The Conversation: 100 Devs and the Future of Coding Education

We were recently fortunate enough to have Leon on our show, discussing his work with 100 Devs, a unique organization that aims to make coding education more accessible and equitable. As we sat down with Leon, it became clear that he is not only passionate about coding, but also dedicated to helping others learn this valuable skill.

Leon's vision for 100 Devs is built around the idea of providing individuals with real-world experience and practical paid work in exchange for their coding skills. This model is designed to help people overcome the barriers that often stand in the way of learning to code, including lack of free time and financial resources. By creating a platform where coders can gain hands-on experience working on real projects with production-level code, 100 Devs aims to make it easier for individuals to commit to an already challenging process.

The agency model that Leon is implementing is a key component of this approach. Instead of just providing learning opportunities, the organization will also be offering paid work to its members. This means that individuals will not only be learning how to code, but they will also have access to a steady income stream while working on real-world projects. The agency model is designed to help level the playing field for individuals who may not have the luxury of dedicating large amounts of time to learning a new skill.

One of the most exciting aspects of 100 Devs is its commitment to making coding education more accessible and equitable. Leon recognizes that many people are intimidated by the idea of learning to code, citing the lack of free time and financial resources as major barriers. However, he also believes that with the right support and structure, anyone can learn to code. By providing a platform for coders to gain practical experience, 100 Devs aims to help individuals overcome these obstacles and unlock their full potential.

Leon's approach is not without its challenges, however. He acknowledges that creating a new organization and implementing an innovative model will require patience and perseverance. Despite the inevitable setbacks, Leon remains committed to his vision, believing that it has the potential to make a real difference in people's lives. As he put it, "we're going to have a lot of mistakes, a lot of things are going to go wrong, but we're going to figure it out."

The Impact of 100 Devs on the Coding Community

Leon's work with 100 Devs is not only exciting, but also inspiring. The organization's commitment to making coding education more accessible and equitable has resonated deeply with many members of the coding community. As Leon himself noted, he is "all about taking away excuses" for people who want to learn how to code. By providing a platform for coders to gain practical experience, 100 Devs aims to empower individuals to take control of their own learning and make progress towards their goals.

The organization's focus on real-world experience and practical paid work is also seen as a breath of fresh air by many in the coding community. As Leon pointed out, "nobody says that learning to code is easy" – but he believes that with the right support and structure, anyone can learn to code. The idea of providing individuals with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience working on real projects is seen as a major step forward in making coding education more accessible and equitable.

Leon's Vision for the Future

As we concluded our conversation with Leon, it became clear that his vision for 100 Devs extends far beyond its current iteration. He sees the organization as a model for how to make coding education more accessible and equitable, and believes that it has the potential to inspire a new generation of coders. As he noted, "I just want to commend you on this program" – his work with 100 Devs is truly inspiring, and we can't wait to see what the future holds for this innovative organization.

In the meantime, Leon's message to the coding community is clear: don't be afraid to take control of your own learning, and don't give up in the face of obstacles. As he put it, "if you have young kids or if you're taking care of your folks if you're working like three jobs to be able to pay exorbitant rent in your city" – these are all valid reasons for not being able to dedicate large amounts of time to learning a new skill. However, Leon also believes that with the right support and structure, anyone can learn to code.

Leon's advice to aspiring coders is simple: "just want to encourage people to do what we've done the two of us" – start your own organization, create something innovative, and make it happen. As he noted, "there are lots of charities out there that are doing important work" – but Leon believes that creating a startup with a social mission can be a game-changer.

Conclusion

As our conversation with Leon came to a close, we couldn't help but feel inspired by his passion and commitment to making coding education more accessible and equitable. The work he is doing with 100 Devs is truly innovative, and has the potential to make a real difference in people's lives. As we look to the future, it's clear that Leon's vision for 100 Devs will continue to inspire and empower individuals around the world.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe welcome back to the free Coke Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larsson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people that are getting into Tech today we're talking with Leon Noel who I don't know if you've heard of 100 devs but it's amazing and it's a huge source of inspiration for me personally he is the founder of 100 devs and he head of engineering at resilient coders Leon joining us from Sunny Los Angeles how's everything going with you it's it's a little early we'll see if the sun comes out things are going well uh this is uh surreal experience thank you so much for having me and uh we we'll get weird with it real quick uh I I always joke that like my my wife knows how serious I am if your face is like the background of my like screens or or I've had a picture of you on my desk for a little while uh so she knows if it's go time or not based off of like she's seeing you so uh IM honor it's a huge privilege like this is a dream come true for me uh you're a huge hero of mine and have done so much to help so many folks and uh you're who I want to be when I grow up so I really appreciate it thanks for having me on yeah well I just want to say that it's like very kind uh and I want to say that that goes both ways like uh often when I'm feeling like a little but low energy and I just like ah you know I don't know if I can get a lot done today maybe I'll just you know go and answer a bunch of emails and not um do like curriculum design or or you know I'll I'll I'll go into like the I'm like what would Leon do he would dive in head first he would have so much energy overflowing and he would just go in there and get things done and so uh yeah like I I do think about you a lot when I'm just feeling low energy because I've watched your streams and I've seen the amount of energy both like literal energy like bursting forth and the positive energy that you bring to the community so uh thank you for that and uh I'll make a little meme of you know Wolverine holding the picture frame and then go holding holding the picture of me I won't really do that but like I when you said that that just fell hot in my mind because I love X-Men so um Leon did did you see the new the new announcement 97 what's happened they're redoing the old school cartoon oh my goodness like post Professor X the original 9s Saturday morning all right no more everybody we stop the podcast we go watch the trailer it's really good it looks really good i i l link to the trailer in a little bit of tears in my eyes when there's a specific catchphrase that is said but yeah okay uh I'm going to link to that be sure to watch that immediately after you finish watching or listening to this podcast interview because we've got a ton of advice that's practical and not just you know something that you can do to escape from your day-to-day experience but to build up your day-to-day experience and accomplish your goals so Leon before we dive into 100 devs uh and Brazilian coders and all the work you've done uh I like to always start these interviews with more autobiographical stuff just so people can have context into like who you are your lived experience uh where you're coming from and where you're heading and things like that so maybe you could take us back to uh where you grew up and like what your earliest Ambitions were as a kid yeah so uh I grew up in Philly um definitely 100% a product of Philly I was always kind of the very kind of tinkering wanting to build type of kid uh I grew up with a a huge household a a big family uh all in one uh row home in South Philly which was amazing and uh I was blessed to have amazing libraries where I had access to computers and could tinker and build and uh I was very blessed even have a lot of even just Computer Science Education early throughout my life I had a q basic class in middle school where I would get a sailboat to go from one side of the screen to the other I thought it had magical powers and so I was very lucky to have these skills so so early uh we also in Philly have magnet schools which are kind of like EXA schools that you test into and so I went to engineering and science where I had two years of C++ in high school and this is like 20 years ago and so yeah I just I'm very lucky to have grown up in an environment that supported my passions and interest even when I didn't have access to those Technologies or knowledge that there was a way for me to get access to it so very very thankful for that that's awesome yeah that that's it sounds like a really kind of like adelic upbringing in the sense that like you've got access to what about teachers did you have any teachers as a kid who like really propelled you forward I always talk very passionately about my um my seventh grade teacher uh or eighth grade teacher uh science teacher Mr creger um whom I've failed to track down if you know Mr creger who taught at uh you know Hoover Middle School which was is is like a now destroyed bulldozed um School in Oklahoma City if anybody's heard of that person let me know but uh did you have anybody like a Mr creger in your life who was eccentric and interesting but kept giving you like interesting books about space and stuff like that yeah so i' I've have been lucky to have a few um so miss franchine was my fifth grade teacher that when I was done my coursework would not let me just sit there twiddling my thumbs but always had like puzzles and things to build and Tinker with in the background and likewise I've tried to find them I haven't been able to find them but they really kind of showed me that I could be in control of my learning that it wasn't a a one-way depositing of knowledge that I could have some sort of control or command over the things I was doing with my free time that would enable me to think creatively and and to do the things I wanted to do uh I had a lot of wonderful folks throughout High school that really helped guide me um that pushed me that uh maybe saw something inside of me that I didn't see inside of myself and would try and pull that out my we're talking about like code education Shout Out Mr shipper would uh push me to learn my my C++ and we had the old school like Matrix printers where you'd print out your code on them and and I would look through it and take it to them and try to point out bugs or errors and you talk about folks in your life that do like the small things right and Mr shipper every every birthday for years and years would just send me like a happy birthday message so talking about folks that just support you long term uh that was there and then in University it was Dr Bri esus the person that showed me that I could be what I wanted to be and supported my ability to learn supported what I wanted to do made sure that I had funding over the summer to like live uh made sure that I got to do the research I wanted to do and ultimately gave me the the skills that I thought I needed to be the person I wanted to be in life and so yeah definitely the product of amazing teachers throughout my entire life and definitely something that I try to think of with resilient coders and uh 100 devs like what what was about those folks that inspired me to to do more to learn to feel comfortable and try and bring that into the classroom as well yeah yeah it's so cool to talk with another teacher because obviously you're a software engineer but you're also a teacher to many many people not necessarily in the conventional way uh maybe in the conventional way too maybe you actually give lectures occasionally in person but like through 100 devs you're essentially like the classroom teacher that people need you know like yeah you know the the bat signals up in the air the the 100 Dev signal and and you're answering that call and you're helping people uh with the not just uh practical challenges of learning to code but the motivational challenges as well and that's that's a huge thing I take away from your Stream So sounds uh like you went on to do really well academically uh I presume because you went to one of the best universities in the world uh maybe you could talk a little bit about like what that process was like what what is it like getting into a relatively Elite cool and um you know like was that how long did you have that plan at what age did you kind of like Snap to awareness I always like to tell people like I kind of snapped to awareness much later in life uh I was maybe like 20 21 and that's when I like got really into like journalism and studying foreign languages and stuff like themes that would kind of run throughout the rest of my life living abroad and and and ultimately like much later I had kind of like a second thing where I learned like technology is really really gosh darn useful like and uh that's when I I learned to code and like automated stuff from my school and stuff but like did you have like an early kind of Awakening at some point do you remember a a distinct period of your life where you're like hey you know I can do a lot more than other people around me are doing my my peers was there such an Awakening for you yeah I think I I want it to be comfortable I wanted to have um a good life and I think early on especially as like a kid of color you're kind of taught this very it's just like Dr lur dentist it comes up over and over and over again and it comes from maybe our families and the folks in our community not knowing kind of all of the opportunities that are available but that those are the safe Pathways the Dr La dentist and so yeah for hundreds of years yeah hundreds years yeah so it's it's proven so that's kind of the path that I got put on as someone that who was successful pretty early academically I did well in elementary school I got I used to have to go from my school to another school every week to do like other programs and I saw how hard my grandparents had to work I saw how hard my grandfather worked specifically uh in a boiler room every day it was hot they were pulling Valves and I saw what Hardware could do and I wanted to do something that would enable me to have a good life but maybe not be so sweaty right and so the the that idea led me to look into Dr l dentist Dr l dentist and as I went through Middle School I was very focused on getting into one of our magnet schools so Philly has some amazing schools that you kind of test in and it's more of like a lottery now too as well and I went to engineering and science and engineering and science was geared around getting folks into engineering and Science and had tracks that you could follow and a really good placement rate into universities and so for a while my sophomore junior senior year pretty much every lunch period was spent with Miss Brown who's my guidance counselor and would make sure that I was getting access to everything I needed to do well academically and to get into really good schools and coming from a low-income family it's really expensive so Miss Brown would U make sure that I had vouchers for everything that I could take the SAT for free that I could apply to schools for free that would get me into all the best summer programs that could help me academically I was a I did upper Bound for a while um made sure I had access to things that I didn't like calculators and things like that and so my school I owe a lot too in terms of getting me prepared um for eventually what I would go to is Yale and so for me I think I've just been really blessed to be the product of a school system that if I wanted it if I wanted to work hard if I wanted to put in the hours and I played three Sports I did every Club imaginable but I had really amazing people that guided me through that process and then uh was able to to make it from from ens into Yale and then um went into hard sciences and was on this track to be a a doctor right I I Dr La dentist I chose doctor uh my mom was uh uh an LPN and um I got to grow up in do offices and see and and talk to folks and that was kind of the path I was on and it's kind of funny because I was doing computer science I was in an engineering high school and I just didn't allow myself to see that as my path or my career even though that's where eventually I should have been or and eventually did make it to and so that's kind of the the long winding path into yeah awesome and LPN is licensed practitioner licensed practicing nurse yeah it's like a vocation nurse basically so instead of doing now I guess the track is like your bachelors and you get like your RN this was a vocational pathway okay to being a nurse yeah yeah yeah I just want to make sure I got that right and I have like this policy that like no matter how common the acronym is I always try to like spell it out uh for especially for our listeners abroad non native English speaker listeners as well um uh so okay so just recapitulate something that I've been taking detailed notice as you talk just because this is so so interesting and I um I'll email these to myself these are not for publiction but it's basically the contents of this conversation is public now so um it sounds like it you didn't it just didn't even click it didn't even really occur to you that software engineering was a field you could go into because like so many people coming from underprivileged backgrounds so many you know second generation immigrants or even first generation immigrants so many people growing up who are kind of still in the shadow of inequality like racial inequality that's systemic that is the reason one of the reasons why you know wealth among black families is like something like one/ tenth of like white families that have been in the US the same duration of time I mean it's like ridiculous but because of these circumstances uh you were pushed to do Dr lawyer dentist and again like most of my doctors dentists that I haven't had any lawyers that uh like over the years have been people who