we've always been about when we have the opportunities like more voices more people different voices than ours and so let's you know exp let's extend our network and our production skills and our the tastes that we have and the interest that we have to other people and let's enable them to do shows and so that's what really became the portfolio now some of us are on like i'm on js party regularly adam has a show called brain science that's himself and muriel reese and so it's not like we're not on those shows but we don't you know it's not like the change they're different shows they're different people and we've been able to expand the number of voices on our network to much larger than ours and so that's pretty cool i think yeah and one thing that i think is really cool is you figured out ways to take that kind of like cool fractal logo and create variations of like radial symmetry yep um each i mean i'm wearing the changelog shirt yeah this is my new one by the way my old ones right here that uh i got four years ago it's been washed about a hundred times but for everybody who's watching love it this is what it looked like this is in the you've even got a framed one over here uh but yeah adam sent me this after i was on the changelog that was your old school credentials right there yeah that's right the og og yeah but the way that you've branded them all and they've all got really cool short punchy names and uh and they have kind of a consistent sound and a big part of that cohesive consistent sound is brakemaster cylinder yeah can you tell us about brake master cylinder not much because we don't know much honestly what's the mysterious the mysterious great master cylinder well you know it's interesting because i obviously heard of brake master cylinder through gimlet media and the work they've done with reply all and startup and other shows so that's where i learned a barbecue master cylinder and just one crazy night on the internet like most things happen i was like just figuring out break master cylinder you know the kind of stuff they're into or whatever and i'll i turn up their website and there's like an invite to reach out and i didn't i thought was like typical contact me kind of scenarios where you reach out and they just never talk to you right there's no response well like the very next day brakemaster gets in touch and says i love what you're doing let's work together i didn't expect that uh that turns us into the scenario where jared and i are sort of riffing with breakmaster on some different ideas for brand new music for the changelog podcast and i think was a good time no time in rc and the reason why go time was so important so this was kind of a a milestone for for me or like okay we're going to do this for real because up until this point so the original change dog had the california song which is has a tight story with adam uh and a band that he knows and all that but then we also just had some like adam would go out onto i don't know sound forest or what are these websites like yeah like the the sound equivalent of the forest premium beat yeah and just buy something you know and you get it it's a royalty or it's a you pay a license yeah but it's not an exclusive license and so he would just pick music he likes we put that at the front of our shows that would be our theme song it was like that for a very long time and in fact when we expanded from just the changelog go time was our second show when we did go time adam found this song that was sorry it's all right don't worry it was uh beloved and it was probably on the first i don't know 10 to 20 episodes yep enough people were like don't change anything yeah so we had some resistance on that one but what happened was because it's just a sound clip that you can buy a license to anybody can do that and it showed up in a commercial what commercial was that disney yeah disney so somebody was tasteful one of the go time listeners is like why is the go time theme song on this disney commercial and we were like okay that was what it was like we have to get our own music yeah it was and it happened with our show or our uh music on the channel too it was a john deere commercial or a craftsman lawnmower commercial and it was like this grungy rock kind of uh and then also that that can put people off too if it's too rough it's not really inviting with everything about the music so what was funny about that was it become clear we weren't unique and right if we had licensed music we wouldn't be unique right so we started working with brakemaster cylinder and with the changelog and rfc which was uh a great show and had i think to this day the best the best music which we don't use now because that shows retired but we should somehow remix that uh it was green field like okay people knew the changelog song but we weren't trying to like they weren't in love with it so we could just start yeah and with new shows it's always brand new with go time the go time crew the listeners who as we said is a very tight-knit and enthusiastic and like very active audience they already loved this song and now we had to replace it with a custom song and so we asked brake pastor cylinder to basically like do a different version like make a remix of it make it break master but make it us but also make it kind of sound like the one that's already out there yeah and uh some people didn't even notice when we swapped it in but some people were mad some people yeah we always when brave master hands us anything to listen to i'm always like doesn't have enough bmc in it can you do it like these glitches like bmc's just break master children's is known for certain things yeah and we're like can you bring in some of these you know trademark break master cylinder stuff so we always love you know to speak very well of brave master cylinder we keep saying this name we don't know guy girl we're not sure if it's one person many people we've never met them we don't really have a first name basis at all besides maybe breakmaster that might be first name right just cutting off cylinders you know but they're in our slack so hey if you if you're out there you're like i want to talk to break master cylinder well go to change.com community doing that hop in our slack and dm or say hello that's just that easy but i'm always talking to breakmaster about different stuff we're working on or just catching up they'll just reach out and say hey how you doing and we'll have like a 20 minute conversation and like three weeks go by and that happens again or something like that so yeah but so easy to work with so not even like what i what often happens with creatives is they're very attached egotistically to what they've done like their creations are often a variation of their identity with break masters there's there's like a zero of that they just throw it out they're just like you don't like that cool let's keep breathing let's keep roofing let's go they're kind of yeah professional detachment from yeah artistic work always willing to like break master is the one of the scenarios where i can see they always deliver way more than you expect them to like they just want to keep delivering more and more value that's a that's a lesson to be learned always deliver more value to the people you're working with and if you can't code reviews are hard you're reviewing somebody's music that they're creating for you is incredibly difficult and it's custom and you don't even know we don't even have the language to describe you know and i i'm expecting from breakmaster's side similar to a code review or even a feature review with the user you can't spread that language too yeah you can't do that like you're almost offended by how juvenile you know the feedback is like yeah exactly so when you're trying to give feedback i can imagine from the other side like who are these fools you know like i don't like that hi-hat at eight seconds you know like whatever like how do you we're always like yeah it's not it's not grooving enough you know make it a little more poppy like the stuff you're saying it's very difficult so yeah very extreme grace and they're talking like time code and and uh and maybe even like majors or minors right or we're like take that wubble wubble take that wubble wubble out of there you know the naming is even cooler too like when brakemaster hands us new stuff to listen to it's always got these unique names attached to it and it's like this one with a little bump bump bump or something like like the the file name is literally named some really interesting stuff so it's just a a lot of fun work with breakmaster and and i'll say you know having having done all of our shows redone the song for the changelog and all that stuff like having only brakemaster cylinder stuff it would be a sad day in our history if we never got to have a break and i'm kind of getting a little bit weird about it but like if something ever happened to brakemaster and we couldn't ever work with them again for whatever reason whether it's they move on or something bad happens who knows i would be really it would be a day i'm worn like i love working with them and they produce the best stuff and we wouldn't use any other music besides breakmaster cylinder music that's a that's a pretty strong endorsement yeah yeah just because they're just so easy to work with they get our they get our dna they get our branding they get what we're trying to do and i just feel like they just add this this special flair that like you'd mention the artwork well there's a reason why because we we sat down in a room for two days basically in a bunker with jake stutzman and uh was it the guy's name micah yeah micah i can't remember his last name though like a frost or fost something like that can't recall but mike you're awesome too but we basically sat down and said hey who are we how can we understand uh what we want to be and how can we create a brand both a visual brand and a voice you know how we speak brand and you know from that we got our artwork we got these concentric circles we got this framework for developing new album art and then from that we also knew well if we're this unique here we have to be this unique in our music too you know the ways we audibly present ourselves yeah well it shows and and also the the design of the changelog.com uh that everything kind of reinforces that visual design that visual identity that you all have established for yourself and now i really want to learn more about the website my understanding is it's written in elixir it's snappy and it just has really good clear user experience like you know exactly what is going to happen when you click on different things and everything's pretty clear it for me it's been a real benchmark uh and and we've taken a lot of inspiration uh from it with with free code camp and and our recent um our recent efforts at at redesigning and simplifying and things like that so thank you yeah yeah who did most of the design like what's the story behind the platform so it's a everything's a team effort and i think uh one thing that you might notice through this conversation is that we do sweat the details we have a few sayings that we use internally one is uh slow down to move faster uh we also say uh what's the one stop slow well slow and steady wins the race yeah a lot of stuff about being slow slow down and check yourself and check yourself that's my favorite yeah so yeah because we can get uh we can get moving to we can get out over our skis a little bit well all too often in anything you feel like especially when there's opportunity and you're ambitious all too often do the opportunities trump your ability to say no right and the next thing you know you're going in places you don't really want to for other reasons and it's like if you feel pulled in anything you're doing beyond your capacity slow down and check yourself right that's what we said that's right i got to do the hand like that slow down and check yourself yourself because if you have you know some dna and some guidelines so if we know that we want to you know slow down to move faster or retreat to attack or to slow down or slow and steady wins the race if we have those as sort of like underlying mantras to ourselves well time we get pushed beyond those yeah slow down and check yourself yeah and it's worth reminding ourselves of these things because we are in an industry that moves so fast yeah and the the pressure is to i mean move fast and break things as the unfortunate you know slogan of a major player in our industry uh which we don't like that saying at all um so slow down and and move faster that way even when you think about software development practices right like thinking things through up front is slower but you also move faster in the long run setting up that test harness right before you move on to writing the code is slower but you all you move faster in the long run i mean people who are tdd advocates they will say the same thing like you think through things first and you move a little bit slower and it seems like you're not getting that head of steam but you know two weeks from now two months from now two years from now you're moving a lot faster and so like the brand is an evidence of that it's like we took the time we slowed down spent two days in a room and then many more beyond that you know that was like the foundation of like building this system and this design and then we can extend it over time we can move faster on new things we have all this stuff in place and so a lot of the website is a result of those initial branding discussions a lot of the design is done either by jake or by cody peterson who is a long time contributor uh and really co-laborer with us on the project he does a lot of our front end a lot of our design work and then added on myself whether it's giving feedback or cranking out the code that renders the pages so i've done a lot of the actual software work on building the elixir app but everything we do is team efforts i think one interesting thing to note is uh is the fact that jared said earlier i was a pearl guy then i was a ruby guy and so i built the site in elixir i mean that this doesn't equate but maybe you can sure why yeah i mean so i've always like i've always been a polyglot and i like programming languages i like the go programming language even though i don't write it on a daily basis i liked uh i like i like a lot of languages and so i've never found one that didn't have any redeemable qualities i even like aspects of php even though it has probably less redeemable qualities and with regard to syntax than many others slight dig i like php too we talk to a lot of people about programming languages i mean that's one of the things about our work is we're exposed to everything in fact i was just thinking about something that came mainstream recently and i was like we did a show on that three years ago like not boasting but just like reality like we are uncovering things before they blow up in fact we have a changelog nightly one of our emails that goes out every single night it's whole point is to it automatically just gets the most start repos on github before they blow up is the idea or like right as they are and maybe those things are going to go on the greatness maybe they aren't we'll pick through them and try to find someone that are interested in interesting yeah but it's an indicator so we're just just because of what we do and and and uh our show we're just at the forefront and so we talk to a lot of people about programming languages and uh some people assume therefore we're like deep into these things or we adopt everything and it's like no like 99 of the stuff we hang up the call on a wednesday afternoon i'm like adam i gotta check this thing out because we just spent 90 minutes with person who's got something cool they created yeah and i'm excited because i get excited about you know cool stuff uh jam stack i remember actually i think that was the one where jam stacks be coming to be like a mainstream top you guys rebuilt your stuff in jam stack we did the show on jam stuff two years ago at least two and a half years ago and that's just because i saw this matching magazine i mean they were the really the ones that were forfeiting that with netlify we had the lfi team on we talked about jam stack and now it's becoming a thing that but then there's other things that we talk about and they don't become a thing so that's just a fact of how the industry works point is we don't like then adopt all of the stuff that we talk about that would be you know impossible and ridiculous to do but there are certain things that you know catch your eye and almost nothing do i follow up on because we move on to the next week or the next show and we have other things to do but elixir actually did catch my eye and i tried it and i fell in love with it and i wanted to use it and so that's why i was writing an elixir and it extends from ruby like it takes yeah it takes a lot of information created by a prominent member of the ruby community and so it it looks rubyish when you look at it but the more you get into it yeah but it's not ruby it's interesting it's almost kind of like there's this uh dna that goes back to pearl through ruby and now to elixir yeah and the thing about the elixir uh combination there is it's like a i wouldn't call it a facade but it's more like a carrot on a stick like it's like uh it's like something that attracts you and you're like ooh this is interesting and then as you figure it out you're like actually this isn't what i thought it was but it's still very interesting it's almost like i mean calling it lipstick would be another bad analogy but there's something to it where the ruby relationship is there because jose who created elixir knows ruby inside out and he knows all the best stuff and so when you see it it almost looks like ruby code but then when you start to learn it you realize oh this is something completely entirely different and yet i feel at home even though i'm in a completely new paradigm which is functional programming yeah changelog.com of course is open source you've got a whole lot of contributors not only contributing to that platform itself but also contributors who are hosting shows yeah who are some of the key people within the changelog somebody to name somebody a name so many we've mentioned a few by name cody peterson is a key player on the website with the brand with the design work jake was crucial to developing the changelog brand guidelines and the album art bmc we talked about in great great depth gerhard you mentioned gerhart is going to kubecon on our behalf he's been working with us for a couple of years on infrastructure really helping us uh roll out since well i guess when we first brought the site on 2016 on node yeah exactly so i didn't really unders i didn't really know how to roll out an elixir app uh in a way that was uh old school i'm very old school like ssh into the box and like you know run uh to start apache or index by hand and that just uh isn't really the smart way to do things if you can do them better so gearheart has really helped us pave the way of like doing smart ways of rolling out uh our infrastructure over the years and uh is going to be representing us at kubecon which is very cool so thanks to gerhard um and then as you said we have more than just our one show now so we have a couple shows which are panel shows and we love the variety there so js party which is all about javascript and the web has nine regular panelists myself being one of them any particular episode has three or four people on it sometimes it was a guest so we just kind of like mix and match really borrowing from the the cheers model as i call it remember the show cheers yeah where you just want to go where everybody knows your name the idea there is is that you're at a party or you're at a meeting go time's the same way by the way now um you go to a place where you want to hang out with people and it's like it doesn't have to be the exact same voices every single time but there's like regulars and there's that familiar voice and it's a place to go where you're going to get variety but you're also going to get familiarity just like cheers when you go to the bar and go back and watch the show some episodes are out this person some are about that person and so that's really the model that we came up with for js party which is like they don't have to be the exact same hosts every single time but you should have regulars and so we have nine people who kind of just like mix and match and then we invite guests uh we could definitely name each and every one of those uh i just go good luck yes i don't even know i mean i know the names but yes i don't have them in my mind for us to book dj good job kevin ball goes by kay ball nick niecy who's a fellow omahan uh is on the show boy oh wait that's his uh tag line chris hiller yep christopher hiller bone skull he's the the one of the maintainers of the mocha js test library um divya sasidaran yep short div on twitter she's awesome she's on the show have we gotten to nine yet myself uh emma vaticand emma vatican yep and i think that rounds it out for now i was counting my rogers michael rogers yeah see i was counting on my fingers but it wasn't actually counting i was just doing the ritual yeah yeah and so i lost count rachel white who hasn't been back but she's trying to come back yep uh it's been a while she's been on but i love hearing from her as well she's got an awesome laugh i love her life uh and so much fun too i'll try go times geez i'm gonna probably stumble on some of these matt ryer of course uh i love matt uh john calhoun johnny borsuko carmen ando uh ashley mcnamara jbd that's six mark bates smart fates that's the cast i think so if i'm if i'm i might i think i feel like i'm missing one do you say johnny i did okay i should pull up the website well and obviously the original cast can't forget those guys carlesia pinto you got brian kettleson you got yorkshire martin now you know we started that show you know three how many years ago many years ago by 2015 maybe four 2016 we launched that show and you know we learned a lot of things from from ds party not to sort of explain why the cast is different but just to sort of like evolve that a bit we learned some things about js party and the fact that like this whole cheers motto that jared has just mentioned but it's it's really nice to hear more than just a few voices um and then also sort of what i look at is like representation of a community you know so rather than just you know one or two or three people that are always on the show why not have a rotating cast like we've learned from gs party but but one layer past that is like those are people that are out in that community sort of bringing their perspective to it and then even bringing in content or different topics that the three people or the two people or whatever don't always see it sort of gives you a larger more wider perspective and then also this opportunity of fresh voices more voices more representation and that's why that shows also evolved to sort of like borrow and learn from a lot of what jesus part has gotten right it's also worth pointing out as a podcast hack that in addition to all those things that we just described which are great virtues of that format is that we want to have great people on all of our shows and the thing about great people is they're very busy and so it's very difficult to get the same great people week by week at the same time to show up and do a show prepared and all the things are required to put together a good show so we learned that because we started those shows with less cat a smaller cast and so one of the things we adjusted it's worked out very well is like with three great people it's hard to get all three of those together all the time and so scheduling is one of the major challenges of podcasts another reason for pod pod fading with nine people so much easier we can get three people together out of nine yeah and and it's less pressure on us as panelists and even if they're unprepared or not as well prepared as they like to be it's not especially if you've got a lot of jelly or cohesion in the in the the folks involved it gets a lot easier to sort of like throw a show together last minute if if it came down to it right you know it's just a lot more flexible too yeah and less pressure on us as individuals so one of the things about the consistent evil podcast is let's face it you're just not excited to do it every single week or you have a conflict or that topic is not necessarily something you're into or that guest is somebody that's rubbed you the wrong way or what there's a thousand different reasons and if you're the only person that does the show well you're gonna do that show yeah right but if you have a cast of nine you know uh somebody could take a month off and the show goes on yeah and like we want the shows to go on and so that's one of the reasons that's the other reason why we've moved to in those particular shows a panel format also just to spread the burden because what would happen in this in that case isn't just that they couldn't show up is that they would feel guilty for not being able to right right and then that leads to a you know a spiral of burden burnout guilt all these things that sort of like plague us this sort of uh self voice saying you should do this or you should do that you should you know all these things that make you feel bad for not doing the things you want to do because you have ambitions you got a busy schedule or you got a new job or whatever it might be um we like that because somebody could be a panelist on one of our shows and take a quarter break you know like they've got a teaching thing or a new job spun up or they've got some travel planned no big deal it gets a lot easier to collaborate work with us because we're flexible you know we we're for lack of a better chance we say family first is the easy way to say that but yeah you know you both have kids yeah right so you can empathize with life like absolutely life period yeah i mean you got a sick kid you got vacation you got whatever you know going to see parents going to see family whatever it might be we want to bake that in so because i think what happens is you start to form relationships that get very rigid and very tested because you just can't measure up every time you're not excited about the topic you've got a busy schedule whatever it might be if you bake that flexibility into how things work now that those shows in particular work well now the change of jared and i essentially talking to somebody that has several shows where i can't show up or i'm busier or whatever might be it jarrah takes over no problem or i'll take a show by myself whatever but it's different for those shows that's not how we do those shows those shows that are more community-focused shows need that one it needs that community representation but then also that flexibility to enable people to say yes and be a part of it yeah there's something important there beyond changelog with regard to sustainability in your work because as you can tell we care about this work a lot and it's something that started as a hobby and was a passion and we're so passionate about the things that we're doing but we do not want to create a thing that then becomes our lives and defines us as humans and we wouldn't want that for any of our collaborators as well we live in an industry and we serve an industry that deals with burnout all the time yeah in fact i got sick of talking about i got burned out on talking about burnout because i just because all of our guests are people who are in this circumstance and they're all having the same terrible sort you know thing happened to them and uh you know it's a huge topic of conversation on our shows and in our industry in general because it's a thing that's happening on a way too frequent basis and we want to be in this for the long haul we we can't allow ourselves to burn out by going non-stop you know that's why it's one of the slow down to go faster right slow and steady wins the weights we have to remind ourselves that we it's okay to move a little bit slower because we have these other things yeah and so we try to maintain even though we have the complete flexibility flex flexibility and freedom to work all the hours or do whatever we want is like let's maintain a consistent schedule and not burden ourselves too much because that will first of all burn us out but also it's going to reflect onto the people who collaborate with us right and they're not full-timers right they're they have jobs they have open source projects they're coming on our shows because this is something they want to do yeah but you know that that can create like adam said the guilt and the shame the shame and like we don't want it we don't have anything to do with that stuff so so essentially through having just like a really like a lot of redundancy is the word i'm i'm hearing like you have a lot of people who can step in if somebody doesn't feel up for it or if somebody needs to take a break just by it's almost kind of like a a big distributed system in a way it kind of is yeah you've got like a pub sub system where right you publish and some people sub to that like they're like all right i'll take this gig here right coughing on this podcast yeah i mean for instance kubecon like we would love to be at kubecon the timing doesn't make as much sense adam's having a baby i've traveled a lot this year one of the things we do is we'll talk about conferences we limit our travel because that's another aspect like we love to go to conferences and be in the community love it a lot but we limit that ourselves because well every time we go to a conference we're leaving our family right okay so that's a circumstance where like we want to personally be at kubecon but that's not going to work out and so we have gerhard who's over in london doesn't get to come to the states as often it's going to be in san diego he'd love to have a trip to san diego and he's going to be there and and so that's a situation where it's like okay that makes sense and we've just kind of slowly you know built these relationships with folks where uh it's a win-win-win win but what's also cool too specifically with gerhart is that it gives us a chance to sort of like invite him in further to the fold like he's already worked with us and done tons of amazing things for us to help us with our infrastructure but from a content perspective we've had him on the show we've talked about change law's infrastructure but nothing specific to like giving him more opportunity so to speak yeah and so this was a chance for us to say hey we can't make it there and rather than being like oh we just won't go or you know we're stretching our limits and going and burning and trying to go like well who would be better to go for us and and also have other wins or win wins behind behind the thing so i mean i love the fact that one gerhard is ready to go and he's excited because i see him behind the scenes and the emails and stuff like that planning his trip and he's fired up right and so a year from now we may have a whole new thing we're talking about because of these you know the you know just like with the drill sergeant this invitation to come in gerhard's already a leader in other ways it's not we're inviting the leadership it's right it's the invitation into into the family deeper you know more things and we think of it like a family really i do and i know jared as well yeah that's great to give people opportunities to uh just take on more and more responsibilities and also just to travel yeah yeah and and truth be told he'll speak much better about kubernetes than i will yeah just saying so on the topic of conference just real quick you all do go to a lot of conferences yeah and i'm glad to hear that you have uh recognized that you don't want to go to all the conferences right because we want to go to all but we don't want to yeah yeah exactly yeah and the same thing with me like i just uh need to spend time with my family too and and the travel time and especially depending on where you're going the jet lag yep has consequences as well so what are some conferences that you all try to make it to regularly or what would you say yeah that's that's the first question i'll ask you another question about conversation in a second so i would preface by saying that our circumstances are unique similar to education where each person's different so when it comes time to like pick a conference go to a conference you have to ask yourself what are you trying to get out of the conference like what are your goals and that will inform which ones are a good fit because there's so many shapes and sizes for us i line it up with the change log the show which is broad and polyglot and open source focused and community focused and so we try to find conferences that are along those lines also because we only get to go to a couple a year you know we kind of say like maybe four a year once a quarter makes sense we don't always hit that fall time seems to be like there's lots of conferences in the fall so we tend to go a little bit more than is that we tend to go a little bit bigger conferences because we want to meet more people right we want to see more listeners or meet people that can become listeners and so uh staples for us i mean the the staple for us has been ozcon yeah yeah we've gone up o'reilly's oscon the last four years straight i think maybe three yeah yeah since 2016 every year yeah so oscar's the big one um it's always about kubecon we've been this will be our third year back and then um gopher gone go for con and all things all things open and and oscar and all things open have a lot in common i would say yeah gophercon is obviously a language-oriented conference so it's different than the other ones yeah and then kubecon is obviously kubernetes and all the cloud native which is a big thing yeah but it's not as like cross-sweeping as as as the open source focused ones so those are the ones that we always try to get to um non-interactive two we've i've went to that one one time kabal went there last year and i think nick's going there this year so this is our third time going to it's changed to the name of it so i think this year's iteration is just node i don't know if it's known interactive or not but it's always been just notice known as node interactive but since javascript and node and the js foundation and jquery foundation have sort of like changed and merged and stuff like that it's it had some naming changes too so awesome and my other question regarding conferences would be what would be your advice to somebody out there who's listening who has been a developer or is getting into