came from a different country like their parents came from a different country or the in many cases as doctors they literally came from like India past the US mle which is this incredibly stringent test ESS like recertified as doctors a very lengthy costly process uh just so they could practice in the US because the US is like you know a great place to live and it's a great place to work as a physician uh generally I I guess I shouldn't speak for all there may be some physicians in the audience to take issue with that because of regulatory you know issues and like all this other stuff but my point is you were so focused on that because that is what success sounded like uh that like that was like the family's perception of success and software engineer is like a relatively new thing that is you know not well understood and it's not a surprise because software engineering has only existed a few decades right yeah um maybe you could talk about like what that Awakening to software engineering was like and how you went about okay I'm GNA go much deeper on coding and learning about computer science and math like all these things that you need to be a successful software engineer um now now I you may take issue with me saying like you need a whole lot of math for example or something like that I don't think that's necessarily true for a lot of jobs but I I always tell people like there is no knowledge that is not power like you should definitely learn math if if you have the time it's probably not the highest priority if you just want to go get a job as a developer Sor right uh but my question for You Leon mathematics all right a complete introduction right on okay so uh I'm glad to hear that like yeah because a lot of times I hear like I think one of the pieces of misinformation that's going around is like oh you don't need math to be a developer like I don't know any math like I just took high school math and I'm a developer and like that is true to an extent but there is kind of like a ceiling that you're going to hit in your engineering career if you don't like at least take some time to learn some mathem matics and you can learn mathematics right here on Freo Camp's YouTube channel we have courses on pretty much every engineering math topic that you would learned at like an undergraduate engineering program so uh you know it's just investment of time and that's a big thing we'll talk about in a little bit is like isn't really free in the sense that you have to invest your time and energy and not everybody has equal time and energy some people have all kinds of different circumstances that inform their availability to learn the code yeah so we'll talk about that in a minute but like how did you approach this and like maybe how old were you were were you still in school when you realized that you wanted to do CS yeah so I was always building so when I started in sixth grade I learned Q basic and I would go to the libraries and tinker and build when I was in high school Upward Bound got me a TI 83 Plus calculator which I still have it's like in my drawer over here some where and you could write code for that calculator and I remember swapping I felt like it was like old school you know like how people used to swap floppies I would swap the games and programs from the calculator and go to the library and like I I remember the thing I wanted for one Christmas was like the cable that connected the the calculator to the computer so that I could like put my code on it and so uh I remember very early working on calculator games and other fun stuff that I just wanted to to bring into the world or modify and hack God and so that was always really fun and then I had that kind of formal C++ in high school and then when I got to University it all went out the window I was doing hard biology uh I was doing U eventually biological anthropology I was looking at hormones testas and stuff like that but this entire time I'd always been building tinkering I really liked entrepreneurship I was always trying to start ideas small companies uh things like that and I had started um one kind of simple project that went pretty viral in in New Haven New York area um and that kind of really showed me some of the power of these skills that I've been kind of accumulating but the real kind of Awakening for me for computer science was uh every summer I was doing lab work and I had figured out how to like survive uh when you're lowincome going into like an Ivy League school basically they give you a full ride right off the rip and so I had figured out that if I didn't live on campus they would give me like whatever the amount of money was to stay on campus they would give me and I was able to use that to like do stuff I would pay rent and food but I was happy eating pasta and pasta sauce and so I actually had money to like live and and do all the things that all my my fellow students were doing because i' had figured out this like way of doing it um but I ran out of money one summer and it was getting pretty dicey pretty quickly I I really didn't have any money for food left and I was literally hungry and I realized that I I could do things like I was looking up like quick jobs and then I was like wait a minute let me let me see if I can build somebody a website I know how to do it I've been building all these like landing pages and and small things with code before so I put on Craigslist hey I'll build you a site I can get it done today and somebody responded and they paid a deposit and my life changed from that moment I I skipped all the way to the grocery store I bought my pasta I bought my pasta sauce for the month I built them the site and in that moment something very clear happened in my brain that I had a real skill uh a skill that could provide that could put food on the table a skill that would make it so I was never hungry again sorry oops sorry chis uh it's cool again yeah if anybody like like we don't edit this podcast at all so I'm not going to edit out the square word that's like a unless there's like something really bad that happens like I had a coughing fit once and so that that changed everything um until this day I still freelance and I that's the reason why a lot of the things I do today the the resilient coders the 100 DS is like I want anybody that's ever felt that way to know that there is this option this ability to to develop skills that no one can take away from you that can put legitimate food on the table and so that's when I kind of went all in on more of the engineering piece awesome yeah well um that sounds like an amazing discovery of like powers that you just had Laten within you that necessity brought forth you know necessity is the mother of invention right uh you were forced to basically by your circumstance to like think outside the proverbial box come up with a way to to get money to buy your pasta um I you know I definitely uh remember the lean College here is subsisting off pasta we got the smack Ramen if anybody like not the good like sh ramun like Korean Ramen but like it was just called smack we'd always joke about it like when you're hungry enough it's almost like you know like a drug because it's just like you feel so sated afterward course like terrible for you but what kind of pasta did you always just like did you have a particular like build of pasta that you liked uh I this is like way back whatever the cheapest was I was I was trying to survive I didn't care nowadays I probably have some preferences but back then whatever whatever was on sale whatever is the cheapest uh there was the supermarket nearest had like this like clearance aisle and in that clearance aisle they would put like the stuff they couldn't sell and so whatever was on that that rack is what I I would grab yeah yeah uh and and to this day by the way like a lot of grocery stores like Walmart like they'll take their baked goods and they'll put them on a rack like right by the like exit like the staff only place where they have like the garbage compactor where they compact the boxes like I I worked in a grocery stores for a few years so basically back where they keep all the mops and they keep all the you know inventory shelves there will be like a little rack and sometimes they'll have baked goods they're like it's still good but we can't really sell it because it's going to expire in like a day or two so like I sto snacks and Bargains from there uh but but yeah just Pro tip if you're going to a US uh grocery store you can often find like food that's about to expire that you can get like at a heavy discount so um that's really cool so how did things unfold from there so how did you um how did you go from that first contract work essentially that that client that you landed through Craigslist which is how I land I think I landed some early clients through Craigslist Craigslist amazing tool I'm not sure if it's still amazing today like 12 years since I last used it but yeah uh yeah like a lot of early G were found on Craigslist how did you go from that to the deciding I am a Dev like taking that identity if you will and going deeper with it yeah sure so um my junior year at Yale I started a small website called List full of hope it was kind of like a reverse Craigslist where uh if you needed something you could say what you needed so if you needed a jacket and someone in the area had a jacket jacket you would meet up and they would give you a jacket so it was kind of like a gift economy um it was very simple site that was just enabling folks to help others in their community and it really kind of popped off in New Haven and so there was the one winter where it was like really popular I remember people getting Christmas presents jackets gloves anything you needed um and I could really see that transition from something that was like just a raw skill to like me having to build an actual application and having real users and I was hooked like I could I saw the power I saw that it could help so many people and I knew that these skills would be really advantageous to keep going so my junior year I kind of slowly stopped kind of really wanting to do coursework senior year it became an even bigger problem and I was trying to finish my thesis to to graduate and I had to get like 300 men to spit in a tube tell me about their sexual history so I could correlate it to their testosterone levels I was trying to like show that um or find something about BPA and relation to testosterone so you drank a lot of like plastic water bottles yeah and so I was trying to do that before before it became really popular like something people would actually think about free plastic which for the kids like just in case D does have like deleterious effects we don't want our kids to be drinking from so I was having a really hard time running that that experiment and uh apparently people didn't want to you know spit in a tube and tell me about their sexual history for like a bottle of Gatorade and like a pack of gum or something and so uh I wasn't able to recruit enough people for that experiment and I decided to use my like coding skills to set up it was just like a landing page where a lot of students were always trying to find studies or experiments to participate in because one they were a lot of fun sometimes and you actually got paid pretty well to do the experiments and so there is one really famous One that people loved where you basically went to a lab they got you drunk and you played poker and they're just like watching you like how you make risky decisions and things like that and you got paid a couple hundred dollars to do it wow and so I made a landing page that had all the studies from Yale Harvard Princeton that were like trying to get people to come and I just slipped mine in there and it took off because we had all these professors that were promoting it we had all these students that got real value they went to the site they found something fun to do they got money and and um I dropped out my senior year to turn that into a business um which became social sigh and um we wound up building academic surveying tools we had over 4,000 different universities that used our tools to power their academic research uh and even though that company has been wrapped up for a long time now we still have research that gets published based off of the data that they collected I needed to know more my Engineers had these like magical powers and I needed to to like learn that skill for myself and so I took my coding education more seriously uh eventually uh I was building other products other startups as well and and started teaching at General Assembly helping others kind of acquire these skills too so that was kind of the the journey it's interesting so first of all congratulations on building something that 4,000 universities use it's not easy to get universities to use your stuff like there's like this notorious like sales cycle adoption cycle among universities they're they're very like slow to adopt new tools um yeah I mean that's that's phenomenal to go from basically like Mechanical Turk for being a human test subject to having like an actual project that is getting wide usage like that that's really funny that you bring up Mechanical Turk that was the reason why we were able to raise like VC funding was because M Turk was becoming more popular um and what social size saw was not just the the survey creation but the participants taking the surveys and so part of my pitch deck and I'll never forget it was I decided to get my mom a Christmas card and I had people on mtk like just like hold up like the the merry Christmas sign and what we had was this one person with a hundred different like not 100 but like a lot of different accounts that was just like Chang ing their hat putting on a different shirt but it was like clearly the same person and so at this point Mechanical Turk hadn't solved the like identity online and like how do you stop like false participants and that was kind of why we were able to be um able to raise money and why we were able to have so many universities trust and use our service because we were solving that problem specifically so was your mom like who is this person and why are they so you know passionate about like wishing me a happy birthday it was cool there was like 100 people from all over the world with like different backgrounds different cities different places and they all were saying Merry Christmas now you could probably facilitate that but back when we did it it was yeah it was pretty cool yeah and mechanical turque just for people that are unfamiliar with it is like they call it artificial artificial intelligence obviously nowadays like a lot of things you would pay someone on mechanical TK to do you just like form out to like an llm or something but it was like um like hey I need you like early on it was like hey I need you to solve a capture for me or hey I need you to create a Facebook account and like like this this Facebook group or something like that was like basically getting around the restrictions that different like platforms might have in place uh but uh event but you know in the good like as designed use would be for example getting people to do precisely what Leon said so uh it was everybody would get like maybe just like a few pennies for doing a a hit I think or job or something I can't remember what they were called but uh yeah you you would do those is that accurate like I haven't actually used it yeah no that that's that's pretty close uh there was it's this whole subfield called human computation right so human computation there's there's some things that computers can't yet do that humans can still do but figuring out how to do them at scale um is really important and so Mechanical Turk you can take an a task break it down into a very small subtask and have thousands and thousands of people do it need for human computation is like labeling data think of like AI training and things like that who were the people like there had to be real people that said that was a a fired hose or that was a car or that was a bicycle that's a Chihuahua and not a muffin exactly that's like a famous like chihuahuas look a lot like muffins to a computer and so figuring out all of that was necessary for a lot of the advancements that we're seeing now and there are still things that humans can do very quickly that machines just can't do yet and so um M Turk still has like a place um there are other companies that do similar things nowadays of course but that labeling and small tasks done at scale and there are other cool things you can do too so where it's like um instead of giving it to just one person you give it to five and if four out of the five do one thing you know that you can probably trust that thing as opposed to the one person that did it as opposed to The Minority Report yeah the dissenting uh the asentic opinion yeah that that's a good kind of consensus mechanism so um Okay cool so you built this project we could talk about that a lot more but we have so much more to talk about like where do you go from there you you basically had a successful project right like everybody's dream especially at this point sounds like you were pretty young like yeah like had you finished college at this point like I I so I dropped out and never finished um oh wow and my senior year at Yale um I had this idea for social sigh I dropped out I did Tech Stars um techar is an accelerator popular like they they give you some some seed money and then you're in like a program where they kind of Coach you exactly they help you yeah exactly they help you lay the foundation for a company and all the skills you might need to know to to do that effectively uh techstars really changed my life it really gave me a lot of the skills that I was missing um gave me my initial Network outside of University and yeah initial seed funding and then helped me going to raise more funds for for social sigh and yeah while I was running social sigh I started teaching uh a general assembly and so general assembly is one of the first like really big uh coding boot camp programs and I was doing their part-time courses for a very long time I'm distinguished faculty with uh GA even until today and I was having just hundreds if not thousands of people be successful like learning these new skills learning how to code getting great jobs and at one point it kind of just got overwhelming that I didn't notice anyone that looked like me taking advantage of this program one because it cost a lot of money it also cost a lot of time um and so I started looking for orgs uh near me in Boston that I could help or support and I came across resilient coders which at that time our founder David delmare I was really trying to work with court involved Youth and show them that hey like there are these things you could be doing like coding or things like that that might help you longterm in life and so I started just going to we had what are called Community hours where it was just myself a few other mentors and a bunch of young folks that um were typically court involved or or a returning Citizen and just trying to like give them these skills and then um we had the idea of starting a boot camp