software development because you all know a lot about different conferences out there yeah what would be a good first conference and what would your advice be to them if they wanted to attend one of those conferences so first i will small plug we have an entire episode of js party called the conference scene which we do we do an hour or four of us about this specific topic so go listen to that if you want the long-winded version sure short link to that yeah cool so short-winded and my advice would be pick something a small single track the cool thing about single track is that you don't have any decisions to make because the less you know the harder it is to make decisions what do i want to go you know and there's the fomo of like there's three tracks which i might miss the good thing a single track has a shared experience everybody saw the exact same thing and so it's a much easier to make conversation yeah because you saw the exact same talk that person did and you don't have to say hey did you hear what chris coyer said they're like no i was in the other track oh okay we can't be friends right so awkward yeah so single track is great for people just getting in like for your first conference smaller size is great because it's just less intimidating more one-on-one opportunities um so you know 200 people fought to 500 versus like a 5 000 person convention so 200 is really tight yeah 500 is a little bit more loose but still small enough mm-hmm uh and then you know other aspects is like regional is fun because you don't travel as far so like it's less of a the worst thing is like well i spent a bunch of money i took three days off of work and i traveled across the country and i didn't have a good time right it's a little bit less risk if it's like well i drove an hour and attended one so i there's a community aspect to the local conferences if you have a language you like like if you're into javascript then you're going to find a javascript conference in your local region that's a great option um that would be my advice mine is very similar okay small conferences are cool especially start i got fond memories of actually uh future of web apps also known as foa uh 2010 uh man met some awesome people allen branch steven bristol and several other people and like they've they were quintessential friends very influential i've gotten some of the best advice in my life from stephen bristol just because we literally met at a conference because we had a podcast called the web 2.0 show and they wanted to meet this these two dudes behind this show that didn't have a gigantic audience but just enough just enough is all it took and they became great friends and for a while there i was going to smaller conferences like that like lone star ruby conference a couple different uh javascript conferences i think js what was it uh texas js or something yes txjs was uh was started here that's somebody else uh on on jesus party started texas j house yeah uh alex sexton maybe yeah alex sexton um that's one more name for him i'm but the point is is just that i met some amazing friends like it maybe i was fortunate that you know just that conference i got to meet people at the same conference i also got to meet gary vaynerchuk and kevin rose we had a podcast about uh with them at that conference i happen to have lost my voice at that conference so i sounded like dmx and kevin said so which was pretty cool too but kevin rose gary vaynerchuk and a bunch of other fun people we've kathy sierra who's like a an icon in user experience and just i mean just amazing so i mean some really cool people over the years that uh you know it was a smaller conference maybe 500 people but you know i got to meet some really really good friends yeah personally so that's that's my personal experience from it awesome one piece of advice before we move on we those are advice on like which conferences to go to but when you're at the conference so nothing noteworthy ever happened when you stayed inside your comfort zone right you're not going to come back home and tell your significant other or your friends some great story because you went to a conference and you attended some talks and you didn't talk to anybody and then you went to the hotel then you flew home or whatever the logistics were right parties you have to actually push yourself outside of your comfort zone and it's not going to feel good because that's what comfort zone means right but this is your opportunity to meet you know people face to face in the flesh whether it's someone you look up to or somebody who is sitting by themselves and needs someone to talk to like if you're going to go to the conference like we can get virtual conversations all day long we get them and they aren't always that great as evidenced by the conversations that we have online but in conferences face-to-face you can have amazing conversations with amazing people but not if you just go and you're a wallflower yeah and so if you're going to go and you're going to put in the effort and the money and all these things you have to push yourself outside your comfort zone otherwise you're not going to get out of it which you can yeah i got one more uh extra on top of that not just that but we learned from eric holster this thing called the pac-man rule right so if you're you know this one i've never heard this no okay i'll give you the short version there's a whole podcast about it we'll point back to we'll add more links to the show notes but uh eric holster was a big fan of inviting people and including people and if you're if you can imagine uh being at an after party or some or in the hallway track whatever it might be and you got a circle of people and there's no openings you don't feel invited to come in right you don't get invited to come into that space so if you leave that wedge there that pac-man shape well there's room for one or two more and as they and the circle just get bigger and bigger but you always have that gap in there to invite people in so he gave uh talks about it he wrote a blog post about it we had a podcast about the talks and the blogs and that just you know inception now you're having a podcast about the podcast that's right that's right but the point is is like you know if you're at a conference describing jared's scenarios one more layer to that is like always leave space to invite one more into the ground if you're staying in a circle look around and see if you can make more of a pac-man shape because that invites one more person in yeah so that's a great tip yeah i've heard like kind of keeping your body language open where you keep your feet out yeah point your toes pointed out um that that also makes people feel more welcome also just saying hi yeah hey how are you that's a good tip yeah looking at people making eye contact with them yeah yeah well these are they seem like obvious things but they aren't easy and we've all been in the awkward circumstance where like you're approaching a circle and there's no gap there and you're like do i what you know do i just hang out until they let me ease in right there's all these awkwardnesses it's already hard enough to get outside your comfort zone and like approach somebody who may reject you or whatever the fears are but when there's no like openness from the group it's even harder anyways we're rambling on i mean it takes me it took me years to get comfortable just approaching developers at a developer conference and uh now when i go to some non-developer thing where you know nobody knows anything about me or and i'm just like some interloper right then i have to reapply all those strategies again to like break into circles and talk to people yeah so it's hard every time yeah it gets easier but it's never easy yeah it's good practice though yeah for sure we're also in in many cases distributed environments or very virtual environments so the awkwardness is going to be there it's going to be there so i guess just own it embrace it embrace it yeah speaking about speaking of embracing things uh you know you all have embraced a lot of changes right there at the beginning of the change log that's right name and you're heading into a new decade a new era of the changelog and uh you know it looks like the field is very open and you've got a lot of possible things you could do with the next 10 years what are some the ambitions or areas that you want to explore or charts you know courses that you've already charted that you're planning to head in that you can share with us i'm usually more visionary and have like some sort of cast but i feel like we're doing what we need to be doing right now and for me that's okay because i think we do a lot and you know i've got a growing family and so personally right now i feel like i'm a little short-sighted on my vision i like what we're doing i think there's a lot of things we can improve on we mentioned the fact that our co-base is open source uh every year we like to participate in oktoberfest we like to invite people in to contribute there's always room for more shows but we're also not trying to grow our podcast count tremendously i think over the next several years we might grow by one maybe two shows a year or basically as topics or interests you know kind of come to come to fruition i would um i would like to to maybe do a bit more on the membership side and then invite people in in that way because there's so many people to reach out and say how can we help you how can we support you and in all honesty the best thing we can say right now is like if you make lists of podcasts if you're on twitter if you tell somebody about your favorite things and we're one of those things that's the best way but for some people that's not enough right they they actually want for some reason to give you money or some sort of exchange of value and i think we got to find find out if it's not just money or some other ways we got to find some way to exchange value with our listeners beyond us freely giving our podcast to the world it's got to be something where they can come in and do something of value whether it's monetary whether it's contribution to the code base whether it's something involving in the community uh a lot of opportunity is also on the written side we'd love to find more people to share their big ideas uh through our platform so there's a lot of things i think in that area that would make sense to to to expand more growing by more podcast isn't that interesting to me right this very moment it's already hard yeah so i think we have a good portfolio i'm proud of it i think we serve a lot of niches i wouldn't say that we're comprehensive like every developer niche there are there are a couple of holes if i if you if you if you pin me down i could name a couple of holes in our lineup but um i think revisiting memberships at this point makes sense because of the kind of the sea change and the attitude towards memberships and i think we can provide unique value to a paid membership that we didn't provide back then i think there are people who would love to support us in that way especially if they get some add-ons and some maybe like an ad-free option or something like that create your own feed like these kind of ideas are things that we're tinkering with where we could revisit that and really serve more directly i mean i love the idea of like just directly serving your audience yeah you know every single time like the period security of that i don't think we would ditch our current model because this model works it's sustainable we've proven that out but we could augment and provide options uh so that's something that that we're interested in i think personally i agree with adam that i'm not like super stoked to add a bunch of new podcasts um maybe just focus on growing vertically versus horizontally at this point i in terms of my own interest i would love to do more writing um i've just in the last uh six months or so maybe even less been able to finally become full-time on changelog and slowly wind down my consulting company which was a long burn but we're like basically down there at that point so i can concentrate fully on changelog i have lots of things to say and and to write i just don't have often the time to write them and so i'd love to be able to execute on more of those opportunities and use use our writing as a way to uh really augment the shows and like bring people back to the shows so yeah let me let me say this to it real quick because you mentioned earlier with when jared came on to the team you know while you were speaking one thing i was thinking to an adjective to describe jared would be instrumental right like if it weren't for we didn't even talk about me going full time ever in this in this conversation which is it doesn't need to go that far but the point was was that jared was a source of encouragement for me he was like i was working at pure charity and so just a quick version of the story and this is basically me giving jared a long thank you is that uh an appreciation too because he's an amazing partner and i couldn't do this alone that this would not be what it is if it was adam solo uh it just wouldn't and i'm so thankful for jared but ages ago he was like dude we can do this you could do this you could do this whatever i forget the exact wording but but i've always been an entrepreneur but i wasn't like yeah i want to quit my job that's cushy because i was working for a non-profit it was amazing work i loved what we were doing i loved the team we were building i love what i was building i love what i was doing and then one day i just loved this a little bit more and i was like you know what you're right and then it for me a silent partner for me at least not a contributor to a show but a huge contributor to my life as my wife if it weren't for her if it weren't for jared encouraging me and saying you should do this we can do this and for my wife to agree uh and believe in me i wouldn't have done it honestly so thank you bro oh you're welcome and i'm glad that you made that leap because you know a few years later it's allowing me to make that leap i was already out there on my own at that point and so there was like i didn't have the the i mean we all know that resistance yeah of like when are you are you going to or do i or don't i or when do i and so i already had the confidence i was like you know i'm out here swimming in the water and everything's fine you know the water is warm out of stuff yeah and i was in that water and i was like i like that water too but now i've got this warm water and i just was less also you know newly married so it was just like timing but uh i i still have mad respect for pure charity the team that runs that i mean i still consider them all friends they do amazing things as a matter of fact a community member uh beverly nelson she's done some stuff with it's been a while she's been really busy but she is cto cto at pure charity she began i don't want to say just as a developer in a negative way but she kind of came in when we had a budding team she came and was very instrumental and i don't think then you know she would have believed that she would have been cto at some point now she's cto of pure charity that's awesome yeah and we love beverly she's amazing yeah well it sounds like you all have a lot of people who have been on the periphery or directly involved with the change log over the past 10 years and i want to wish you all a fun prosperous next 10 years to the life of the chinese vlog i'm going to be listening i know that a lot of the people in the free code camp community learn about open source and learn about software development in general and get introduced to a lot of the people whom you've interviewed uh you know dhh you had yehuda cats on a while back just a ton of really like developers developers um and they're able to uh get a lot of exposure to those people and a lot of inspiration for those people so i just want to thank you again for everything you're doing for the community and um you know long live the change log 10 years 10 more years of awesome learning that's right well quincy thank you you've always been a staple for us to you've always encouraged us and congratulated us along along the way too we're obviously huge fans of free code camp we can't say it enough and we just thank you for caring enough about us for one to drive from your place to my place here in houston we are in for lack of better terms adam's studio yeah uh you know so he came here we flew jared in forever i mean this is your studio that's right that's right well i almost called it like you know change like hq but it's not bad but you know we really appreciate you know the time that you've put into this too the research and just sharing uh sharing your community with ours honestly we really really appreciate that we can't thank you enough all right well hey adam jared it's been an absolute blast everyone uh still with us thank you again for listening to the free code camp podcast uh be sure to check the show notes where we'll have links to a lot of the different episodes of the change log that we mentioned here and and some of the articles as well also if you're not subscribed to the change log be sure to subscribe to it the free code camp podcast will come back in early 2020 we're just as i said doing a lot of other things but in the meantime if you can just tell your friends about the change log tell