and uh our founder dve dmar said hey like you've been running these other boot camp programs could you do it for RC said yes and then for the past six years we've built a program that can help folks uh traditionally of color that have um particularly not completed a degree go from zero to employable as a soft engineer and we've been pretty successful at it we've helped hundreds of folks get jobs um and with starting salaries around $992,000 and for us that's huge because for each person we can get from those communities we're talking about millions and millions of dollars back into those communities over the lifespan of their career so started doing uh resilient coders that eventually led me to 100 devs and that's kind of the the Long Way Forward I want to dive a little more into because we're going to talk a lot about 100 devs but like uh Brazilian coders you you said uh court involved youth uh I'm I'm not familiar with term but like you know I have lots of friends who are like convicted felons and I'm not sure if that if that is essentially like people who early on in life uh get into trouble maybe because they actually did something wrong or maybe they were profiled in like the the very unequal justice system in the United States didn't do its job very well and and you know gave them much harsher penalty than that kid should probably have in many cases uh but uh is that like accurate is like yeah so we had a lot of individuals that we say court involved because exactly of the things that you brought up a lot of the folks that we were working with they didn't do anything wrong uh and they were just at the wrong place the wrong time um we did have folks that um had gone down a different path in life to do the things they needed to do provide for themselves and their families and so we wanted to give them a clear path forward to do the the thing with their loved ones and so we trying to get them skills just skills that they could put into practice to to to get to a point to where they had a a strong stable high growth career and and that's that's kind of the birth of RC and our our our Dirty Little Secret that um I guess some folks know is that the first dollars we ever took in were from the Boston Police Department uh because they saw our program as hey we're going to spend all this money on incarceration Rehabilitation um why not get ahead of it and they gave us some funding to help run our first boot camp yeah that's awesome well it sounds like it was money well spent uh given the uh impact you all have had over the past six years I think you said um so so you got resilient coders going you're teaching there um and there it sounds like you're having a big impact but was there a moment where you're like I can have an even bigger impact by leveraging the power of the internet like what was the process that and and maybe I can back up a second and just say what is 100 devs yeah sure uh so 100 devs is a collection of Engineers that help build a completely free live software engineering training program for anyone anywhere uh that was kind of our our Genesis now we're also building and we're going to be piloting this year a full service digital agency where real clients come to us to build products and get to tap into our amazing alumni that have gone on to work at some of the best tech companies in the world we're talking Amazon LinkedIn slack You Name It We have an alumni there they come back to work on these projects uh each Project's getting broken down in individual tasks and then as you're learning you're also building real code for real companies and getting paid actual money to do it um we mentioned early on that free isn't always free because it requires you to have an extreme privilege of time to work through all this material to give up your nights and weekends and we want to do something that helps soften the blow for folks that are going through our program so our program is entirely free uh every resource I have ever given out is always free I don't work with anybody that doesn't have a free version or something that we can have access to but we did a poll not too long ago that said hey we realize a lot of you uh care can't commit the time or the the take the time away from putting food on the table what would it what would it take for you to be able to focus and it was $200 a week was the was the average we can make that happen we can figure out a way to get folks those fund so that they can focus and get through a program like a 100 devs and yeah so now we're a global Community our Discord is 60,000 plus strong uh we have alumni all around the world and we're just trying to figure out a way uh for folks to be able to unlock a stable high growth career put food on the table support themselves and their family and their loved ones and luckily we found a lot of folks that believe in that idea and Mission to and we build a wonderful Community around it yeah and uh so the mechanics of the community like first of all it goes without saying that I'm in awe of what you all are accomplishing with hund devs and uh I've had so many positive interactions with people who are both like the free Cod Camp curriculum and in the 100 devs I guess you call it like a cohort or an intake or like basically a bunch of people working together through a set kind of like week to week um program and I you know free Cod camp we have experimented with like cohorted programs and like let's see if we can get all these people uh but what we found is like it's it's a lot of work to organize which I'm sure you're very aware of and like free COC philosophy is like let's just build the resources at scale put them out there yes lots of kids who are the you know the son or daughter of like software engineers in poo Alto are going to use free Cod camp and they're going to use it for free and they you know probably could have paid a bunch of money to have a computer science student like tutor them or something right but also a whole lot of kids who are in like a village in rural India or uh in like kind of like a failed State uh which a lot of people have smartphones and can't get on the internet even in places like Somalia right uh North Korea right people in North Korea use freeo Camp sometimes that's wild and uh essentially they can they can learn even though uh it would be normally prohibitively expensive for them to buy you know a $20 course on like a course website uh for example and and so like our philosophy is like we need to make sure that there is a baseline that everybody has access to comprehensive math programming computer science and English education um so that everybody regardless of their circumstances if they have time which not everybody does but if they have time or they can figure out techniques to like make time yeah to learn even a little each day then they can make steady forward progress toward the eventual goal of working as a software engineer right uh so so that is kind of like our philosophy is like let's just make tons of really high quality free stuff that's essentially subsidized by the community like the the people who are able to give the alumni um sometimes like we got a gift for $250,000 the other day from comp saw CEO of coma is a fan of free Cod camp and uses free Cod Camp to expand his JavaScript knowledge super chill dude uh you know we darl silver uh founder of thinkful uh kicked in $150,000 um and then of course we're getting grants from like you know Linux foundation and mongodb and Google and a lot of other organizations but a vast majority of our support comes directly from the community from people who donate so rec.org donate all right but but my point is oh yeah and thank you thank you for supporting our charity uh Le I didn't even realize I apologize um but maybe you're getting my my periodic donor uh email like I said yeah so um my point in all all this little tangent is to say that like free C Camp like we don't have the bandwidth to do things that don't scale and you are doing things that don't scale at all really like maybe you figured out some techniques to get like cohorts to scale and get like because I mean you mentioned your Discord has 60,000 people in it uh but like actually getting on stream and like teaching for like a marathon 3 five hours like however long you go it's really inspiring uh definitely catch some of the live streams if you can or I've watched I I watch everything at Double speed so I watch like the video on demand Stu like that but uh like I guess you saw from coming from the like intensive program where you're teaching folks like you saw the Merit of quality not just quantity or like I guess like cont like I'm not like doing things that don't scale really uh and and helping in people individually uh doesn't really scale but that's not necessarily the idea the idea is to give a whole lot of attention to a a smaller number of people and to really make sure that those people can ramp up to you know an impressive he said like uh what was the uh the figure you said was like the the median income of people who graduated um 92,000 yeah for cters yeah that's a lot more than I made at my first developer job given if this is in Boston like the cost of living might be higher but but I mean that's a that's a lot of freaking money for people that like I I imagine some of these people don't have University degrees I didn't even know that you hadn't completed your degree although dropping out of Yale is probably very different from dropping out of like you know rather University right yeah but uh sorry I've been talking for the last three minutes I'm just very excited about how you approach this and I I want to make sure our audience appreciates the I guess counterintuitiveness of what you've done uh and how you've been able like people weren't doing this because it was perhaps counterintuitive to do so and it was like probably very idea don't yeah so so like maybe you can talk about that like how you have to do stuff that doesn't scale and like ways that it doesn't scale and then ways like techniques you figured out to scale it a little bit sure yeah happy to I think the first thing though is just like Shout Out free code camp like you all laid the the foundation for so many folks to learn and one of the things I'm always hyping uh especially in 100 devs on our Discord is I think a lot of folks that go into this space don't put in the work to do the things that really matter the most and so one of the things I've always admired about free code Camp is like this commitment to filling the gaps and so realizing that most people don't have the privilege of speaking English so we're going to build a full like how do you speak English course right uh that's that's huge it's like very progressively thinking about what do our folks going through our program absolutely need and so um that's why I'm so happy that free code Camp exists it's why it's one of the first things I always recommend to new folks getting into Tech and why like I I think you all will continue to be so successful cuz it's just like this Relentless pursuit of making Tech more Equitable to everyone and so um that's why I said really early on in this conversation I look up to you so much and it's a lot of that ethos is what I've tried to bring to 100 devs um for 400 devs we got started during the pandemic and the pandemic hit and things got really bad really quickly so people always like to talk in Boston about at 2% unemployment rate but I knew just from looking at the actual data when you looked in our communities of color is already at 12% this is pre pandemic if you look during the pandemic it jumped from 12 to like 33% in some communities and so it got real bad real quick and I I just if you are already in Tech or if you already come from a privilege background I don't think people really understand what that means when right now like if you look at the most recent like labor data like the the median income come median median is 56,000 in the US and so if we have that percent of folks under it and we're seeing 33% unemployment and then labor data actually includes like eligible workers it just got real bad real quick and it continues to be a really rough situation from folks and so I'm not a doctor uh I didn't have like a skill that I thought that could be helpful to folks that were being affected by the pandemic but I had been teaching for a while and I knew that I could get folks uh skills to make them more employable and so 100 devs started as a way of getting 100 folks into software engineering jobs we're way beyond that now and I wanted to make a live cohort where we would meet twice a week on the internet and I really thought it would be like you said just a handful of folks maybe five 10 people um we did a pilot that was really successful our first cohort was about 300 people every single class that was successful we did another cohort that was like 3,000 people every single live every single class and so we kind of just built slowly we we we were able to kind of jump from Zer to 300 300 to 3,000 and we always joke that we're baddies we're like we're we're baddies writing bad code like it doesn't matter uh it's about getting the skills that we need it's about figuring out things on the Fly um and we just live up to being kind always to ourselves to others and as long as you're willing to say you know what we got to figure this out we got to figure out how do we do this at scale how do we have 3,000 people live in a class getting help and not feeling lost um we had to figure systems and ways of doing that and um building community that wanted to support that number of folks awesome what you said there first like I just want to call it that that particular Insight we're baddies writing bad code it doesn't matter so when I was a you know a teenager like uh really interested in like writing and reading lots of you know fiction and Jour like literary journalism and stuff like that um I I would always hang out at Denny's like till 2: amm just talking to random people and learning from them and just writing and stuff and uh one time like our our server he he was kind of a grizzled old looking dude like he would he would not look at a place in like a bullpen in a newspaper Newsroom if such thing even exist in 2024 but uh but his advice to me was I'll never never forget what he said he he said throw away your first million words and I was love that damn a million words that's like years of writing uh but just accept that it's gonna suck and the same thing with your your code projects and really the same with any Endeavor you you take like I've been trying to get better at Bass for the past three or four years and like takes me forever to record the bass intros for like I thought you like the one of the videos I watched you did it and then sat down so that's what I was I'm telling you that's what I was expecting for for today so I'm a little sad that I didn't get the bass intro live just for me but I didn't want to bother you with like watching me screwed up several times I love it but but yeah like like you just have to accept that the first few thousand hours you spend with an instrument or with like a programming language or with anything is going to be not ready for prime time uh you know my wife uh she grew up in China we met in grad school and she's now a US citizen we we brought her over and naturalized her after grad school after we got married we've been married 19 years and um she she loved playing piano right and one of the things that she says in China like people take piano extremely seriously and they have the saying in Chinese which is basically like you spend thousands of hours um behind the stage practicing for you know five minutes on the stage you know like that's just the nature of the game and with code like if you're writing some serious system that's going to like code that's going to be run millions of times right like if you're making an open source contribution to free Cod camps codebase and it's in the platform itself and this component is going to be rendered 50,000 times a day or something like that like it's it's okay that it took you a whole lot of work to get that like code into the shape and it's okay that it took a lot of practice and trial and error before you got the skills to be able to create that code that code just going to keep going right like you know uh when Elvis goes up on the stage and he's being filmed uh and he's playing I use Elvis because I love Elvis I'm sure he's overrated or whatever but he he's he's the man so I mean like that guy practiced like crazy that's definitely the same with uh for example like James Jamerson the greatest basist of all time basically uh or um you know like pretty much any musician they're going to practice just like crazy they're going to rehearse obsessively and they're not going to be satisfied but once that recording is made once that record is cut if you if you uh there's this great um documentary about fonus monk uh the jazz pianist right and he would only do like two takes and he he's just like after two takes whatever I do is going to be garbage I'm done like use one of those takes but how it got how he got so good that he could actually nail it in one or two takes was he practiced like a maniac and he spent so much time at the piano uh where a lot of you know uh I guess amateurs would would just be like good enough he was not content with that and so I feel the same way about like any undertaking but but like certainly with coding it may seem like coding is not like a synchronous performative event like where you're having to sit down and perform in that regard you can go and you can edit your code you can iterate on it the tools have gotten so much better like free C Camp every millisecond or two you're going to get the tests like telling you whether you met all the test conditions or whether you need to keep tweaking your code right so you have all these tools to iterate but at the end of the day like you should still try to approach it like a performance you'll get a lot better if you don't rely so much on the tools catching uh what you're doing but anyway I'm kind of going on a tangent but I just wanted to to Riff on like the Insight that it is we're all baddies yeah we're writing bad Cod it doesn't matter because you throw away your first million words you spend thousands of hours at the piano before you're playing anything that's worth anybody listening to right like you just have to accept that this is the nature of reality this is the nature of doing anything that's hard is it's going to be hard you're going to have to work hard and you have to just have that mental fortitude and and that's something that comes through in your your video is like it's so supportive like I love the way that you're just like it's all good like just this happens to everybody everybody has to go through this you know I always like to say like there some people may be like slightly better at programming like aptitude wise or or like they may have some intrinsic like Quirk that makes them marginally better at programming but those people were probably just forgotten how much time they spent at the keyboard when they were a kid if they were privileged enough