your friends about free code camp that would mean the world to us have a fun day and happy coding four years ago four years ago we talked to you and since then you have literally blown up in many good ways now if he literally blew up wouldn't he have exploded and his guts worn out okay figuratively literally jared's always i always do that to him he is although technically you're right literally can mean the exact opposite right well it depends what dictionary right in this case blowing up meaning that let's start over again gosh i was digging that flow oh you were yeah i would keep it then we'll keep it jared likes we'll keep it but but seriously four years ago we had a conversation with you much different free code camp today than four years ago what are you doing that's so great what are you doing that so well that has gotten you toward your ad not just you but the rest of everyone the contributors were pretty skeptical were we not i mean we tend to be at times skeptical we're paid to be yeah we're paying to be skeptical well there's lots of stuff that comes out and certain things last i think we're talking about that earlier in the other show by the way kind of a companion podcast going on right here so definitely listen to the other one as well links will be cross-posted that's right show notes check them out i mentioned that lots of stuff hits our radar and some things last and other things don't and i know one of the things we were talking about then four years ago now links in the show notes the original quincy larson episode apologies by the way it's been four years for us to get you back it should have been much faster yeah we usually have the be backs back sooner you're still here you've blown up you did not fail to sustain so so now you agree with you blew up i do okay good i do well i think the different stuff i'm guessing is that then was just one pillar right now you got many more people that happened why does that work yeah so 2014 uh almost exactly five years ago we launched just the curriculum itself we had a chat room right uh so free people coming to free code camp and they work through the curriculum and they would ask questions in a chat room which was originally hip chat and then it was slack and then it was getter we still use getter but now the main thing is the forum so the curriculum was the the original pillar of freco camp and now we have a second pillar which is the forum uh which is growing really rapidly and we've got a lot of exciting things going on there that i can talk about and then the third pillar is the publication uh freecodecamp.org news um so you find it interesting that that forums are cool again they're always cool-ish i mean to some degree sure like i think social media is quintessential community of the internet to a certain degree yes but then you have social networks and you got groups within those networks so it's like you know what is truly a forum so you're saying in this case a literal forum yeah a self-hosted place where people can have threaded discussions right over long periods of time that's indexed by google that has its own search tools that has accounts uh that has moderator tools all those things where the organization who's hosting that forum has control play control yeah if you contrast this with like you know a subreddit or if you contrast this with a facebook group a forum gives a lot more organization a lot more power to the organization and also means that you know the data stays on that server with that organization it's not being used for advertising curious how you host it what do you do yeah we so we use discourse which is a really popular form tool yeah created by uh jeff atwood and his is a partner sam i can't remember sam's last name saffron sam saffron thank you and they are really solid developers and they also know a lot about online communities with you know stack overflow being one of the bigger ones so uh a lot of the same defaults that they bring to the table are what we use so yeah what about literal hosting though like do you host it yourself what do you what's your what's your architecture aws or yeah so it's it's a docker image and we just we have it on digitalocean okay so we use a lot we publish this whole organization like visualization of free code camps architecture and discourse supports our instance so that's like that 80 bucks a month i see cool for us to have a hosted uh digital ocean i was asking that because this course does have like a like a service version right yes their own host so you're not hosted by them you host your own but they said they support it they support well in the sense that like we every six months there's some huge thing i start messaging them on their own meta discourse yeah like hey yeah yeah exactly yeah and we have ssh access but if if there's something catastrophic we you know we can ask them to go click flip the switches right so the buck doesn't stop at you in terms of the you host it but you got help well free code camp the forum is one of the bigger ones uh i think there are probably some big like i know blizzard and described so we're getting about five million views a month on the forum nice and it's pretty big i assume there's a lot of recurring active i mean there's lots of conversations yeah forum hits some people are just googling they find a solution in a forum but there's a lot of people that are actually like actively part of the community posting answers posting questions on the daily yeah at any given time there might be 60 80 100 people logged in using the forum so let me go back and collect ecliptic guy let me go back and clarify the skepticism because it wasn't that we were skeptical of the concept or the idea of free code camp it was really just like the will it continued to last because you're a non-profit there's lots of startups that are also non-profits they're just they don't want to be nonprofits but they are but we talked about the sustainability of like you pouring yourself into this we didn't know it was pretty new at the time all you had was curriculum and it was like is this going to be a round right we're also putting a ton of time into and it seemed like a lot of work and anytime you see those those things it's just the rest before maybe yeah for burnout yeah exactly or or uh goat farming in the horizon right right but you're still here you're still standing so i guess that's maybe the question is not extending he's thriving fair enough striving what have you found what's working what how did you get to this point you know you have a probably a team you have lots of i know you have lots of people that are working on it so how would you figure out that way yeah well last time i was on youtube were both asking lots of very similar questions about sustainability because we do yeah and and you since you've had the whole request for commits uh series which is phenomenal i recommend everybody check it out and i listen to that and nadia eggball and michael rogers and uh you know that was really helpful for me as well just thinking about uh open source and sustainability yeah uh since i visited we finally got the 501c3 status which is the u.s government's tax-exempt status code it's the same one that like doctors without borders and the red cross and all these big ngos have right so now if you donate the free code camp you can deduct it from your taxes and we ourselves don't have to pay taxes which is a huge savings absolutely yeah it makes a big difference so uh we were able to shift from just selling merchandise which was the only way we were sustaining free code camp which you know spoiler alert it was barely covering even the servers let alone you know payroll and other things and i i put a lot of my savings uh into it i put about 150 000 into free code camp which keep in mind i was a teacher and a school director that's like i was basically saving every half of everything i earned for like 10 years yeah that was the money that i had and we were gonna use that to get a house and or a down payment on a house in california um but did that keep you up at night like were you were you were you confident you were gonna find that that thing that works or were there nights where you're like you know what i'm just wasting my savings away well so i wasn't i never thought it was wasted because people were benefiting tremendously but i was worried that i it was not going to work out and i was going to have to go get a job but really that's like that's a very nice first world problem to have like oh my gosh if this fails then you have to go out and get a nice job as a software engineer right but i mean 10 years of your savings gone is beyond that what he's saying is that that doesn't outweigh the risk of of loss and i i guess to some degree the belief in what you were doing enough to keep going what you've done yeah yeah it could have been nice though yeah that kind of risk that kind of that kind of any fear anything like where you were like twitching oh yeah it was a long and and i had my first child about one year in it gets deeper uh so you know that was and we were living in a we were living in the bay area in a one-bedroom apartment yeah it was like 700 square feet and we had a baby in there and i was just on my laptop all day long every day just crunching trying to reassure my wife that we would pull through and everything would be okay now she had a job at a tech company doing accounting and she as a result we had health insurance so our position was already better than a lot of americans and we both had lots of options so i just want to emphasize that like we were coming from a position of great flexibility and privilege yeah that a lot of people do not enjoy so i don't want to sound like at all um because really i mean worst case scenario i i had like standing offers from different companies that would have probably hired me and all those things but free cocaine was doing great people were using it people loved it and i knew that we could make it work where there's use there's usefulness yeah so what what financially made it work finally like it's working now right yeah yeah we're break even essentially so what we did was uh as soon as it became clear that we were gonna get our tax exempt status not that we actually got it quite yet but before that we'd always been just shifting if you want to support free co camp here donate money instead to women who code or donate money to hack club or donate money to hacker dojo or some of these other non-profits that are helping in developer education because we really wanted to make sure that people were able to deduct things and and the money was going to in to a proper non-profit so once we got that nonprofit status you know retroactively all all the donations to us were tax deductible and i remember just holding my newborn son and holding up the the certification that i got from the us government and that was kind of the light at the end of the tunnel and from there we just worked really hard to get a whole lot of people doing monthly recurring donations to us which is beneficial not only because a lot of people can afford you know five twenty even twenty five dollars we had a few people giving like 250 a month a lot of people can afford that and uh it says it's monthly it gives us the ability to project out and budget and for an organization like us like we just need to be able to budget we're not trying to make huge fixed cost investments yeah we're just paying for servers we're paying for people to be working on free code game full time so let me throw a number at you here this comes from your five years of free code camp post which is on change dog news also in the show notes for those who missed it more than 40 000 free code camp graduates are now working in tech at companies like apple google microsoft amazon and spotify surely many other companies as well that's an astronomical number 40 000 those are people who've been certified through the program many of them have gotten certifications that includes everybody who's in our linkedin alumni network which is like 60 000-ish people who are working now in technical roles uh not everybody ultimately got the certification because if you get a job like you're a graduate all right let me explain the graduation certification it would be a ends to um or a means to an end once you have the end you're not gonna like well i really need my fcc certification right yeah a lot of people get the job and then they'll come back and gradually try to finish it what's that not that fcc this is yeah i mean of course not the federal communication just in case he was thinking like did they start what yeah when were you fcc this is audio and this is the airwaves the internet airwaves that's right yeah okay so but still i mean 40 000 people that is to me a huge amount i mean what does that feel like do you feel those numbers or they get so big at a certain point that it's kind of like another drop in the bucket i mean some some numbers are hard to actually like i don't know like reify in your mind well i'm you know extremely blessed and i just feel incredibly grateful that there are so many people out there who bother you know emailing me or tweeting at me or sharing these stories of their transitions from you know working in accounting being a trucker working in manufacturing uh all these different fields that they've gone from to doing software development and yeah so that's interesting it contextualizes those numbers when you're getting practically every day i get an email from somebody saying hey i just was able to do this you know thanks again and then i'm able to follow up and say like oh yeah can you tell me a little bit more about how you um how you made this transition or can you post it on the forum because a whole lot of people are in the process of trying to make this transition yeah and so the number isn't abstract i mean it's abstract that it's that large but i have so many concrete examples of that every day that drive home to me and so for me you know it's just it's a it's a dream come true i never would have imagined that we would have anywhere near the scale of people being able to uh accomplish new things and you know provide for their families in new ways and actualize themselves and be creative in new ways so yeah it's just been a huge honor and a huge blessing so one of the challenges that we've seen people facing coming out of non-traditional education backgrounds such as i have a free code camp certification or some sort other boot camp or i'm self-taught is that that hiring process is difficult for them uh for lots of reasons one of the reasons is that companies and organizations aren't always on board with hiring i mean more people are looking for senior developers than junior developers and uh people who going through free code camp sounds like they're having success getting hired do you help them on that side of things or is there like a community support i'm wondering like if there's like tips and tricks or how are people having that level of success like yeah i got through the program and i got a job because like you said the job is what most of us are after and so i'm just curious if there's like if the community helps on the job side or if it's just like once you're through the program you just are competent enough to get yourself a job yeah that's a great question we've kind of made a like a neutrality setup where we don't we don't specifically guide people to specific companies um we try we we thought about we built out of a job board and we were going to have it to where people could apply for jobs directly through free code camp but we just thought about like you know if somebody has a negative experience or if there are people out there who are you know that you read about a lot of these silicon valley companies that basically just pretend that they've got all this vc funding and things like that and then the funny never materialized these people have moved to this expensive city and and basically get stiffed on their on their paycheck uh you know we didn't want to be associated with any sort of like project like that so we just decided you know we're not gonna we're gonna leave the job board stuff and the recruitment stuff to the experts and we're just going to focus on training people now we do have interview preparation section uh that has hundreds of additional algorithm challenges uh we've got like we've updated a lot of the project euler problems uh rosetta code problems and made them interactive with like tests that you can run right in the browser instead of having to uh you know the old interface for project wheeler was it's like a 20 year old website but it's just like you enter a number and it tells you whether you're right or wrong it doesn't give you any more feedback than that and it just takes a long time to enter it so rather than having to do all that coding locally and then go and type a number into a web form and see if you're right uh we we just modernized it and made an interactive experience but so we've got lots of interview preparation stuff we've also got at this point probably hundreds of i got a job type posts on the forum and we've got lots of articles from people who transitioned successfully from other fields into tech who successfully got jobs at amazon or google or other places like that telling how they went through that process like especially the thing that people