to grow up with computers right like uh you know when you hear like Bill Gates talk about how like oh I don't actually like write out the code until I figured everything out in my head and then I said that's nonsense Bill Gates did not just sit down and like write basic from memory because he'd like been moving everything around his head people can't do that I don't believe that that maybe there are some people that have like some extreme form of like like like extreme brains they could do something like that but I don't believe that Bill Gates could do that sort of stuff I think he's just talking up the Mythos you know he he's trying to build up hype for himself and like it's this old kind of like Old School elitism uh that a lot of the early devs the Old Guard have and uh just just don't buy that hype is is all I want to say and and I want to thank you for like dispelling a lot of that whether you're intentionally dispelling it or not just telling people like coding is right like not not sugar coating it we call it the trough of Sorrow which actually comes from like startup worlds is one of the things there's this very classic graph of like um this like really big hill that you go up when you're really excited about something like I'm going to learn the code you buy a thousand Demi courses because buying stuff feels good even though you're not going to do them and you at the very top and then you start like day one of any actual coding program and then you just Plum it once you realize how long it's going to take and then you spend all that time going through the trough of sorrow and then the most like sick thing about this is that I shouldn't say that but the the most Twisted thing about this is at the very end there's an even further dip that you have to go through uh where you it's the and then you get into what we call the Wiggles of false hope so even after you've gone through you've learned everything you needed to learn you start actually interviewing to get the job and you're just getting rejected rejected rejected and so there's just this huge curve long trough of Sorrow uh that for a lot of folks takes years to get through then once you get to the end where you're like trying to actually get something out of it it gets even worse and then slowly slowly gets better so I think the big thing for what we do like you mentioned at 100 devs is just helping folks manage that frustration we kind of have like three key things that we just say every class almost manage your frustration be consistent and take care of yourself when you look at how adults learn the reason why adults kind of probably don't learn is as well as they think they could is because they don't manage that frustration piece when they looked at language fluency and like language acquisition they thought that we probably lost the ability to be fluent in our teenage years but they found that that probably isn't true it's just once you get out of those years your time is entirely your own and so would you rather do this thing that sucks for two years or would you actually uh sit down and do it and so if folks that can manage that frustration to actually be get through the things they want to do and so that's a big part and it's also why we're live uh when you look at other programs I love uh Dr M out of Harvard cs50 I love that cs50 is now on on free cam I've read every single article they've ever put out and one of the ones that are really interesting is they actually published all of their data for cs50 in the beginning uh which was really cool to read through and you you notice that they had like 150,000 people that signed up for like the they're up and they'll help you get back up right so you help one another so that that's kind of the genius of 100 Dev so maybe you can talk a little about the mechanics of it obviously you've got the Discord you've got the twice weekly um streams when classes in session so to speak uh and and they are high energy streams man I just have to compliment like the you got like the like all these sound effects like the cool astronaut background and stuff it's like watching uh like a gamer on Twitch like like watching somebody playing like you know csgo at a high level or something but it it's education right like and in my mind like you're pioneering kind of a new approach to education that is based off of like people are already familiar with like games and Anime and all these other cultural kind of touchstones and you're just like hey let's let's relate this to software engineering right and so you're doing a great job of that but maybe you can talk about in addition to the stream in addition to the Discord what are the other aspects of 100 devs what are the other uh instruments sure so we do a live cohort model we basically do a cohort a year and when that cohort is live we're live on Twitch twice a week uh for about three hours for a class we take about an hour to do review space repetition active recall is super important uh so we spend that first hour just like reviewing and then about two hours of something new we do that twice a week and then we have office hours on Sunday which is another stream typically on Twitch or on Discord um but it's just people asking questions and getting things answered outside of that there are so many other expectations and things that you're working on that's about 10 to 20 hours outside of that twice a week class networking all the things are going to actually move the needle for you to get a job our our our joke is that we're not really a coding program we're getting a job program and so all the things you have to be doing to get a job have to be happening when we're not live then for folks that can't participate in a live experience we have our lustrious catchup crew which is a group of folks that are working through the classes at maybe a little bit more of their own pace we have a lot of folks that are around the world that can't make that live time work for them so they get together they're on our Discord working through the classes together you'll often see like 20 people just in a voice Channel watching a class together um that they've just they've come together to do uh and so you can move through the material at your own pace uh when we're outside of a cohort like right now now we have we have our huddles twice a week and the huddles are just like a traditional standup we're just trying to move away from that I I think it's a slightly ableist term so we interest them as as huddles and yeah that makes sense I've never thought about stand up as an ableist term but it is a lot of people can't stand up and so we we'll have anywhere from like 500 to 700 people every huddle just asking questions sharing we call the the job hunt the hunt sharing what's happening on the hunt uh how while they are negotiating they'll come up live we'll help them negotiate offers they'll talk about uh an interview that W great or poorly and just by showing up to these huddles you're learning all these like it's so hard to go through life with everything that you're experiencing being the first time you've experienced it it doesn't have to be that way specifically with when you have a community that's also doing it so the huddles are our way to expose people to the realities of getting a job going and interviewing and and and actually seeing all this knowledge and so that when you're in that situation uh you can experience it too so we have the huddles twice a week and then we have a lot of independently generated Community things so um we have Banky brunch shout out Banky brunch which is a group of folks that come together to work through behavioral questions technical questions pretty much every single day uh we have groups that are working on projects our voice channels are always going and uh none of this works without community and a wonderful group of mods uh i' be remiss to not say Miriam dier Mayan wolf Claire uh these folks that like blah that make like all this work um and for free and volunteering so much of their life to like make this happen amazing yeah like free Co Camp similarly to draw parallels to our organization very Community Driven like we have tons of mods on the Forum on Discord we have open source contributors that are just dropping in and like fixing little bugs making sure that like our copy is as readable as possible to non-native English speakers making sure that like you it's a lot of contributor driven activity and it sounds like you've figured out a way to encourage a lot of people in your community Empower them with like you know you can delegate uh some degree of uh I guess authority to them so that they can go out and they can just experiment and build out different things one of the things that you said uh that I thought was really interesting uh I do want to talk about let's just talk about space repetition and active recall I believe are the terms sure uh Barbara Oakley teaches the how to learn course the most popular moo massive open online course ever other than maybe like cs50 which we were talking about earlier uh learning how to learn it's not just obvious how to learn there tactics right there there are phenomena uh in that are ingrained in the human brain from you know Evol tion from like the you know savanas of Africa basically that we carry with us today uh that that we can use if we know how to use them and one of them you mentioned is space repetition what what is space repetition yeah sure so I I guess kind of to set the stage real quick is that a lot of folks that attempt to learn how to code are not successful we know that we know the drop offs we know that that's just a reality and a lot of time those people feel like that it is them that it's a they they do not have the ability to learn how to codee they do not have there's something about them that would stop them from being successful as a software engineer and as someone that's worked with thousands of people like literally in the classroom my finger is on their keyboard I just know fundamentally my heart of hearts like a outside of a a cognitive impairment that's just not true and the thing that I found is it's just that most people don't know how to learn and it's it's almost criminal that our school system doesn't actually teach us how to learn that every textbook doesn't have some very fundamental things at the beginning uh that help you remember and learn this material so the difficult thing about software engineering is that it's a cumulative career the things you learn this week you're might need two years from now and so there are two like really fundamental learning techniques that Dr Barbara Oakley does walk through that I really it's my favorite one of my favorite courses of all time uh brings up uh where as humans we forget stuff very quickly so if I gave you a three-letter code this is called the evos curve it's it was a study of one it's somewhat been replicated since then but basically this person just tracked a new three-letter word a three-letter code every day and they found within the first like 30 minutes there was a 20% chance they just forgotten it the first 30 minutes so imagine trying to learn this really complicated coding stuff and within the first 3 minutes you're going to forget it then if you look at that forgetting curve by the end of the month there's an 80% chance that you have forgotten that very simple thing and so for a lot of folks that are going into coding education they just don't realize that the forgetting curve is very steep they they'll learn something a month later they've completely forgotten and they start back over and that's super frustrating so space repetition is using a tool that makes the material come back to you when you need it most and so uh a typical tool for this is anky or Anki however you want to call it that's like it means to commit to memory in Japanese aod exactly and so it is a flashcard tool that has an algorithm behind it so that surfaces the information when you need to see it so if you're doing good study habits which is a huge portion of what we teach at 100 devs it's just like how to study you're using this tool so that the things you learned about HTML you're not forgetting when we're talking about like mongod DP right and so that space repetition is going to help you remember stuff for the long call which is really important for a cumulative career but then the other thing that's even more important in my opinion than space repetition is something called active recall coding can be done through like video tutorials it can be done through text but it's a lot of information the process and most people just go through it that's not active learning they they feel maybe some sort of productivity from having watched tutorial or having read a blog post but they didn't actually engage with that material or learn and a lot of times like for me I teleport through information like if I'm reading a book I'll get through three paragraphs and I'm like what the heck just happened I feel like I've just teleported through that T through I haven't heard that expression but that's a good way to describe the phenomenon especially you know people who have like ADHD and stuff they may just be like halfway through a you know a book maybe I don't know like you just your mind wanders and uh if you're not constantly kind of trying to engage with it you won't necessarily retain so active recall is the way that that helps me as someone that does have ADHD like do this and so active recall is just recalling the things that you just learned or just read or just watched and for folks that do have attention issues I recommend doing that after each paragraph uh I recommend doing after each chapter end and you're just literally talking to yourself what did I I just read what did I just learn and you're saying it out loud the research behind it is really shocking like staggering differences uh you can learn something once actively recall it once and do better than somebody that reread it four times yeah like you can do a quarter of the effort and have better results just with this one technique and the fact that that's not like stamped in every single textbook ever made is is absurd yeah it it's I mean like we could talk all day about like the shortcomings of the US uh uh education syst like both both uh K through2 and HED and be completely clear there are a lot of very smart people who are working very hard to address a lot of these deficiencies but but the fact that we're having to explain what active recall and uh you know space repetition are when they are you know like time- tested phenomena that you can leverage so just a quick note about active recall this is one of the reasons why freeo Camp's entire curriculum is interactive it's because you have to Grapple with things otherwise it's just it could have just blown right past you right like y everything needs some sort of evaluation criteria some sort of comprehension check and if you're doing something that doesn't have comprehension check if there's not some right or wrong answer taking a moment to summarize what you just learned or relate it to something else you've learned think thinking about it just grappling with it that that can absolutely help cement those you know synapses right like what's the thing that connects synapse Axion not Axion dendrites I can't remember it is you probably know but uh but yeah like and it's something anybody can do like when I when I'm uh you know reading a news article or something like that right that's not interactive now with GPT or something I could throw I could throw it in GPT and say like hey come up with like a multiple choice question based off this article and I'll do that sometimes uh and not not just for like active recall but space repetition like write a bunch of notes and then review them a few days later or use a tool like eny that can systematically do that where you can like load a bunch of flash cards s a lot of learning platforms have spaced repetition just built into them if you go through the free Cod Camp curriculum it's designed in such a way that we're going to reintroduce Concepts over and over and you're going to be like oh yeah I kind of remember this from like a few hours ago you know it's like or a few days ago like but but we're intentionally trying to you know incorporate that and one of the things I think talking about the free codame curriculum let's talk about 100 devs and like what you all are and is it 100 devs or 100 devs I you say either 100 Dev I just I couldn't remember I say 100 devs 100 devs is shorter yeah it sounds more uh more like easy to say so yeah with 100 devs like what is the coursework that you're going through like are are you using mukes are you using open textbooks are you creating a lot of the stuff yourself how are you do yeah so I think there's like two important things one I really don't believe the content matters it's all the other like we're we're jobs program and I think I think one the biggest mistakes people make is like an over an investment and the idea that the thing like that the learning aspect and not all the other things that move the needle so we're very much two kind of tracks like we have all this other stuff we're doing outside of the learning and then the learning as well so the learning is is very simple um we do full stack JavaScript and I do a lot of like custom like I make all the lectures basically with the slides and all the the funny stuff that you mentioned on Twitch and we we move through that material together but a lot of a lot of it is supplementing with other things that I think are just the best free courses out there so in the beginning our students will use some free code cab um as they get a little bit further along they'll they'll use um some things maybe from Full stack open um that are trying to supplement the things that we're doing in the classroom and anytime that's we're doing something it's always a free resource it always has a free trial or not a trial like a free level of access yeah um and so we we give you the skills to be a full stack web devel developer we do some of the other kind of rounding out to give you the software engineering skill set um the tooling and things that you might use and then uh as you're getting ready to go on the hunt the data structures and algorithms you're going to need to be successful um but that's kind of like the coding stuff outside of that from the very beginning there's pretty stringent requirements in terms of like your networking so you are supposed to be getting three connections and two coffee chats every single week uh throughout program you're doing things that are going to be opening all these doors to help you get a job and um that's kind of another really I think that's where our curriculum shines is those things that are really helpful and impactful for helping you get a job we actually have a lot of folks that do other boot camps which we love like like I don't really care where you come from what you do as long as like you're getting to where you want to go and a lot of folks will join us just for like the how to get a job portion which I think we're pretty strong at awesome so it it's so interesting and