underestimate the most it's just the sheer numbers game that the modern job uh the modern developer job application process constitutes is quite often for like somebody who's finished free code camp or somebody who's gone to a boot camp to have to apply to hundreds of jobs and then they'll start to get uh interviews and then they'll start to get offers but we just try to instill in people the notion that this is hard this is not easy anybody who tells you it's easy to go out and get a developer job they're probably trying to sell you something because it's not easy that's right so we have all these resources and we have a supportive community who's there to share in your accomplishments and you can just read lots of anecdotes that realize the statistics that we all know that there are a tremendous number of developer jobs at all different levels uh certainly there are a lot of middle tier and senior jobs and the senior ones are the ones where the recruiters most actively go out and aggressively try to recruit people but there are definitely tons of small medium level businesses that just need somebody you know the church or the um local food bank or the other organizations that want to have a nice website or just need somebody to help set up like a facebook group or configure like a wix website or something like that from your vantage point can you see trends there in terms of it getting by no means is it easy but are we is it trending up in terms of those entry level opportunities in your opinion or is it just kind of been like a steady churn obviously this would be from your vantage point not like it's like based on numbers but so i could look at the numbers and we do have quite a bit of data that we've made public we for the last three years we didn't do it this year just because we've already done it so many times and there was already so much data it's a lot of work uh we we did what's called the new coder survey and it shows like how many you know it asks about 50 questions we had like 30 000 respondents this is really nice huge data set yeah significant from a statistical standpoint um and if you dig into that you can see like how many months of experience people had before they you know started applying for jobs or how long they've been working in for jobs and you can you can sort of play with the numbers and figure that out i don't have like a really well informed answer on that a lot of what i hear is just at the street level people like saying that they got a job or people saying they haven't gotten a job yet um it's in reality is messy and every employer is different every country is different too they you know european uh and i say european that's really like a collection of city states right um and then you know you go to india you go to china you go to all these other countries where free cooking is really big and and the market's completely different i've been to startups in like shanghai uh where i walk in the room and half the people working in the developer bullpen are free cocaine grads wow right so so there are definitely jobs out there uh for people it's just a question of what those jobs look like and how many applications you have to make and how many people are competing for those same jobs i will say this though getting a job i think a lot of people think it's all about your skills but it's really about three things in my opinion it's about your skills it's about your reputation and it's about your network whom you know if you know the right people you can get in even with subpar skills subpar reputation if you have a great reputation you may not be the best developer but people know who you are from your blog posts or from your youtube channel for your podcast or or just from your open source projects that you've contributed to everyone wants to de-risk a choice right and the rate the risk of choice is by some sort of assurance or certainty right so if you have a decent reputation you can kind of bet that you're a decent person yeah de-risking is exactly what i think employers are trying to do they're sure they're just trying not to make the catastrophic choice that results in them having to terminate somebody yeah pay a whole bunch of severance and then go through the entire job all over again yeah and it's it's costly it's funny that uh who you know comes so it makes sense but we try to be in a world where it's not about who you know because it's it almost seems unfair and yet it totally still is the facts right right that's what i mean like so if you don't know the right kind of people you can't build your reputation properly or at least maybe add to an area where you have less reputation you have somebody vouching for you for like a better term if you have a network it's a network of people to some degree associating with you they're they're fine they're therefore kind of adding to your reputation that you're trustworthy that you're right somebody worth betting on or taking a risk on yeah and this is why like the local markets are so important yeah people focus so much on silicon valley and like the hyper competitive like trying to get a job offer from google or facebook or amazon but if you go to a lot of communities like we're here in houston right and i live in i live in the dallas metropolitan area and jared lives up in omaha like these are all completely different tech ecosystems with different employers different hiring cultures um different circles of people that meet together for tech talks and and events and different professional groups i mean like if you learn your local meta and if you're content to stay in the city you're you are in currently um there won't necessarily be like a clear road map for you to get to that job but if you pound the pavement and if you get to meet people i think that things will work out for you because you're already doing a lot more work than most job applicants plus like you said uh many companies that aren't traditional software companies need software people and so as you know the old saying go software see in the world every company is becoming a software company well there's a lot more competition to work at the software company right they need developers because they develop software for a living but a lot of companies that just need like one or two people and maybe their bar is a little bit lower the competition is going to be less maybe you have a friend who works there like there's just lots of those would you might consider non-traditional software opportunities where it's like well maybe they're not a software company but they have software needs and i bet you can pitch in there maybe even more so than you could at the place that has 100 developers already yeah if uh if getting a developer job is hard does that mean that it's got something broken in the system and if if you say yes what is that and if no then move on so if it's hard to get a job that way what's it's somewhat of an indicator that there's a broken system yeah i mean there's broken processes something's broken what makes it so difficult aside from reputation network skill it's it's hard here in the us again and i have lots of friends in china and in india and places like that where i think it's comparatively easy not in every city in those countries but in a lot of markets it's just much easier to go out and get a job uh in the us we have like a combination of like benefits and like the legal framework and all these things make hiring and firing very difficult so because it's it's difficult to bring some it's costly to make a mistake yeah really so that makes employers really risk-averse even in a field where there's so much demand and also employers to some extent are operating under pattern recognition so they're like oh this person has worked at this company right that's like the biggest indicator of your likelihood of success who have you worked for and are do they have similarly stringent uh hiring requirements uh so if you've worked at google there's a very good chance that you're going to be a good employee at you know xyz corp as well so um i and these are things that i think there's a great she writes a lot of articles for pre-cocaine's publication as well uh alien lerner she does interviewing.io and she's written a ton of articles that are much more data driven on this but i i wouldn't say hiring is broken that's kind of a strong word but i would say there are very clear ways in which things can be improved without having to completely overhaul you know the way that we handle labor in the united states for example uh just pair programming or doing more take home assignments rather than doing whiteboard uh challenges would be one i think fairly obvious improvement because that is heavily biased toward recent college graduates who just spent a whole bunch of time but basically going ad nauseam through uh algorithms for like tests and stuff like that it doesn't work as well when you're hiring somebody who's who's been out of the job market for a while if they just had a kid or somebody who has just been working for a long time but hasn't interviewed for jobs recently your mission isn't to get people hired it's to educate would you say that would you agree with that or is it kind of part of both sides so you know you don't really help place so you're not it's sort of part of it's it's implied by your efforts so our official mission is just to help as many people as possible learn to code i think it's written at the bottom of every single page in our footer that's our official ngo's mission yeah that said virtually everybody who uses freecodecamp dreams of one day becoming more technical now whether that's actually being a software engineer yeah or just you know being a designer who can code or a marketer who can code or somebody who wants to build like a cool interface for their drone that they're flying around as a hobby yeah somebody who wants to build an alexa app just to impress their kids you know there are so many different use cases for programming knowledge but it's all a net positive i like to say that you know back in the 1600s you didn't need to be able to read to go out and work right but the people who did sit down and take the time to learn to read were infinitely not infinitely but they were dramatically better off as a result same thing in the 1920s if you learned how to drive a car suddenly you had all these new opportunities open to you and more recently like the 1990s people really learn how to use spreadsheets they learned how to use word processors they learned how to use like these slide based tools like powerpoint and that opened up so many opportunities for people so yeah you can get by without it you could be you know a congress person a congress person in 2019 who doesn't know how to type and just relies on the secretary to do the typing for them right but real life like you're better off just gathering those additional skills and i think that soon people will awaken to the fact that being able to code is very helpful and it does give you a whole lot of additional options so figuring out the financials is one aspect of sustainability another aspect is making it so that quincy doesn't have to do all the work and surely you have a team at this point and lots of people contributing so like to hear the different roles who's involved in the and then as a follow-up to that how you inspired them to get involved in free code transmission absolutely yeah so freecodecamp currently we have a lot of active contributors um and i'm extremely grateful for all of them and we're getting ready to maybe by the time this episode goes live we'll have our uh top contributors for 2019 we've got some really nice backpacks that we're going to ship to them to recognize their efforts to say 2019 top contributor it's got the free code camp logo and and these are the same backpacks that we sold a few months ago we're actually running a second run of those two since we're going to be printing some these top controller ones but there are seven people who work for free code camp full time including myself and they are all generalists in the sense that they all wear a lot of hats everybody comes up through free code camp as contributors after a few years of contributing if they seem to be particularly capable or particularly passionate then and we have the resources then we will bring them on and so currently the team is is again me doing just everything like i do support and i also do uh i'm overseeing a couple different projects within then we have beau carnes who is running the frico camp youtube channel which recently became i think the biggest programming channel on youtube it's got 1.4 million subscribers now there's a channel called the new boston that hasn't been updated like four or five years and they have more subscribers than we do but other than them i think we're the biggest uh so beau runs that he creates a lot of the videos he does a lot of the editing for our contributors and uh beau also is working with a curriculum so beau worked as a teacher for i think five or six years prior to joining free code camp a public school teacher up in michigan we have abby abigail renomeier she is based in portland and she worked as a archaeologist before she has like a totally different background but she had been editing thousands of articles for the free code camp publication and she kept doing it and i was like hey you want to do this full-time so she's been doing that she also runs the podcast so if you've listened to the free co-cam podcast there's a good chance you've heard her interviewing people and then we have ahmed abdul sahab he's in turkey i recently immigrated to turkey and he is doing some exciting things over there uh he does a lot of the design like when we overhauled freco camp's visual design uh he did a lot of that work and he also does a lot of just like the day the in and out code maintenance um then we have murgesh mahapatra who is in bengaluru or bangalore and he does pretty much everything regarding the core code base and like all the servers and he uh he's the person we call if something catastrophic happens and then we have uh christopher koishigawa who's in south korea and he was working as a teacher for the last six years and started contributing a whole lot to our to our interview prep section and so we brought him on so he and bo are working together on the updated curriculum which i can talk about in a minute and then we also have uh mia lu who is based in hangzhou in china and she's running the free code camp china team and we basically have like a completely parallel organization in china and we've got chinese language forum chinese language publication and chinese language curriculum and that's you know hundreds of thousands of people using that so i think i got everybody it is hard to always remember everybody on the spot yeah as we experienced recently as well so that's amazing you have a parallel organization in china just curious in terms of the free code camp alum or even just the users i mean your team is spread abroad and so is where's your biggest audience like do you have the foothold in india is it india india and the united states are like neck and neck sometimes india gets there are more people in india sometimes there are more people in the us uh and then nigeria's third and china um and then is that based on just visits or how do you how do you use logged in use yeah like time on site yeah right so you have chinese translation do you have translation into other languages as well or just yeah it was a great question what we're trying to do is just really make sure that we have everything rock solid in chinese and chinese is bigger than most of the other world languages combined uh it's second only the english if you look at wikipedia usage and this is what we used for our metrics i like to to plan internationalization we looked at how wikipedia was being used and and we looked at like the world language usage for different uh translations of wikipedia um and then we looked at like the total number of speakers of those languages that were using the internet actively um china is just exploding in terms of people adopting technology and they're very enthusiastic about it and a lot of them are getting great jobs and there's a lot of money going into just a lot of different aspects of like um artificial intelligence like machine learning essentially yeah um the real machine learning and also the ifs and then statements and stuff like that um and then also there is a whole lot of um expertise in china uh india a lot of the great indian engineers stay here and a lot of the chinese engineers go back to china and create companies so uh you know i'm trying to think of some uh some names of famous engineers who've left like google or have left like teaching at stanford uh who've gone back to china but there are a lot of really promising companies over there so we wanted to do china first um i personally maybe i'm a little bit biased because i lived in china for like five years my wife's chinese and i'm just very optimistic about the future of china they've over the course of the past 30 years they've taken hundreds of millions of people from subsistence art agriculture and they've transformed into a manufacturing center in the world and now they're transforming into much more services and creative based economy and learning the code is going to be a big part of that for sure can you speak to the the need for native language curriculum like specifically with what i've heard at least with china is that there's you know this desire obviously a massive amount of people there but most of the documentation a lot of the books tend to be are more likely to be in english can you speak to the the need for native language curriculum yeah well it's always easiest to learn in your native language just one less thing you need to worry about uh a lot of people more than a billion have chinese is there they're mainly more than a billion yeah yeah i mean if you include if you include like written chinese like there are a lot of right spoken dialects on earth six point five seven billion people yeah you're behind it's like seven and a half or eight yeah yeah it'll be eight and like ten or fifteen stats machine here okay but the point is is that that's quite a lot of people i mean more than a billion people yeah that's a massive amount of people that's like i'm gonna say one half facebook but i can't remember facebook facebook i think is 2.5 billion gosh that's crazy yeah it would make sense too it's interesting too to hear your insights on the choice to use a massive um global site like wikipedia as an example to say a smart you know why did you choose where did you choose first under what circumstances because in a lot of ways what you're doing is creating a wikipedia for like a better terms for software developers right curriculum is very much like that wikipedia has been a huge influence on us and of course wikipedia is mostly open source as well and they're also a non-profit so right in many ways if wikipedia hadn't proved out the concept that you could have a donor-supported commons of learning material in their case more encyclopedic in our case more procedural skill focused uh learning you know free co camp probably we wouldn't have attempted it because we needed that proof of concept i'm not the kind of person who's going to throw their entire livelihood behind like a totally wild guess but i sensed i guess correctly in retrospect that there would be demand there and that people would be people who were graduating from free code camp and going out and getting these great jobs would turn around and donate back to the organization and it would be sustainable do you see somebody utilizing free code camp and maybe a boot camp as well or some sort of intensive is there is there a scenario where it's only free code camp i know you're not trying to do that because you're very community minded and oriented but is the is the intention to be free co-camp alone or is it sort of like a companion to other learning opportunities so i've always viewed pre-co camp as a core curriculum if you will and a lot of coding bootcamps do use free codecamp as either part of their curriculum or they'll use it as their pre-course work and we have a really good relationship with a lot of coding bootcamps and i'm very excited about the future of coding bootcamps really anything that can drive down the cost of adult education the hardest part about that too is is curriculum development yeah right like if you have to start from scratch every time you want to start up another boot camp opportunity in your neck of the woods whether it's here in the states or elsewhere abroad you know if you can shrink that time from you know desire to teach to teaching it's a it's a leg up on on opportunity yeah i'd agree it's the hardest part but it's not the most important part the most important part is the interpersonal relationships that you know a teacher professor has with their students and that students have with one another and uh you know the counselors that help you prepare for the job search and all the other things that a university or a coding boot camp or um any sort of adult education program can add like the value added the curriculum itself really if you think about it very few people actually design curriculum in the sense that most universities have textbooks yeah right and like everybody like you go to econ 101 and everybody has you know the same textbook regardless which university you're studying at uh for the most part so yeah free code camp can be a free interactive textbook that these organizations can use and of course it can be used on its own just like i could go to a library and crack open a textbook and learn economics or i can learn you know how to program and see just from a textbook or from some sort of static resource the the main advantage with freecodecamp of course is it's experiential it's project focused and things stick a lot better when you're actually building how do you keep it fresh how do you keep it relevant current and maybe the naysayers saying oh your curriculum is not current enough or it doesn't is not idiomatic enough yeah how do you how do you push back the haters basically well we just focus on fundamentals uh we're not going to be covering bleeding edge tools for the most part like i believe that everybody needs to just get a really strong foundation first and most of what constitutes foundational knowledge as a developer stuff that was figured out in like the 60s and 70s and in the case of mathematics sometimes hundreds of years ago thousands of years ago right so what we're teaching is just the most ubiquitous tools that are the most generally applicable i think node.js is to a large extent one kind of the web server war if you will uh and uh javascript is useful for pretty much any kind of web development uh we're getting ready to introduce python as well as a core part of the curriculum so currently it's six certifications each certification requires you to build five projects and get all their test passing so we're adding four additional python focused certifications uh so right now our certification just for people who aren't aware front end specific we have the responsive web responsive web design we have javascript algorithms and data structures then we have front-end libraries data visualization with like d3js primarily and then we have the the full stack focus ones which are apis and microservices and information security and quality assurance so we're going to add four additional python ones that will be either at the end of that or we'll be we'll kind of break up those but we're adding uh we're adding scientific computing with python we're adding data analysis uh we're adding information security with python and we are adding machine learning using tensorflow keras and potentially scikit-learn so we're adding lots of tools but these are not tools that are like groundbreakingly new these are things that academics and practitioners in the field have been using for years what about things like the small things like i think of the javascript syntax and the updates to the language i mean the nice thing about web development is mostly additive like new technologies add on top of html and on top of css with trends in javascript i think the the big change between callbacks to promises to async away like those are things that do get outdated do you just like churn it out and keep it updated or do you not fight those battles what do you do there so we we just update uh like if if one thing like for example css variables we're probably going to rip out our sas section at this point because css is getting so many of the core features that like those pre-processors yeah and they're taking sass out yeah it's about time i told you nobody want in this show never mind yeah and then like like we still have a bootstrap section but probably just going to teach flexbox and grid and stuff like that so so we do go through an update and like like you just asked specifically as new features are added to es6 or es2019 or whatever they're calling it this year right um we'll just go and update the individual lessons and we kind of update them in situ and add additional lessons if necessary the entire curriculum is about to become completely project oriented this is something we started at the beginning of the year we're rewriting our lessons to all be building projects so instead of learn javascript and here are 200 javascript lessons that are tangentially related go through them it's learn javascript by building a role-playing game yeah nice and so you'll build like a role-playing game you learn basic javascript from that you'll learn typography from building a usda nutrition label you know you'll you'll learn all these different things through projects and currently the curriculum is like 30 certification projects and a whole bunch of lessons soon it'll be 30 certification projects and also a whole bunch of practice projects like 30 or 40 practice projects so those will all be interactive with tests the entire time and you'll build the projects one line at a time one passing test at a time it's so much easier to learn when you have some sort of like concrete expectation or visual in mind you know like giving somebody a goal and not just abstract thoughts of like oh here's you know as you said 200 different tangential lessons on javascript it's more like here's what we're learning in order to build something like this that you've seen in the real world you may have even used in the real world you know nutrition labels for example what was that one for those tables uh learning typography typography yeah yeah like visual hierarchy yeah that makes sense yeah so we've got i mean this is all of course open source it's only github so if you want to see exactly how our curriculum is coming along you can check it out um and we're gonna keep plugging away at it like i said chris christopher koei shigawa and beau carnes are working on this basically full time doing instructional design they're both trained classroom teachers who've also learned uh web development on their own through frico camp over the years and through other resources so should be really really solid and even if it's not totally solid when it launches that's the great thing about open source it'll gradually accrue a whole bunch of improvements and eventually it will be great eventually great it's like eventual consistency exactly greatness so in addition to the refresh of the curriculum you also launched a brand new refresh to the learning platform you're now buzzword compliant because you're on the jam stack yeah you want to talk about some of the new infra and the code and what you're doing there yeah absolutely so jam stack javascript apis and markup is what jam stacks stands for my friend matt billman over at netlify coined that term in a bar at some point i don't remember the exact story but um he uh he's been a big proponent of just like the security and the performance boost that you can get from just you know doing everything at build time and then just serving like the static files essentially right so now free coke if you go to freecodegame.org and you go into learn app uh pretty much everything is pre-packaged and you get the entire application uh it just loads and it'll work offline it won't work offline perfectly right now but we're working on getting it to be like a offline first app so there are a lot of advantages and a lot of those advantages have to do with the fact that we don't have to sorry that little thing threw me off text message okay yeah uh a lot of those advantages just have to do with the fact that we don't spend as much money on servers yeah we can cache everything has that been like a substantial difference for spending like i mean it's been like 5 000 bucks a month on servers what are you spending now that you're on jam i think we're spending like 4 000 but we're still doing a lot of the optimizations gradually it'll reduce yeah wow yeah eventual greatness eventual greatness curious why you know if you have such a massive global audience why and this is just the the uh partnership personality in me comes out as like why you wouldn't reach out to someone in that business to establish some sort of partnership and make that zero or very low if anybody is listening who's like in a position to grant a whole lot of credits yeah or uh do something we'll take them yeah we'll take them we use all that we can get from like amazon azure google cloud like we use all the credits we can get we we just need a lot are you uh picky on platform are you picky as long as it's reliable so okay azure is where a lot of our stuff is hosted digital oceans where some of us hosted we we have to be very mindful about what services we we look at where like how critical they are so far azure in my experience has been incredibly reliable and aws is really reliable too um but we decided to like locate most of our database and our servers in azure because they gave the most generous credits candidly they give they give every non-profit like 3 500 4 000 a year in credits and that that's a big big head start and so we locate everything in the same data center it reduces latency so if we had like a significant offer of credits we might be able to relocate the entire stack for like learn over to a different place but we'd want to we wouldn't want to do a piecemeal just because the introduction of latency and additional security risks and stuff like that but either way with the new stack you've definitely been able to shrink said budget so yeah and this is just day one like this is the very beginning is there a stack though i mean isn't that the point of jam stack as you do it when you build and then well you said most of your stack is we still have like servers that like are these like things that are like apis yeah yeah so whenever you complete it whenever you complete jam a lesson for example that writes back and if it can't establish connection with server just stores in like local memory or i think local storage is what we use and then when it re-establishes connection then it pushes so we're building out all that kind of uh you know redundancy and and targetedness right very cool so any drawbacks on the jam stacks so far like things that you're like oh we didn't see this one coming caching validation is always challenging like you you push a bunch of changes and they're cached on cloudflare or netlify cdn or something and you just have to wait till it propagates or hey try refreshing and we're working on figuring out a way to do that so we don't have to tell people try doing a hard refresh you know web developers least favorite phrase yes try refreshing because we hate saying that because like it's like it means turn it off and on again right it's kind of like the yeah i kind of failed at the cash invalidation part hard refresh you have to teach people how to hard refresh versus regular refresh yeah i've been there yeah i've done that so that's that's been the biggest drawback but i mean a whole and then like like i think netlify was like under like a ddos attack the other day and like we we had some some uh like uptime issues with that but again it's like they're doing the best they can they're a pretty small organization compared to like the awss of the world um we just want to be there to support them and uh we're just grateful that like you know netlify discourse a whole lot of other organizations have given us in-kind uh sponsorship in a sense they're not giving us money but they are giving us like servers and services that makes a big difference yeah so the third pillar of what you're up to we've talked about the learning platform the forums we touched on at the very beginning of the conversation we haven't talked much about the publication yeah yeah that's a big part of free code camp is we have freecodecamp.org news and we have hundreds of authors who are publishing articles there every week not not like active we don't get hundreds of articles every week we're going for quality over quantity it's not an open publishing platform where you can just like sign in and start publishing with uh with the publication you have to apply and we're really selective i think like we had five percent selectivity so most people they'll submit a whole bunch of writing samples we'll force them to read our style guide and all that stuff make them jump through all the hoops if they want it badly enough then we'll give them a conditional account like a contributor account and then they can write drafts and we can look at those and if the moment we see one of the drafts that we're like yeah this is ready to go this is solid we do a little bit of editing publish it and then we give them full access to our google analytics so they can see exactly who's reading their articles like basically everything google analytics tracks and we've got a bunch of additional custom filters and stuff making it really simple for them uh that's the only tracking we use by the way we use google analytics because at this point it's the only like server-side analytics are great but you just don't have enough information for the authors to be able to understand their readership this process of collaboration or lack thereof if there isn't any on the edit process how do you handle that do you have sort of baked in processes where you're giving them feedback and suggesting edits or do you make the edits and say this is how it is how does that how's that relationship yeah we make the edits for them uh and then we tell them what else we made generally uh if usually the edits are are seemingly unimportant but actually really important like the headline is by far the most important thing to the point that i'm practically