important that you distinguish yourself as like a not a learn coding program but a Get a Job Program uh and I just want to emphasize like like even though we put a great deal of time and energy into our curriculum it's AB absolutely like if you took it like look at where all the donations we get and things like that go toward its instructional design platform development mainly for the Core Curriculum uh because for us it is important that there's a really good Core Curriculum but I'll be the first to tell you or I guess the second since Leon just said it getting a job as a developer is really three things in my humble opinion and and if you haven't read my free book that uh I published about a year ago uh learn to code and get a developer job literally the name of the book just Google that or go Google code book and I or learn to code book I think you you should find it pretty quickly um and by finding it and clicking on it and spending a lot of time on the page you help ensure that Google continues to recommend it to people um so uh skills are only one leg of the stool y network and reputation are the other two and I we've talked enough about skills let's jump into networking and building your reputation which are two things that are also instrumental to the hundred devs program yeah yeah like like what is the value of a network why is networking worth your time and energy when it's such an awkward you know thing to do yeah we we have um it's so we have like a lot of like in jokes and things like that that if like you're not part of the community it's kind of like weird to bring up but we refer to most people as clickers uh people that learn how to code and then they just click apply uh and clickers don't get jobs maybe every once in a while somebody gets lucky and they click on a button and they magically get a job but especially in this market clickers don't get jobs and so we do everything in our power to never click apply we want to make sure that we're talking to like real humans that can see our Humanity that can see our ability and our skills and the things that we can do um so that we're not just discarded by some AI ATS system and so from the very beginning of 100 devs we're tasking you with generalized networking and networking I think it's like a scary term that I don't think should be to me networking is just making friends and you want to do things in the beginning that get you comfortable with making friends and so you don't have to start networking by going to like your local python Meetup that's like super hardcore like no if you like Pokemon go play Pokemon at your your local league right or like if you like hiking go on a join like a hiking group and just like share passion with some others get comfortable talking to people and then eventually apply those skills that you learn to places where developers are more likely to hang out and turn those acquaintances into friends and then by the time you're ready to go on the job hunt you ultimately want hundreds of people that you've interacted with over the past year that you could go to and say Hey you saw me where I was here's where I'm at now who should I talk to I'm looking for a job and that's really successful for people so that's phase one of networking phase two is once you go on the hunt it's very targeted we call it building our Hit List where we identify the companies that are Act ly hiring we identify like three to five people at each of those companies and we're doing Outreach to um get in communication with those folks learn more and what we're finding is that a lot of jobs just don't get posted a lot of times folks will be applying for one job that they wind up getting a different one just because they like the person like right we we have this idea that like Tech is this like meritocracy where if you know the skills you get the job it's not it's like people want to work with people that they like they want to work with people that they know and trust and you can you can make that happen for yourself by really kind of going this networking your way in pathway so the term meritocracy is it was like actually like a joke because the author was like this doesn't exist this is absurd like it's who you know and like you're skill unless you're I mean even like the most demonstrably good pianists for example to talk about pianos we talked about it earlier like somebody saw you know um skill in them and like help them get obser you know enrolled in some Observatory or they had the time to play piano a lot with all the other kids who were working in the shoe factory you know in the you know Industrial Revolution or whatever right like like it takes so and everybody's circumstances are different so I just want to like put the bed because I've never talked about this on the podcast but we don't use the word meritocracy on here except to say that things aren't a meritocracy because they aren't it's ridiculous to think that they are uh the the person who came up with it I think in a book was like just joking about it um yeah yeah he he defined meritocracy as like I think effort and intelligence and how do you build intelligence through effort right some of it may be like you know endowed upon you uh but for most part we all work really hard I study you know foreign languages like an hour a day I play bass an hour a day you know and like I still suck at those things but sucking at something is the first step to being good at something right um so I also wanted this describe or like Define like an acronym uh ATS is uh applicant tracking system system yeah yeah when you apply through like a web form you're like applying into some algorithm that's going to be say okay we didn't ask if they have a college degree because it's hip to say that we don't look for people who have college degrees but in reality our system is going to just filter you out because you don't have a college degree we didn't put it on the thing but you know I I think I I heard some uh study that like uh it was a recent study like 700 job postings that didn't say they required a degree like zero people got those jobs for software engineering for those roles even though they didn't say because if you don't have a degree the ATS just simply filters you out no human ever even reviews right but like the way I got my first job as a do as a developer was through meetup.com going to like local Ruby developer Meetup and I got a job as a rails developer and the interview was very similar maybe you can describe the typical interview the hunter devs folks go through because it's not like Elite code whiteboard maybe for some of them but a lot of it is like hey I've already seen your projects I know you can code are you a good fit for our organization right it's about 5050 we're talking across hundreds of people that have gotten jobs that I've like literally seen right and people have come and talked about them during our huddles so we have a celebrations channel on our Discord where you can like go through and see hundreds of people their stories how they got the jobs what the interviews were like and so that's really powerful to know that but it's about 50/50 and it's when they when they do an interview we're talking about sometimes there's not going to be like Elite code style portion there's still going to be behavioral questions there's still going to be technical questions you're still going to be walking through a process project you might do some light like coding together but for about half the folks that have gotten jobs they haven't done like a leak code style question the other half you will and then there's varying degrees of it and so so many folks focus on like grinding out Le code until their eyes bleed and it's like yeah if you're going for Fang sure that needs to be the thing that you do but if you're going for a local health care company in your medium-sized city they're probably not going to know like like they're probably not going to go through and do that level of interviewing and so one of the things we always say is like don't go into your interviews like an accident always ask what you're about to walk into they'll tell you like almost every single time if you just say like hey like I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this application I would really appreciate just being fully prepared what am I about to walk into in this interview and they'll tell you oh you're just going to meet with so and so and talk through a project great now you know how to prep for That interview don't ever go into an interview if you don't know what you're about to walk into and so about half of our jobs have been not really needing some of those more aggressive skills but it's a huge smell test it's a sniff test uh we like to say every single person that starts off at 100 Dev smells there's something about you that's going to stop you from getting the job and it's your job to like figure out what it is get rid of the smell and make sure you come across as a cool confident professional that's done this been there and has ready to get to work and if you can do that you're going to be really successful getting jobs and even focus that want to go the other more traditional interviews with like the leak codes and things like that you're still passing a sniff test I have seen folks that I consider just amazing even done like competitive programming that do well in interviews and don't get the job and they wonder why and then you look at the resume and you look at how they present themselves and their narrative all that stuff matters it really matters you need to invest time in opening that those doors as well yeah absolutely and I just want to emphasize like if you can figure out what that smell is maybe it's that I don't have a degree and like I'm getting filtered out of ATS or or people are just not looking at me as a serious per like a serious candidate just based on that virtue you can absolutely correct for that and I have lots of friends like free C like lots of people on the free C Camp team dropped out of college or never even went to college right um and it's it's just one of those things where you have to figure out like and empathize with like the HR person or whoever you're talking to and figure out what it is they're they're sniffing for because usually they're just trying to figure out a way to quickly weed people out yeah so to speak so they don't have to inter right once you know like I don't know one of the things we try really hard at 100 devs is to like make sure you know all the like hacks and the secrets and like what's really happening and so recruiters are using some sort of like we said ATS some sort of filter you know what to add to your resume to get past those filters we use things like CV compiler which is like a website that'll tell you like what you're missing um we have like our own resume template that's like battle tested we follow like the true f-shaped pattern like if you watch recruiters with eye tracking there's a video that's going really popular it's done it again where you like watch the way they look they read left or right like most folks that read English they're looking for those specific keywords at the frontload of the f-shape pattern right so if you know these things you can you can get past these like screen segments and the other thing is people really need to work on how they talk about themselves people people go into the hunt too humble this is your this is like your one chance in life to talk your talk uh be proud of your previous experience I don't care what you've done having that pre PRI pre like previous experience makes you a badass and brings different skills to the table than someone that did a four-year CS has only ever worked in computer science like they're there're you're different and that difference can be a value ad to a lot of companies and so knowing how to craft that into a narrative like a logical reason from what you were doing to why you're the best software engineer they have in their candidate pool and being able to talk about yourself highly is super important so if you're listening what is your narrative what is your story why are you the coolest thing since sliced bread walking into that interview and that's what we do a lot during like our huddles and at 100 do we have whole nights where we just craft stories we'll have dozens of people come up they give us their their life history and we craft the narrative live and then you just see an instant difference in in how they're going through applications yeah and so first of all I would love if you can share the links to those uh the CV I'll pull up C compil like if you have resume template and like we we've talked a lot about um 100s and I feel like we could talk a whole lot more first of all I want to make sure you still have a few minutes finish I'm good to go for as long as you'll have me awesome well that's great news um the the main uh the main limiter is going to be the fact that I've drinken like literally like two liters of tea while I'm standing here talking with you so I may have to go to the bathroom at some point but what we um what I really want is just to tease out as many like high level insights that we can get into this podcast like like I just want to end on as many pieces of actionable advice as you can share as somebody who has become a developer worked as a software engineer who's even like built a successful project I guess three or two projects and then you're very actively high high up in resilient coders too which sounds like a really uh and I want to tease as many of those out of you as I can sure uh for the for the benefit of the audience and for the benefit of myself I've been furiously taking notes through this whole thing so some questions I have are um I guess what are some questions I should be asking what what are some interesting things that people never ask you that like are really helpful um that would be helpful for the many people out there learning the code well well okay what is a big mistake we can we can think about that maybe you can think of some other uh things but what is a big mistake that you see developers make other than you know over optimizing on their skills for example and and not enough on their Network or their reputation or figuring out how to empathize with recruiters and and I I don't mean like he buddies with them but like you always want to understand other people's perspectives there's no disadvantage to having more perspectives kind of compacted in your head being able to build with more verisimilitude models of other people and how they're approaching the world and what they're looking for how you can find the job that needs to be done and you can do it for that person right yeah I guess I'll I'll gear it towards folks that are like learning how to code and trying to get a job I think the biggest mistake outside of the things like not investing early in networking and um over investing in things that aren't going to really move the needle in terms of you getting a job is there's there's two things that I think lead to most folks not being successful and the number one thing is going into your day is like an accident if you're going into your days like an accident and you don't have a game plan for your day your week your month and you're trying to commit to a process that's going to take years you're not going to be successful and I've worked from with folks from all different walks of life the folks that make a plan for what they want like what do you want for yourself what do you want for your family what do you want for your loved ones like what do you want and then what are the steps you're going to take to get there that plan helps you get through the trough ofar it helps you get through through the the days where you don't have motivation when the discipline is is is is fleeting how do you stay true to like what you want and you should have it written down you should have it on your wall you should you should there's a reason why I have your photo as like the background of my wallpaper every once in a while is because I need to know what I'm shooting for and like what do I want like what do I want for myself what do I want for my community and like having that why go everyone that's that's trying to learn code needs to go on some long walks with no podcast no music no anything thing and just ask yourself what do I want like what's my future like what do I want for myself because until you have that it's really hard to to push through and so I have a lot of people that come and they they say they want it but they only kind of want it right there's like a very famous Dr Eric Thomas speech like they just kind of want it and until you really want it and that can come from a lot of different ways it can come from being hungry it can come from uh wanting the respect of your your family like it can come from a lot of different places but until you have that you're not going to you're not going to make it through um and yeah so having that hammered down and really having it visible putting it somewhere on the wall like knowing what it is and then every day before I go to bed I write out the three things I want to get done the next day once a month I what are my goals for the month once a year like not once a year every couple months like what am I trying to get done for the year and I I hold myself to it and the last piece I'll say about this is I get Buy in from the folks that matter most to me so it's not something internal to me like I know if I want to be successful in this I need to get the Buy in of my my wife right hey this is the thing I want to do it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take some nights and weekends away from us being together and and with our family and I I need you to understand why I'm doing it why it's important and can I have a little bit of your trust and I'll prove that to you over time that it's worthwhile investment but I need you to know like why I'm doing this and get that buy in um because you don't have that buy in especially if you're like stay still at home with family that doesn't get it if you're um not being as present with your loved ones there that that's going to build up some resentment and for a lot of folks that's another reason why they're not successful so yeah don't go into your days like an accident have a plan for your days know what your why is and get Buy in from the folks that matter most yeah that getting Buy in is so important because learning to codes a long long journey and you get all hyped up you get like these uh you know probably YouTube ads or um you know ads on the side of your coding tutorials learn to code in just three months and get a job paying like 200k and like you know whatever you know and to be fair there are plenty of developers who do learn to code very quickly and do get jobs uh I've had lots of friends who transitioned from working on Wall Street and they went to some expensive intensive coding program and they were able to then go get a job in Silicon Valley but they already had college degrees uh they already had you know like probably figured out how to plan uh they they probably had an understanding of like a lot of the you know learning techniques that we've been talking about and and most importantly they had a lot of money and they were able to just focus on it exclusively and and attend an intensive in-person boot camp like and and that era may have passed it may be that it's just a little harder now uh to to be able to get a job just because you should learn math right like it used to be back in the day you could just learn some WordPress and you could probably go get some clients doing WordPress work and it may be that case but with the global market and the level of competition you're going to get from places like India Nigeria China like tons of extremely educated extremely hungry people are coming from all these places and you know frankly they're going to eat your lunch if you're not putting in the time and effort Benjamin Franklin said few people plan to fail most people who fail fail the plan that's a paraphrase of what he said it's not exct no it's perfect yeah but but it is like 100% what Leon's saying here um and uh yeah so I just want to emphasize like getting Buy in from your family like when I learned a code again I don't want to make this all about me but like I told my wife like hey like I've got this job as a soft as a School director right and I would like to become a software engineer and we had doubled income we had insurance which is a huge deal here in the US uh through her work and so even if I left my job we we could continue to have health insurance and I just grinded every single day and I every I did precisely what you're talking about planning out okay what am I going to accomplish the next few days because planning is everything like it it's so important to have a plan and to stick to a plan and to have goals that are measurable and that are within your control that's another mistake I see a lot of people make is people will be like my goal is to get you know 100,000 YouTube subscribers this year or my goal is to get you know a job paying like n1,000 or or to get n freelance clients you know those are not things that you can directly control you can't control the outcome but you can control the input my my goal is to play base for an hour a day right or you know whatever goal I might have at a given moment uh yeah James James Clear of like Atomic habits has that very famous quote that I love so much that he says we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the levels of our systems and so this idea like we can have all these lofty goals but if you're not putting in the systems the how you're going to study uh play the Basse for an hour each day study your languages for an hour each day and and the process for that uh it's just not going to work out for you in the long run absolutely so we've talked a lot and of course you and I we grew up in the US you grew up in Philly I grew up in Oklahoma City um and you know here in the US even though things are not equal by aone shot it's very unequal Society we still have vestages of you know history yeah going back 400 years right like uh they warp uh the essentially The Haves and the Have Nots and um but in the US we're pretty well off compared to folks in a lot of countries uh for example like the hyper competition in places like India and China where you've got like so many people getting like CS degrees and trying to compete and so few employers or Nigeria where there are so many amazing developers like I think it's like the third or fourth largest community in free Cod Camp people that use free C Camp is Nigeria but if you look at Nigeria there aren't a lot of big employers and the government's kind of a mess and as a result there's not a lot of opportunity even though there's a lot of talent so a lot of those people have to move overseas to like Europe or to to the United States or wherever they can find opportunity right like a lot of the what is the proportion of people doing 100 devs who are outside of the US and uh how what have you observed about those people that that might be helpful for them uh yeah and and like just a followup questional tack on is like do they need to move to the US to be able to be successful in software engineering or are there other paths you've seen people succeed with yeah so I would say about half our community is from the US and about half is from everywhere else in fact the first jobs we ever got got were not from the US they were from Brazil then Poland UK and then a bunch of other places in South America uh and so a lot of our community and folks that have gotten jobs haven't been from the like us Centric and so the first thing I always say is whenever somebody from outside the US says I want to get a job I just tell them bluntly it's way harder don't let anyone convince you that it's going to be the same pathway as somebody from the US it's going to be a way more difficult journey and there's a very couple of like very key things that you have to keep in mind um one the Visa sponsorship ISS issue in the United States is wild it goes to a lottery most years right and so banking on that is like a pathway into an engineering career if you're from a area that doesn't have like that strong of a local Tech economy is very hard the competition for companies that hire remotely is brutal and it's even more brutal when you look at the companies that hire globally so a lot of people think oh I'll get a remote Tech job no even even though they're remote they only hire folks from the US or from a very specific select countries so finding a a group of folks that hire globally remotely uh that's a very narrow pool so the first thing I would recommend that you do is build a hit list of those companies there are list you can find online there are couple hundred of those companies you need to be best friends with everybody that works at that company and you mentioned building your reputation this is something I really recommend folks that are coming from from uh a location do to have a traditional Tech economy is your reputation matters a lot we talk about building authority a lot in 100 Dev so picking a niche or a topic that you know very very well generating content around it so when somebody thinks about I don't know authentication they think about you and the blog post you've written and the depth of knowledge that you can bring that way when you're applying to these Global remote companies you have something that nobody else really has this like intangible thing that helps set you apart and so the first thing I say it's harder building authority or reputation is super important and not going into your job search like an accident it's not going to happen if you don't have a very strong game plan and you're building the references and helping pass that sniff test that these companies are putting out there if you do those things you'll be successful we've helped hundreds of people in that situation get a job it's just a way more difficult pathway yeah and uh just on that note of like building authority like what are some of the most I guess immediate things someone can do like let's say you already have the skills let's say you've been coding for a long time and you just want to be able to get a job preferably at like a multinational company many of which are of course us-based um and you would love over the next five or 10 years to eventually get a visa and come to the US where salaries are like double what they are in Europe and and where we have a high degree of Freedom that people in other countries don't necessarily enjoy I mean it it is a good place to live like uh I like living in the us right I guess it's easier for me to say that it's like a middle class guy uh who speaks English natively and has US citizenship and doesn't have to deal with like my H1B you know being shifted around and like getting companies to sponsor me and all that stuff but like like I can definitely understand the appeal I can understand why so many people are trying you know to immigrate to the US every day but like what would be some uh practical ways that they can establish Authority as you said yeah so I think when you are trying to stand out amongst lots of other talented individuals doesn't have to be anything wild uh I really do think building a list of companies that are on your targeted range um and the H1B processes we I I've helped sponsor a lot of h-1bs like it's we could talk about like that's a whole other beast in of itself that's like you have to be of an exceptional talent you have to do these things to help you stand out like that's a whole other thing you're talking about like Global remote company like what can you do right now I'm thinking about somebody right now that wants to to to to get a a job my my process probably wouldn't be the H1B coming to the US right away it' be these like Global remote companies and then maybe expanding to companies that could sponsor um but a lot of times you're going to need more more credentials you're going to need like degrees might actually become a Thing If you're trying to go that sponsorship route um so I recommend right now if you're someone in Nigeria or India um looking at these Global hire in remote companies figuring out what they do building a list of them building a list of all the people that you know that work there adding them to a Twitter list right like each person add them to a Twitter list start engaging with their content just liking stuff at first don't be spamming don't be weird just like engaging with them liking their content congratulating them when they get a a new project built right like building that network of folks that know who you are over time like you become like an acquaintance like you can go from nobody to like they have no idea who you are to an acquaintance just by regular interaction on LinkedIn Twitter and it's there's a fine line between like being weird with it right we at 100 do we always joke it's not stalking it's networking and so you want to make sure that you're not like Crossing that line um and then starting to realize what these companies have trouble with right like you're you're engaging with these content you're seeing the things that they're doing are they having trouble implementing I don't know AI or llms great right that's the content you need to start generating build your Authority about how do they integrate these tools into their daily process you should have a Blog you should have um a YouTube you should have something where you're putting content out there you're getting feedback from them and from community of some sort to where you're building up that hey I I'm not just somebody that says I do this you can you can look at my content you can look at the things I'm doing uh you can look at the the things that I say I've done and be able to see that very clearly and also by doing that you're practicing how you talk about these things you're practicing um maybe if English is your second language you're getting more comfortable with these things that when it comes time the pass the sniff test you are because these people you've been engaging with for a year plus they've seen your content they know who you are they know what you're capable of that makes getting into these orgs a little bit easier absolutely 100% agreed uh based on my limited knowledge I I think it sounds like you have a lot more knowledge about that so what I would like to ask then is like let's flip this around employers who want to bring in more folks uh and and this can we can we can definitely start by talking about folks from overseas if you want Talent if you want to be able to tap that talent and you don't want to like go to some consultancy or something in some other country and say give me like 20 devs right go to infosis or whatever like you want to literally get the best talent from India or from Nigeria just by picking developer by developer yourself you're trying to build out your company or or you're a hiring manager and you're just trying to build a team you're you know like what strategies what advice would you give to those people so that they can actually find talented people and what should they be looking for yeah I think Partnerships are really great so we work with a lot of hiring Partners at resilient coders we've sent dozens of folks to Amazon through resilient coders we sent we have these very strong Partnerships with a lot of orgs that need a good solid pipeline of talent and so partnering with communities is a really good way to do that um if you came to RC res coders or you came to 100 devs and you said give me the best of the best I would talk to you I'd make sure that your job is doing all the things that it needs to be done to be do to be done equitably and if I felt that that was the case I would give you all the folks you would have a pipeline that was full for days of Highly qualified incredibly talented Talent um from wherever you needed them to be from or or or anywhere you'd want to support as well like we can make that happen and so I think think for folks that are looking for a good pipeline just working with communities so I would of course say working with myself you um I always think of uh Paris black Tech pipeline does this work really well where they're able to get you a very strong source of talent um from anywhere from entry level to super senior uh and so figuring out these different orgs that have a surplus of talented engineering Talent um could be a great way to build those those funnels for you yeah absolutely and then uh for organizations that just want to be more representative of the folks in their Community let's say like it's not necessarily remote but here in the US uh Los Angeles for example like there's a tech startup and they're looking for engineers what I guess General tips would you give to employers so that they can they can be inclusive and they can make sure that they're bringing on talent that actually represents the local population instead of just bringing in a bunch of you know Stanford GRS or something like that right yeah I I think it takes Champions within a company that actually care about these things of course you can read like the McKenzie reports a more diverse Workforce equals better outcomes right so a lot of companies know these things to be true but it takes someone on the inside that cares about building an equitable Workforce for this to actually happen especially when things like Dei and these initiatives are being contested in the courts a lot of companies are becoming a little bit more um shy around being ten toes down right and so I think if this is the case it really doesn't come from top down it comes from individuals looking around and saying you know what I live in a community that is 25% black and brown but only 1% of our Workforce is of color there's something fundamentally wrong here when we looked in Boston where I spent most of my career we had the second largest tech economy but double digit unemployment rates in our communities of color there's a there's a fundamental mismatch and so we had a group of individuals that realized that this is just woly inequitable and they would go to town they would go to fight the fight every single day to bring one person along than to bring two along and the thing is it can compound once you have folks in these positions of power you can turn around and help lift up more along with you so I don't think it needs to be like like a companywide thing I think anybody that's listening to this call has this ability to fight for what they know is right to turn around and say you know what I want want to make an equitable pathway in my company and I'm going to work really really hard for the next open rule for it to be someone that deserves to be here but might not have the opportunity yeah and that's a huge part of 100 devs like as far as I can tell from like listening to a lot of your episodes and stuff like instead of asking people to like necessarily donate to 100 FS or uh like you tell them send the elevator back down is is something you've said a few times like like try for every one of the 100 devs cohort members the the Learners they should try to find somebody else who's in Alum and bring them onto their company so they can kind of uh essentially be increasing the number of alumni within these organizations in the free software Community we have a word grus right it's not it's not free it's grus meaning that there's like no cost like there's no like monetary cost and so 100 devs is grce I mean there's no like money should no money should ever come out of your pocket I never want to see a dollar come out of your pocket for anything um there's no way that you can give us that dollar we don't want it but it's not free and the reason why it's not free is because we expect that when you get the job that you turn around and help three more get into the same position that you have whether it's helping answer questions whether it is literally helping people apply and get into the pipeline for your company the the expectation is that this community has in invested thousands and hours into your success and the thing that we ask is that you turn around and give a little bit of that time back and that's the reason why 100 death has been so successful is that we have folks that have made it to the the upper echelon that are now senior developers at the best tech companies in the world that are still giving up their time every single day on our Discord and our huddles to make sure that the next folks are successful that is a beautiful note to end on just the the the virtue of this organization that You' birthed into the world uh but let's not end quite yet because I want to ask what are the future initiatives what yeah does the next what what does 2024 the rest of 2024 maybe even 2025 2026 free we think literally a decade out like we're working on this computer science degree program that will take another six years to complete all the course workk for plus another five years to gather longitudinal data plus probably another five years to have the data AC you know approved by accreditor so we can get uh the degree program accredited free computer science uh bachelor's degree free which I was super on I don't I I was tweeting up a story I was telling everybody and their mom I was running and showing my wife like look this is this is this is the future like this is this is the thing that uh we need the most in the world right now and so I'm super happy that that's like on your your vision education wants to be free yeah exactly like this is it right like doing the work like and like we said earlier I I think free C Camp is amazing at identifying the real gaps like the things that people really need to be successful and filling them and having a community that's willing to step up and do that work to fill those gaps um so something I the reason why it's the best donation I make every single week it's the reason why um I always uh send folks to free code count because I know that they're in safe hands to like get the things they need done yeah um free isn't free for everyone right in terms of time and commitment a lot of folks that would be extremely successful at 100 devs right like the the the cliche line is that like um skill and talent