the point where i was just like i'm just going to write the headlines for you because like that's all 90 of people see especially in the age of like apple news and reddit and all these aggregators people just scroll through headlines and that's their news like very few people actually click through do you actually say anything like a headline is a suggestion from them and it is let's say for like a better terms it's um it's uh in your hands at the end yeah what they write may actually become the headline but it's actually just a suggestion yeah we're clear that like essentially they're they're writing and to save a whole bunch of back and forth a bunch of communication overhead that slows things down we just apply the edits ourselves yeah um and people understand that they appreciate it because they understand that we care a lot about quality and we want to get their article read by as many people as possible the way we do that of course is after they they publish it uh we publicize it through our twitter account which i don't know how many followers it has a lot is it like it has a high level of engagement let's let's say that like generally when we tweet something it gets retweeted like 10 to sometimes 100 times and uh we also um have a huge linkedin alumni network and we get like 2 million impressions a month just off linkedin posting things on linkedin so and then of course i have my email blast that i send out and i've got like a mailing list of like 2.5 million people so a lot of people click through and read those articles that i choose for the weekly email blast so it's worth it we're giving them a megaphone to reach a whole lot of people and to really raise their profile in the developer community and they take that opportunity seriously yeah what kind of pieces are you looking for because i know i remember in your post you mentioned like journalistic kind of stuff eventually or i don't know eventually we'd like to have explanatory journalism where we take like net neutrality for example i wrote uh maybe like 10 000 words about net neutrality and it put everything in context right during the peak of like people asking about net neutrality and curious about it and it was it put it in a historic context with all the other mediums that preceded it the other media that preceded it like radio cable stuff like that and uh so that would be kind of like the archetypal like if i was going to lead by example i'd say we should be writing in-depth articles like this um and there are plenty of other publications that write really like new york times uh the wall street journal a lot of them will just have really in-depth articles that put things in a historical context it's not just like this happened and this happened this happened it's like this happened and here's why that's significant from a historical perspective or here's what that means so explanatory technique uh technology journalism explanatory technology journalism that's that's kind of our aspiring goal one of our goals is to get people to actually come to freecodecamp.org every day and have something new and exciting that they can learn right now people just blow through the curriculum and they get a job and they're like awesome yeah free coq i use that back in 2017 i hear that all the time yeah we're still doing a lot of exciting stuff we're still here i was gonna ask you about that because it's one thing to you know if your mission is to educate as a primary mission and you mention the three pillars it's going to be very difficult to keep a captive audience because of what you just said so it's very easy for people to be transient given that their goals and their means have been covered and they're gone yeah so you know it makes sense i almost want to ask you like you got curriculum you got the forum and then you have publication you know how much thought that you put into that because it's pretty smart because you're you're answering my question without even answering it by uh by this publication being there and free code camp news being there because you're bringing them back whereas before they didn't have a reason to come back and now they do and you're sort of keeping them captive when yeah when before they were just you know they've they've learned they've gotten their job they've moved on and they've said hey i learned about it back then and that's it now yeah and there's always more stuff to learn right like i learned a lot about quantum computing in the past few weeks i learned a lot about uh you know micron length semiconductor manufacturing and stuff like that right so there's always new stuff that's coming out i mean technology by definition is new so there's always new stuff and just being able to explain how you know you orchestrate with kubernetes or how a docker container works what's the difference between a docker image and uh you know a docker container right or a docker instance i can't even remember all the different terms associated you need an article do you have um you've mentioned a free code camp mission but do you it seems like the roles of these pillars are distinct so do they have their own agenda that feeds into a sort of main or corporate agenda like why these three yeah yeah so we are strong believers in content i think that uh one of the biggest tragedies is that so much of the rewards of the web have been accrued by platforms that are basically just aggregating other people's content if you look at like facebook and all these companies uh they're benefiting from providing the basic infrastructure you could argue that you know medium fits that boat quora they just create the software everybody else comes and adds the content and people don't care about the infrastructure that much they really are there for the content right it's it'd be like you saying like netflix should accrue 100 of the value because they created such a great streaming platform and like the hollywood movie company shouldn't get anything because hey they just created the content content's free right or cheap but content is it content is not a commodity really good con and content is incredibly valuable and if you look like there's the information for example it's like this news publication that charges like hundreds of dollars a year to get a subscription the economist historically has always charged like 150 200 a year right for a subscription and i think we're going to see more and more of these publications that are like this is really high quality so we're not going to give it away for free at the same time there are publications that do give it away for free yeah like pro pro publica and uh you know the guardian and places like that and that's because they're fully donor supported they can do that and free code camp of course being fully donor supported by you know small individual donors we're a grassroots organization we can do that we can make everything free and we can provide tons of content from our community and from ourselves like like paid staffers like me who are writing articles and things like that yeah so let's talk about donations real quick and then we'll switch gears because they do want to talk about meet up you mentioned platforms yeah so five bucks a month let's just say i go and sign up for recurring i'm in i like your mission i got the cash i'm gonna give you five bucks a month where does that money go yeah great question so first we've got seven people uh okay first let me talk big numbers so so everybody understands free code camp's 2019 budget was 373 000 that may sound like a lot of money but i know developers in silicon valley who personally make more money than that a year sure that is maybe payroll for like three or four people right um and we're figuring out a way to like stretch it across seven people and we're also paying you know tens of thousands a year in servers so the answer is like 100 of that gets consumed by the by what is traditionally called programs when you analyze a non-profit there's fundraising there's administration and there's programs and we don't really have administration we don't do fundraising we just that we have quincy larson saying please donate to our non-profit please sir you know right we don't have a pr firm we don't have a marketing department uh you could argue that we could do better and we could raise more money but that introduced a lot of complexity to the organization and right now everybody who works at free code camp came up through free coq right never cleaner yeah i get it and i would say like i know a lot of non-profits that do the fundraising side and of course it's a it's it's akin to like a bootstrapped company getting vc funding i mean there's like some analogs there but it's different but you could at least i mean but the small the hardest way is the individual recurring donations versus having a person on staff maybe it's you or maybe it's somebody who's really good at going around to the big donors yeah to the foundations maybe that's the reason why well part of it was his response my point is you could get like a one million dollar grant maybe yeah but we'd be beholden to those organizations and also like that would kind of spoil us that's why going out and fighting in the field to like earn people's donations regular people people who are just working day jobs have kids feeding paying mortgages but they're like hey yeah i can spare five bucks for free co-camp a month or yeah it's the end of the year and i can just give them a thousand bucks or ten thousand bucks what about those companies though they're reaping the benefits of your work that's fine it's like a you know a positive externality for them right it's consumer surplus for them but there's uncaptured opportunity there i mean you could argue the same thing with wikipedia i mean how much value do you think wikipedia has bestowed upon the world by making it to where i can get good factual information within seconds from a relatively objective arbiter of truth yeah there's a whole lot of value that is not captured but that's that's kind of the point yeah but then they also have to put jimmy whale's face on wikipedia for like one month every year and bug the dog do out of their users when they could just do these other things such as some tasteful ads you know no use no no i i'm just no problem with advertising i think it's a great model especially for podcasts but but also you know like if you if you don't have the invasive ad networks and stuff i think i think ethical advertising could be uh i think i know you've decided to go pretty much ad free like across the board i think it's an admirable decision that being said we're back i cut you off on the donations thing like you pretty much that whole five bucks is going right towards programs yes and uh there's no fluff there's no like there's nothing else it's all right there we are extremely lean we're living lean uh i mean we we did we have in-depth discussions about whether to like pay for like a 20 a month service because it's like oh really yeah yeah i mean things are we just want to operate really efficiently like a lot of my heroes like you know sam walton for example kind of walmart on this notion of thrift and you can argue that like walmart has um not been the best employer or the best uh patron of of different communities that it's been in but you it's hard to argue that it hasn't been good for the end consumer because they've managed to drive down the prices of so many things absolutely and save people an incredible amount of money like especially families these are corporations that could probably make a lot more money uh but they're choosing to kind of be broader and more resilient to changes in the economy and things like that um that's a trade-off yeah it's it's a trade-off but with free code camp we're never going to capture all the value we don't even if we can capture like just to give you an idea less than point one percent uh i'm sorry it's it's about point five percent of our monthly active users donate yeah so it's it's just a fraction if if i can get a little bit better right well you're going to my next question and so let's talk about scale how do you what are the conversations you have with yourself yeah or anyone else in the team about like okay if when you said your budget was 375 000 a year or you're 787 right last night never this year this year this year 373 sorry 373. so is that is that equate to revenue and i guess the second question might be you know when you talk about growth of revenue or income dollars however you describe it in non-profit senses um what are the ways in which you make that number grow yeah so we just get more people using free go campus as simple as that the more people that use free code camp a certain percentage of them will go out and get great jobs and turn around and donate like sometimes we hit you know like a windfall like i was saying earlier uh we had somebody who donated ten thousand dollars earlier this month john wong sean wang um he's a uh he went through a free code camp he works at netlify and he had money at the end of the year and he wanted to donate to a high impact charity free coat camp just to put our efficiency our capital efficiency in perspective we have delivered 1.1 billion minutes of instruction this year that's the equivalent of 2 000 years of learning in one year we've done that for 373 000 that's the equivalent of 50 hours of instruction for every dollar spent now you're putting in terms i like to hear so if you go to like five bucks feel a lot bigger yeah so your five bucks each month is essentially paying for an entire classroom of people to learn that's that's interesting i i like the fact too that uh that i lost my thought that uh i'll get in just a second well i lost it all right i'll get it back in just a second yeah uh one thing that uh is important to note also is that these people are able to do it for free and the scale that we're operating at you know it's not only self-paced and free and fully interactive it's just incredibly cheap like to put that 50 hours per dollar in perspective in the united states the average cost of having a child in a public school is 10 per hour per child so free code campus several orders of magnitude more efficient than like and granted they're trying to accomplish totally different things we don't have classrooms we don't have a teacher with a student-teacher ratio of like 17 to one or whatever we just do instructional design and people work through it at their own pace but it's because of those concerted decisions that we're able to be dramatically more right efficient these are all conscious decisions we've made because our ultimate goal is scale our ultimate goal is helping as many people as possible for as little money as absolutely necessary which brings me back to what i forgot i like the fact that you're focused on those two metrics you grow the number of free co-camp you know i i guess interested people users however you want to describe it and then that obviously impacts the ratio of donors and you can sort of like grow that one to grow this one or you can grow this one too i mean like meaning you know if you grew the amount uh from five percent point five percent 25 says that yeah okay geez if you double that if you double to one percent right i mean so you can sort of focus on those two metrics either grow the total captive audience or grow the you know the ratio of donors that's i like the simplicity of focusing on two things rather than so many other things yes to grow to scale yeah yeah and that's why i'm reluctant to bring in like you know a fundraising expert or uh right you know to try to court like personally fly around and meet with the ceos of all these different houses if you can get by without it it's obviously better than not have to do that and it seems like you're on that path you have these two numbers uh the higher leverage one is honestly the percentage yeah but uh you seem to be pretty good at growing the top end funnel at this point yeah all these people using it you've also been very patient so based on four years ago we talked to you and you're also and i don't want to use this word too loosely but you're not greedy right like there are some people that just and maybe it's i don't know really how you describe greed where it's not um egregious or so like where it's overly greedy yeah you know like yeah level yeah right you know you can have capitalistic ambitions and not be greedy you know you seem to have a patience that is uncanny well i avoid that i'd where it's not not everybody has the kind of patience you have like i don't i don't i couldn't do what you've done yeah well i managed you know for-profit companies before i started freako camp like as a school director essentially like it was a private uh intensive english program and you know i had to make sure that we had like a a good even day and you know all those metrics that matter so and i i have kind of a traditional business background in addition to my education background uh so i can understand the physics of business so to speak and that's really helpful because that gives me some perspective and it's kind of like if you're a jazz musician if you don't know how to play you can just do chromatic skill play whatever it doesn't sound good but if you do know how to play you know exactly how to break the rules and how to bend the rules to make it sound really cool uh so that's like to