is distributed opportunity is not right and so we have a lot of folks that are extremely talented that um could be phenomenal software Engineers but don't have the opportunity or the privilege of time they need to take that time they would be spending learning d driving for Uber doing door Dash they they need to take that time to put food on the table for their family and when we pulled our our our Collective we we saw that folks really only needed around $200 a week to like make this a viable pathway so our huge big goal is to build out an agency model where real companies come they have work that they need for us to to accomplish we have super season profession Professional Engineers that lead those projects and then we break those projects down into individual issues or tasks so that as you're learning you're also maybe picking up some of these tasks in a real code base like your skills become intensely practical and by the time you graduate or leave 100 devs you've built real projects for real companies with production level code and all the money that comes into the agency goes directly into those issues so that you're also getting a little bit of money coming in as you're working through it and we think that might make our program more Equitable for folks that just don't have that last little bit of privilege of free time and so like I said we talked about earlier we're a group of people that run head first into really big audacious goals sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't we're going to have a lot of mistakes a lot of things are going to go wrong but we're going to figure it out and our goal is that when we launch our next cohort uh we also have this agency model in place as well so that you're not only learning but getting this practical paid experience as well yeah that's so cool I mean that's like we're all about taking away excuses from people like and and like to be fair like a lot of excuses like if you have young kids or if you're taking care of your folks if you're working like three jobs to be able to pay exorbitant rent in your city you know like those are very reasonable reasons for not being able to spend a lot of time coding but if there are things you can do to remove some of those barriers uh to to make it easier for people to commit to an already arduous process of learning the code right and nobody anybody who says learning to code is easy is trying to tell you something like it is hard as heck it's getting easier every year it's we're not dealing with Punch Cards you know we're getting higher levels of abstraction it is becoming easier but it's not Star Trek easy where you just talk to the computer right uh eventually it will be but maybe in the 21th century the more immediate problem how helping people free up their time so they can actually learn I just want to commend you on this program like I love the idea of getting people out there doing real world work getting compensation through some sort of program where they can just I mean even $200 a week it sounds like it's going to be a huge Lifeline for a lot of these folks and free up a lot of time and energy um this is extremely exciting and I would be very excited to have you back on in the future catch up and like see what you learned from running this this new uh experiment that you're running this bold endeavor I'll let you know how it goes awesome man well it's been such a joy learning so much from you not just from this conversation but just you know following you on Twitter I'm going to add links to a lot of stuff that we' talked about in here I'm going to of course link to 100 devs and I just encourage people to learn more about the work of Leon learn more about uh 100 devs resilient coders these organizations that uh you know like resilient coders is a charity like Freo Camp 51 C3 and um you know like there are lots of Charities out there that are doing important work I'm going to try to like uh encourage people to do what we've done the two of us and yes you can create a startup and make a lot of money and you know life-changing money especially if you've got like family that are back in a home country that that need support right or if you have like any number of different there I will never give people a hard time about just wanting to make a whole lot of money but if you have the means if you are somebody who's midcareer and wants to do something in the charity space I hope that uh the accomplishments of Leon and and modestly free Co camp and the pro like modestly there's no mod that needs to to be had there yeah yeah I I I hope some of this will inspire you to also consider you know doing work in the public space right as a tax exempt public charity uh and and again I just want to commend the work you're doing Leon and um I hope everybody has learned a great deal I appreciate it thank you so much like I said this is a a dream come true uh you've inspired me so much throughout my entire journey into this and uh I know you do the same for so many other folks each and every single day so thank you for the work that you do and uh and our communities right that that help push this stuff through yeah and and to everybody in the hund devs community that's watching this uh hang in there keep it up man there we go man and woman uh you all are doing a long grueling process but you're helping one another and you know you're making friends along the way so um with that I I just want to thank everybody for tuning in until next week happy codingthe welcome back to the free Coke Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larsson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people that are getting into Tech today we're talking with Leon Noel who I don't know if you've heard of 100 devs but it's amazing and it's a huge source of inspiration for me personally he is the founder of 100 devs and he head of engineering at resilient coders Leon joining us from Sunny Los Angeles how's everything going with you it's it's a little early we'll see if the sun comes out things are going well uh this is uh surreal experience thank you so much for having me and uh we we'll get weird with it real quick uh I I always joke that like my my wife knows how serious I am if your face is like the background of my like screens or or I've had a picture of you on my desk for a little while uh so she knows if it's go time or not based off of like she's seeing you so uh IM honor it's a huge privilege like this is a dream come true for me uh you're a huge hero of mine and have done so much to help so many folks and uh you're who I want to be when I grow up so I really appreciate it thanks for having me on yeah well I just want to say that it's like very kind uh and I want to say that that goes both ways like uh often when I'm feeling like a little but low energy and I just like ah you know I don't know if I can get a lot done today maybe I'll just you know go and answer a bunch of emails and not um do like curriculum design or or you know I'll I'll I'll go into like the I'm like what would Leon do he would dive in head first he would have so much energy overflowing and he would just go in there and get things done and so uh yeah like I I do think about you a lot when I'm just feeling low energy because I've watched your streams and I've seen the amount of energy both like literal energy like bursting forth and the positive energy that you bring to the community so uh thank you for that and uh I'll make a little meme of you know Wolverine holding the picture frame and then go holding holding the picture of me I won't really do that but like I when you said that that just fell hot in my mind because I love X-Men so um Leon did did you see the new the new announcement 97 what's happened they're redoing the old school cartoon oh my goodness like post Professor X the original 9s Saturday morning all right no more everybody we stop the podcast we go watch the trailer it's really good it looks really good i i l link to the trailer in a little bit of tears in my eyes when there's a specific catchphrase that is said but yeah okay uh I'm going to link to that be sure to watch that immediately after you finish watching or listening to this podcast interview because we've got a ton of advice that's practical and not just you know something that you can do to escape from your day-to-day experience but to build up your day-to-day experience and accomplish your goals so Leon before we dive into 100 devs uh and Brazilian coders and all the work you've done uh I like to always start these interviews with more autobiographical stuff just so people can have context into like who you are your lived experience uh where you're coming from and where you're heading and things like that so maybe you could take us back to uh where you grew up and like what your earliest Ambitions were as a kid yeah so uh I grew up in Philly um definitely 100% a product of Philly I was always kind of the very kind of tinkering wanting to build type of kid uh I grew up with a a huge household a a big family uh all in one uh row home in South Philly which was amazing and uh I was blessed to have amazing libraries where I had access to computers and could tinker and build and uh I was very blessed even have a lot of even just Computer Science Education early throughout my life I had a q basic class in middle school where I would get a sailboat to go from one side of the screen to the other I thought it had magical powers and so I was very lucky to have these skills so so early uh we also in Philly have magnet schools which are kind of like EXA schools that you test into and so I went to engineering and science where I had two years of C++ in high school and this is like 20 years ago and so yeah I just I'm very lucky to have grown up in an environment that supported my passions and interest even when I didn't have access to those Technologies or knowledge that there was a way for me to get access to it so very very thankful for that that's awesome yeah that that's it sounds like a really kind of like adelic upbringing in the sense that like you've got access to what about teachers did you have any teachers as a kid who like really propelled you forward I always talk very passionately about my um my seventh grade teacher uh or eighth grade teacher uh science teacher Mr creger um whom I've failed to track down if you know Mr creger who taught at uh you know Hoover Middle School which was is is like a now destroyed bulldozed um School in Oklahoma City if anybody's heard of that person let me know but uh did you have anybody like a Mr creger in your life who was eccentric and interesting but kept giving you like interesting books about space and stuff like that yeah so i' I've have been lucky to have a few um so miss franchine was my fifth grade teacher that when I was done my coursework would not let me just sit there twiddling my thumbs but always had like puzzles and things to build and Tinker with in the background and likewise I've tried to find them I haven't been able to find them but they really kind of showed me that I could be in control of my learning that it wasn't a a one-way depositing of knowledge that I could have some sort of control or command over the things I was doing with my free time that would enable me to think creatively and and to do the things I wanted to do uh I had a lot of wonderful folks throughout High school that really helped guide me um that pushed me that uh maybe saw something inside of me that I didn't see inside of myself and would try and pull that out my we're talking about like code education Shout Out Mr shipper would uh push me to learn my my C++ and we had the old school like Matrix printers where you'd print out your code on them and and I would look through it and take it to them and try to point out bugs or errors and you talk about folks in your life that do like the small things right and Mr shipper every every birthday for years and years would just send me like a happy birthday message so talking about folks that just support you long term uh that was there and then in University it was Dr Bri esus the person that showed me that I could be what I wanted to be and supported my ability to learn supported what I wanted to do made sure that I had funding over the summer to like live uh made sure that I got to do the research I wanted to do and ultimately gave me the the skills that I thought I needed to be the person I wanted to be in life and so yeah definitely the product of amazing teachers throughout my entire life and definitely something that I try to think of with resilient coders and uh 100 devs like what what was about those folks that inspired me to to do more to learn to feel comfortable and try and bring that into the classroom as well yeah yeah it's so cool to talk with another teacher because obviously you're a software engineer but you're also a teacher to many many people not necessarily in the conventional way uh maybe in the conventional way too maybe you actually give lectures occasionally in person but like through 100 devs you're essentially like the classroom teacher that people need you know like yeah you know the the bat signals up in the air the the 100 Dev signal and and you're answering that call and you're helping people uh with the not just uh practical challenges of learning to code but the motivational challenges as well and that's that's a huge thing I take away from your Stream So sounds uh like you went on to do really well academically uh I presume because you went to one of the best universities in the world uh maybe you could talk a little bit about like what that process was like what what is it like getting into a relatively Elite cool and um you know like was that how long did you have that plan at what age did you kind of like Snap to awareness I always like to tell people like I kind of snapped to awareness much later in life uh I was maybe like 20 21 and that's when I like got really into like journalism and studying foreign languages and stuff like themes that would kind of run throughout the rest of my life living abroad and and and ultimately like much later I had kind of like a second thing where I learned like technology is really really gosh darn useful like and uh that's when I I learned to code and like automated stuff from my school and stuff but like did you have like an early kind of Awakening at some point do you remember a a distinct period of your life where you're like hey you know I can do a lot more than other people around me are doing my my peers was there such an Awakening for you yeah I think I I want it to be comfortable I wanted to have um a good life and I think early on especially as like a kid of color you're kind of taught this very it's just like Dr lur dentist it comes up over and over and over again and it comes from maybe our families and the folks in our community not knowing kind of all of the opportunities that are available but that those are the safe Pathways the Dr La dentist and so yeah for hundreds of years yeah hundreds years yeah so it's it's proven so that's kind of the path that I got put on as someone that who was successful pretty early academically I did well in elementary school I got I used to have to go from my school to another school every week to do like other programs and I saw how hard my grandparents had to work I saw how hard my grandfather worked specifically uh in a boiler room every day it was hot they were pulling Valves and I saw what Hardware could do and I wanted to do something that would enable me to have a good life but maybe not be so sweaty right and so the the that idea led me to look into Dr l dentist Dr l dentist and as I went through Middle School I was very focused on getting into one of our magnet schools so Philly has some amazing schools that you kind of test in and it's more of like a lottery now too as well and I went to engineering and science and engineering and science was geared around getting folks into engineering and Science and had tracks that you could follow and a really good placement rate into universities and so for a while my sophomore junior senior year pretty much every lunch period was spent with Miss Brown who's my guidance counselor and would make sure that I was getting access to everything I needed to do well academically and to get into really good schools and coming from a low-income family it's really expensive so Miss Brown would U make sure that I had vouchers for everything that I could take the SAT for free that I could apply to schools for free that would get me into all the best summer programs that could help me academically I was a I did upper Bound for a while um made sure I had access to things that I didn't like calculators and things like that and so my school I owe a lot too in terms of getting me prepared um for eventually what I would go to is Yale and so for me I think I've just been really blessed to be the product of a school system that if I wanted it if I wanted to work hard if I wanted to put in the hours and I played three Sports I did every Club imaginable but I had really amazing people that guided me through that process and then uh was able to to make it from from ens into Yale and then um went into hard sciences and was on this track to be a a doctor right I I Dr La dentist I chose doctor uh my mom was uh uh an LPN and um I got to grow up in do offices and see and and talk to folks and that was kind of the path I was on and it's kind of funny because I was doing computer science I was in an engineering high school and I just didn't allow myself to see that as my path or my career even though that's where eventually I should have been or and eventually did make it to and so that's kind of the the long winding path into yeah awesome and LPN is licensed practitioner licensed practicing nurse yeah it's like a vocation nurse basically so instead of doing now I guess the track is like your bachelors and you get like your RN this was a vocational pathway okay to being a nurse yeah yeah yeah I just want to make sure I got that right and I have like this policy that like no matter how common the acronym is I always try to like spell it out uh for especially for our listeners abroad non native English speaker listeners as well um uh so okay so just recapitulate something that I've been taking detailed notice as you talk just because this is so so interesting and I um I'll email these to myself these are not for publiction but it's basically the contents of this conversation is public now so um it sounds like it you didn't it just didn't even click it didn't even really occur to you that software engineering was a field you could go into because like so many people coming from underprivileged backgrounds so many you know second generation immigrants or even first generation immigrants so many people growing up who are kind of still in the shadow of inequality like racial inequality that's systemic that is the reason one of the reasons why you know wealth among black families is like something like one/ tenth of like white families that have been in the US the same duration of time I mean it's like ridiculous but because of these circumstances uh you were pushed to do Dr lawyer dentist