some extent the fact that i'm older i'm you know i'm going to turn 40 next year that gives me a huge edge because i've got the like the life experience i had run a lot of organizations before free code camp so i knew like the people part of it and the budgeting part of it so i guess in some respects one of the reasons i'm more patient is i'm more confident in the state of the world and how things work and fit together and also you know i had my wife who has the patience of job and she had a job with benefits and and we had health insurance for our kid and for ourselves and so i didn't need to you know run out and buy that ferrari or whatever it is that you know startup people do when they when they exit like free code camp will hopefully go on forever and hope hopefully at least for the rest of my life which i'm hoping to live to be you know 90 100 like uh hopefully i can continue to be involved in leading or helping somebody else lead the organization for the rest of my life so everything is long term this is not a problem that's going to magically solve itself you look at how long it's taken to get people to you know to even get literacy to the rate it is yeah after 400 years right um this is going to be an ongoing challenge to teach people about technology we probably have people coming into developer land at a faster rate than the birth rate at this point just a thought a thought exercise think about which one's actually happening faster so i think maybe converting more developers then we're birthing them at this point so huge massive forward-looking opportunity as well and impact so let's do a hard cut to uh can i ask one question before the hard cut yes real fat i don't think it'll take you long to answer this one it's probably really easy even for you have uh have you gotten offers or people venture capital anybody that's come to you and said quincy i will buy what you got i would give you know whatever have you got something like how often do you get i'm not gonna say the names but we've had some big companies that like have approached us um for like aqua hire i guess i don't know how it would work i mean this is before we got the tax exempt status uh but once we got that people just left us alone because it you can in theory unwind an ngo like if somebody wanted to acquire the red cross it'd be like this bureaucratic you know nightmare and you spend so much time i'm sure but it is possible to convert yeah but that's never going to happen here uh and i'm grateful that you know those organizations saw value in free code camp but that's not where we're going like we don't want to be you know free code camp by acme corporation yeah or something like that right i just would imagine the offers are a plentiful and the temptation is is uh is very i mean it's not really for me it could be i mean for some depends yeah i i'm just a simple dude like i like hanging out with my kids i like reading books and uh going for runs you know i mean i don't know because i'm in this very fortunate position where i live in a really advanced country with rule of law order like you get more money it's almost like an insurance policy right like if i get cancer i'll be able to pay for all my chemotherapy and my radiotherapy uh or any surgeries necessary right if my kids get cancer i'll be able to pay for that so money at some point like just becomes a score a number that uh in theory you can dip into if you really need to i don't think that that really applies to me i'd much rather just be a normal person and have a normal kind of middle class middle american life then be cruising around in a ferrari in san francisco or something yeah yeah our left go ahead okay hard left turn so closing in closing we're going to talk about this topic because you're not busy enough with free code camp you decide you know what we want to do we want to disrupt we want to disrupt meet up with an open source event planning platform for not just for developers but for everybody to be able to just set up their own instance with a docker container tell us about yeah a chapter and why you're doing this and uh how it relates to at least relates to the current you know to the recent changes in media i'm not sure if it's actually inspired by that if you're already working on it and you're like oh this is opportunistic tell us the story of chapter real quick yeah so meetup was acquired by wework a couple years ago wework as we all know was not worth as much as they said it was pretty disastrous uh reversal reverse ipo yeah yeah it's it's one for the history books but anyway we work of course uh and as of october when i made this announcement uh it was a few hours after meet up and announce that they were enacting this new policy that they were going to charge everybody a two dollar rsvp fee whenever they rsvp'd for an event now free code camp grudgingly has 40-ish meetups on meetup most of our study groups are organized on facebook because it's free but some meetups will pay the 20 a month to have a meetup page which i think is ridiculous that it costs that much money but it does and people are willing to pay for it so we quickly did some back of the envelope calculations and based on the number of events we had it would have cost us like twenty thousand dollars extra every year not just to us but to the entire community in aggregate if they were all paying and that's two bucks is essentially yours to potentially get as a donation so just yeah oh there's just money in their pocket that they shouldn't have to spend to rsvps for the platform the infrastructure that hasn't changed the only notable thing that meetup has done in the past 10 years was get acquired by wework they have been exactly the exact same website yeah in terms of product in my humble opinion and i say this is somebody who's been using meetup for that yeah i could say that as well because there's like i recently as part of this was like i thought i closed my account i double checked on it i didn't know like i'm closing because i thought i did before i think when they were acquired by we work it was just like i never knew they got acquired i just this was the first i had heard i mean i just been a yeah a grudging meet-up user as well just more from the they've done some other stuff too i i can't recall what but it was like you know what i you know if i'm if it wasn't like oh i'm canceling you know uh meet up from my life it was more like i don't use the platform anymore i don't find value in it and i'm like wow if i if you leave a profile somewhere at least your data is still there so there's still this um opportunity for them to use you when you've since gone away so my thought was like i'm gonna pull my account and not do that anymore well what i love about the open source community is like we don't have to put up with that stuff if we don't want to that being said somebody has to step up and like throw some code on the table or a spec on the table yeah you know that's one of the things we talked with uh siege bot about what they're doing with the federated you know replacement for the package management uh what's it called a camera with the name of it all of a sudden yeah and tropical topic yeah you know and just the fact that it's like well we could all sit around and complain hey as people who talk in the microphones a lot some something that we do is the easiest thing for us to do is to complain yeah we complain quite a bit but in the open source world it's like hey we can actually solve some of these problems and that's why i was just impressed by the announcement and you guys at least beginning of an effort to say you know what meetup has value these this is the thing that needs to exist but it's not like it's irreplicable or replaceable so it's not that complicated so yeah we quickly made an announcement like i thought about it really hard i just decided yes this is important enough this is going to make a big enough difference for just us that it's worth having self-hosted chapter management tool i mean that's what it is it's for multi-chapter organizations so we're not trying to boil the ocean and just say we're all events everywhere just like meetup is right we're just focused on like you know the ymca or the boys and girls club of america or rotary club lions club some of these other organizations that have lots of chapters they can just have their own server they can have full control of the data and people can go there and set up events and and they can have chapter organizers and uh then they can have some discovery within their own organization and they can just have a little subdomain or sub directory that's like you know ymca.com chapter or women who code org slash chapter or something like that right so as far as how i was coming along i tweeted out this kind of somewhat angry tweet by quincy larson uh relatively emotionless tweet standards um and a lot of people were like yeah that's messed up you know like it was like a i think it was a tweet of the screenshot of like the meet up their announcement cheerful announcement oh great news i'm worried is everybody right yeah this is actually gonna slightly reduce your cost as an organizer and pass like massive costs onto the community but anyway uh a lot of people retweet it and i had a little link to a discord room which uh discord is not open source course but it is pretty convenient for just organizing an impromptu thing i've used it for hackathons and stuff um so everybody jumped in there and we got like a thousand people jump in most of them just of course promptly left and forgot about it but some of them stayed and we started brainstorming like what kind of tools are we going to use what what's the user story you know what are they going to look like who are the roles and we quickly got a lot of stuff ironed out like at the schema got uh like an api documentation up got an api up um so now we're just building a lot of the additional functionality we need for our mvp but soon it'll be out and of course it won't be amazing right off the bat but eventually it'll be great i love this of course it won't be amazing there's a theme but eventually it'll be great that's right i like that theme for the show eventual greatness so how do people get involved i mean typical github flow like find chapter in the show notes and like get involved because it's a thing that uh we could all could use and if you could use it and you want to have seems like to me pretty easy entry low hanging like collaborator fruit like hey here's a pretty open project that's still getting itself figured out that's the best time to get involved because like huge impact like you can be you can be a big contributor early on uh check out chapter from the free code camp crew yeah is it would you say it's a meet-up alternative though well i have a question if if the answer is yeah then i gotta call it i mean it's for our purposes yeah as a as an ngo that has lots of chapters around the world absolutely like we're not gonna use meat up anymore you're solving your own problem first and hopefully this the problem you have is is multiplied by many others yeah well i'm confident it is yeah sure it is but even if only we used it internally it still be it's just fine twenty thousand dollars in savings and also the pride of us being able to go in and tweak things and not having all of our user data just be like owned by wework and they're desperate you know cash squeezing efforts so what about more traditional meetups so like we have the nebraska javascript meetup it's just a very typical javascript meetup is chapter it's not multi-chapter it's just like well we do a meetup ever and you can you can run like you can run your own instance it's just 20 bucks for whatever five bucks to get like a tiny little server that'll run it yeah we're trying to like make it as compact as possible like instead of using uh elasticsearch for example we're just gonna use postgresqueries um so little tweaks like that that just reduce the number of services we have to have running in it in a docker container yeah has the idea of federated ever yeah made it into the into and how did that go i mean not necessarily from a technological perspective but just like a way that you can opt into being part of a shared discovery network right exactly right because the main benefit of meetups yeah exactly discovery yeah right that's the that's the only benefit i mean if you if you have your own organization you already have a mailing list of tons of people your people know your website and they're visiting it already then you don't need to worry as much about discovery but it's it's still a nice thing to have well you still go there and check your interests too so if a new group comes up near you geographically let's say my interests are javascript and ruby well anytime anything touches those two areas then i'm going to get notified so it you wouldn't want to just prop up your tent without an audience and no opportunity for discovery yeah yeah you wouldn't i was curious about that i mean this could eventually come to a displaced meet up in a lot of respects but that's not our goal at this point even though initially i was like so angry at meetup i was like yeah let's let's just create a made-up killer but that's not how i think like when i'm thinking clear-headedly and i don't see red um i think i think practically what can we do for our organization what can we do for our community and this is a right scope right scale tool right that's going to work for them well it's been five years four since we last talked five since the inception this is your fifth year anniversary uh similar question in the companion podcast you asked us which was hey what's the next five years like for you what what's the future hold for you are you lack of visionary like i am currently or are you visionary and you've got lots of ambition i have an incredible amount of things i'd like to do a lot of it comes down to how much we have in our budget because we don't want to overextend ourselves we're a tiny organization we want to make sure everything we do we do properly and that we're not spreading ourselves too thin so if we can continue to grow our budget we'd like to do a lot more explanatory journalism and explain a lot more about technology and put tech news in context through really in-depth primers we'd like to create a lot more really good first party courses and we'd like to create a lot more interactive curricula we'd love to be able to figure out a way that we could pay for servers so that we could actually have linux focus challenges uh get focused challenges all these things that require like file file systems essentially right like you can only do so much in the browser just you know for example we're able to do python because mozilla just released a giant library that's a significant update from like brython or some of these other browser-based python tools but we'd really like to be able to actually have full development environments like on a server that is showing up on freecodecamp that you yourself have your own little mini you know compartment on the server it costs a lot of money yeah so yeah if we if we're able to increase the budget we're going to just keep doing what we do with those three pillars we're going to keep growing the number of people on the forum and by extension in irl events and we're also going to just keep creating articles and videos and we're gonna keep expanding the curriculum gosh we haven't even talked about that side of the publication your youtube channel i mean we're on there right now theoretically so subscribe we do have a youtube channel click the bell for notifications every time you like like and subscribe yeah click the bell that's right youtubers they always it's like subscribe and the bell right why did why did youtube do that they want you to have to subscribe twice i've never hit the bell in my life you know actually it's kind of like a double opt-in you subscribe because you're interested what's the bell give you it like makes notifications i don't care that much that you know i have a video like i'll come watch it on my own terms thank you very much no one's that important well that's where the double opt-in is i mean i get it from the from the creator's side like yeah i would love to have the bell for my channel but i don't want to have your bell for my feed keep your bell all right keep your bell well quincy man it's it's a journey it's been it's been fun watching you over these last five years uh the numbers speak for themselves i think the fact that you're you can educate at such a efficient rate makes it total sense for people who are who have you know the funds and have benefited from free code camper know people who have you know that five bucks seems like it makes a lot of sense so you know one more time to pitch to our listeners if if you appreciate the work they're doing and you want to help educate the next generation of coders out there whether they're young whether they're young or old or what part of the world they're in yeah uh no better way than to do a recurring donation to free code campaign when he says better no better there's no more efficient way right and the leverage is amazing yeah yep and uh yeah thanks for sitting down with us we really appreciate you and all the work you're doing thanks again for having me back it's been a privilege talking to you gentlemen thanks quincy same here\n"