and again like most of my doctors dentists that I haven't had any lawyers that uh like over the years have been people who came from a different country like their parents came from a different country or the in many cases as doctors they literally came from like India past the US mle which is this incredibly stringent test ESS like recertified as doctors a very lengthy costly process uh just so they could practice in the US because the US is like you know a great place to live and it's a great place to work as a physician uh generally I I guess I shouldn't speak for all there may be some physicians in the audience to take issue with that because of regulatory you know issues and like all this other stuff but my point is you were so focused on that because that is what success sounded like uh that like that was like the family's perception of success and software engineer is like a relatively new thing that is you know not well understood and it's not a surprise because software engineering has only existed a few decades right yeah um maybe you could talk about like what that Awakening to software engineering was like and how you went about okay I'm GNA go much deeper on coding and learning about computer science and math like all these things that you need to be a successful software engineer um now now I you may take issue with me saying like you need a whole lot of math for example or something like that I don't think that's necessarily true for a lot of jobs but I I always tell people like there is no knowledge that is not power like you should definitely learn math if if you have the time it's probably not the highest priority if you just want to go get a job as a developer Sor right uh but my question for You Leon mathematics all right a complete introduction right on okay so uh I'm glad to hear that like yeah because a lot of times I hear like I think one of the pieces of misinformation that's going around is like oh you don't need math to be a developer like I don't know any math like I just took high school math and I'm a developer and like that is true to an extent but there is kind of like a ceiling that you're going to hit in your engineering career if you don't like at least take some time to learn some mathem matics and you can learn mathematics right here on Freo Camp's YouTube channel we have courses on pretty much every engineering math topic that you would learned at like an undergraduate engineering program so uh you know it's just investment of time and that's a big thing we'll talk about in a little bit is like isn't really free in the sense that you have to invest your time and energy and not everybody has equal time and energy some people have all kinds of different circumstances that inform their availability to learn the code yeah so we'll talk about that in a minute but like how did you approach this and like maybe how old were you were were you still in school when you realized that you wanted to do CS yeah so I was always building so when I started in sixth grade I learned Q basic and I would go to the libraries and tinker and build when I was in high school Upward Bound got me a TI 83 Plus calculator which I still have it's like in my drawer over here some where and you could write code for that calculator and I remember swapping I felt like it was like old school you know like how people used to swap floppies I would swap the games and programs from the calculator and go to the library and like I I remember the thing I wanted for one Christmas was like the cable that connected the the calculator to the computer so that I could like put my code on it and so uh I remember very early working on calculator games and other fun stuff that I just wanted to to bring into the world or modify and hack God and so that was always really fun and then I had that kind of formal C++ in high school and then when I got to University it all went out the window I was doing hard biology uh I was doing U eventually biological anthropology I was looking at hormones testas and stuff like that but this entire time I'd always been building tinkering I really liked entrepreneurship I was always trying to start ideas small companies uh things like that and I had started um one kind of simple project that went pretty viral in in New Haven New York area um and that kind of really showed me some of the power of these skills that I've been kind of accumulating but the real kind of Awakening for me for computer science was uh every summer I was doing lab work and I had figured out how to like survive uh when you're lowincome going into like an Ivy League school basically they give you a full ride right off the rip and so I had figured out that if I didn't live on campus they would give me like whatever the amount of money was to stay on campus they would give me and I was able to use that to like do stuff I would pay rent and food but I was happy eating pasta and pasta sauce and so I actually had money to like live and and do all the things that all my my fellow students were doing because i' had figured out this like way of doing it um but I ran out of money one summer and it was getting pretty dicey pretty quickly I I really didn't have any money for food left and I was literally hungry and I realized that I I could do things like I was looking up like quick jobs and then I was like wait a minute let me let me see if I can build somebody a website I know how to do it I've been building all these like landing pages and and small things with code before so I put on Craigslist hey I'll build you a site I can get it done today and somebody responded and they paid a deposit and my life changed from that moment I I skipped all the way to the grocery store I bought my pasta I bought my pasta sauce for the month I built them the site and in that moment something very clear happened in my brain that I had a real skill uh a skill that could provide that could put food on the table a skill that would make it so I was never hungry again sorry oops sorry chis uh it's cool again yeah if anybody like like we don't edit this podcast at all so I'm not going to edit out the square word that's like a unless there's like something really bad that happens like I had a coughing fit once and so that that changed everything um until this day I still freelance and I that's the reason why a lot of the things I do today the the resilient coders the 100 DS is like I want anybody that's ever felt that way to know that there is this option this ability to to develop skills that no one can take away from you that can put legitimate food on the table and so that's when I kind of went all in on more of the engineering piece awesome yeah well um that sounds like an amazing discovery of like powers that you just had Laten within you that necessity brought forth you know necessity is the mother of invention right uh you were forced to basically by your circumstance to like think outside the proverbial box come up with a way to to get money to buy your pasta um I you know I definitely uh remember the lean College here is subsisting off pasta we got the smack Ramen if anybody like not the good like sh ramun like Korean Ramen but like it was just called smack we'd always joke about it like when you're hungry enough it's almost like you know like a drug because it's just like you feel so sated afterward course like terrible for you but what kind of pasta did you always just like did you have a particular like build of pasta that you liked uh I this is like way back whatever the cheapest was I was I was trying to survive I didn't care nowadays I probably have some preferences but back then whatever whatever was on sale whatever is the cheapest uh there was the supermarket nearest had like this like clearance aisle and in that clearance aisle they would put like the stuff they couldn't sell and so whatever was on that that rack is what I I would grab yeah yeah uh and and to this day by the way like a lot of grocery stores like Walmart like they'll take their baked goods and they'll put them on a rack like right by the like exit like the staff only place where they have like the garbage compactor where they compact the boxes like I I worked in a grocery stores for a few years so basically back where they keep all the mops and they keep all the you know inventory shelves there will be like a little rack and sometimes they'll have baked goods they're like it's still good but we can't really sell it because it's going to expire in like a day or two so like I sto snacks and Bargains from there uh but but yeah just Pro tip if you're going to a US uh grocery store you can often find like food that's about to expire that you can get like at a heavy discount so um that's really cool so how did things unfold from there so how did you um how did you go from that first contract work essentially that that client that you landed through Craigslist which is how I land I think I landed some early clients through Craigslist Craigslist amazing tool I'm not sure if it's still amazing today like 12 years since I last used it but yeah uh yeah like a lot of early G were found on Craigslist how did you go from that to the deciding I am a Dev like taking that identity if you will and going deeper with it yeah sure so um my junior year at Yale I started a small website called List full of hope it was kind of like a reverse Craigslist where uh if you needed something you could say what you needed so if you needed a jacket and someone in the area had a jacket jacket you would meet up and they would give you a jacket so it was kind of like a gift economy um it was very simple site that was just enabling folks to help others in their community and it really kind of popped off in New Haven and so there was the one winter where it was like really popular I remember people getting Christmas presents jackets gloves anything you needed um and I could really see that transition from something that was like just a raw skill to like me having to build an actual application and having real users and I was hooked like I could I saw the power I saw that it could help so many people and I knew that these skills would be really advantageous to keep going so my junior year I kind of slowly stopped kind of really wanting to do coursework senior year it became an even bigger problem and I was trying to finish my thesis to to graduate and I had to get like 300 men to spit in a tube tell me about their sexual history so I could correlate it to their testosterone levels I was trying to like show that um or find something about BPA and relation to testosterone so you drank a lot of like plastic water bottles yeah and so I was trying to do that before before it became really popular like something people would actually think about free plastic which for the kids like just in case D does have like deleterious effects we don't want our kids to be drinking from so I was having a really hard time running that that experiment and uh apparently people didn't want to you know spit in a tube and tell me about their sexual history for like a bottle of Gatorade and like a pack of gum or something and so uh I wasn't able to recruit enough people for that experiment and I decided to use my like coding skills to set up it was just like a landing page where a lot of students were always trying to find studies or experiments to participate in because one they were a lot of fun sometimes and you actually got paid pretty well to do the experiments and so there is one really famous One that people loved where you basically went to a lab they got you drunk and you played poker and they're just like watching you like how you make risky decisions and things like that and you got paid a couple hundred dollars to do it wow and so I made a landing page that had all the studies from Yale Harvard Princeton that were like trying to get people to come and I just slipped mine in there and it took off because we had all these professors that were promoting it we had all these students that got real value they went to the site they found something fun to do they got money and and um I dropped out my senior year to turn that into a business um which became social sigh and um we wound up building academic surveying tools we had over 4,000 different universities that used our tools to power their academic research uh and even though that company has been wrapped up for a long time now we still have research that gets published based off of the data that they collected I needed to know more my Engineers had these like magical powers and I needed to to like learn that skill for myself and so I took my coding education more seriously uh eventually uh I was building other products other startups as well and and started teaching at General Assembly helping others kind of acquire these skills too so that was kind of the the journey it's interesting so first of all congratulations on building something that 4,000 universities use it's not easy to get universities to use your stuff like there's like this notorious like sales cycle adoption cycle among universities they're they're very like slow to adopt new tools um yeah I mean that's that's phenomenal to go from basically like Mechanical Turk for being a human test subject to having like an actual project that is getting wide usage like that that's really funny that you bring up Mechanical Turk that was the reason why we were able to raise like VC funding was because M Turk was becoming more popular um and what social size saw was not just the the survey creation but the participants taking the surveys and so part of my pitch deck and I'll never forget it was I decided to get my mom a Christmas card and I had people on mtk like just like hold up like the the merry Christmas sign and what we had was this one person with a hundred different like not 100 but like a lot of different accounts that was just like Chang ing their hat putting on a different shirt but it was like clearly the same person and so at this point Mechanical Turk hadn't solved the like identity online and like how do you stop like false participants and that was kind of why we were able to be um able to raise money and why we were able to have so many universities trust and use our service because we were solving that problem specifically so was your mom like who is this person and why are they so you know passionate about like wishing me a happy birthday it was cool there was like 100 people from all over the world with like different backgrounds different cities different places and they all were saying Merry Christmas now you could probably facilitate that but back when we did it it was yeah it was pretty cool yeah and mechanical turque just for people that are unfamiliar with it is like they call it artificial artificial intelligence obviously nowadays like a lot of things you would pay someone on mechanical TK to do you just like form out to like an llm or something but it was like um like hey I need you like early on it was like hey I need you to solve a capture for me or hey I need you to create a Facebook account and like like this this Facebook group or something like that was like basically getting around the restrictions that different like platforms might have in place uh but uh event but you know in the good like as designed use would be for example getting people to do precisely what Leon said so uh it was everybody would get like maybe just like a few pennies for doing a a hit I think or job or something I can't remember what they were called but uh yeah you you would do those is that accurate like I haven't actually used it yeah no that that's that's pretty close uh there was it's this whole subfield called human computation right so human computation there's there's some things that computers can't yet do that humans can still do but figuring out how to do them at scale um is really important and so Mechanical Turk you can take an a task break it down into a very small subtask and have thousands and thousands of people do it need for human computation is like labeling data think of like AI training and things like that who were the people like there had to be real people that said that was a a fired hose or that was a car or that was a bicycle that's a Chihuahua and not a muffin exactly that's like a famous like chihuahuas look a lot like muffins to a computer and so figuring out all of that was necessary for a lot of the advancements that we're seeing now and there are still things that humans can do very quickly that machines just can't do yet and so um M Turk still has like a place um there are other companies that do similar things nowadays of course but that labeling and small tasks done at scale and there are other cool things you can do too so where it's like um instead of giving it to just one person you give it to five and if four out of the five do one thing you know that you can probably trust that thing as opposed to the one person that did it as opposed to The Minority Report yeah the dissenting uh the asentic opinion yeah that that's a good kind of consensus mechanism so um Okay cool so you built this project we could talk about that a lot more but we have so much more to talk about like where do you go from there you you basically had a successful project right like everybody's dream especially at this point sounds like you were pretty young like yeah like had you finished college at this point like I I so I dropped out and never finished um oh wow and my senior year at Yale um I had this idea for social sigh I dropped out I did Tech Stars um techar is an accelerator popular like they they give you some some seed money and then you're in like a program where they kind of Coach you exactly they help you yeah exactly they help you lay the foundation for a company and all the skills you might need to know to to do that effectively uh techstars really changed my life it really gave me a lot of the skills that I was missing um gave me my initial Network outside of University and yeah initial seed funding and then helped me going to raise more funds for for social sigh and yeah while I was running social sigh I started teaching uh a general assembly and so general assembly is one of the first like really big uh coding boot camp programs and I was doing their part-time courses for a very long time I'm distinguished faculty with uh GA even until today and I was having just hundreds if not thousands of people be successful like learning these new skills learning how to code getting great jobs and at one point it kind of just got overwhelming that I didn't notice anyone that looked like me taking advantage of this program one because it cost a lot of money it also cost a lot of time um and so I started looking for orgs uh near me in Boston that I could help or support and I came across resilient coders which at that time our founder David delmare I was really trying to work with court involved Youth and show them that hey like there are these things you could be doing like coding or things like that that might help you longterm in life and so I started just going to we had what are called Community hours where it was just myself a few other mentors and a bunch of young folks that um were typically court involved or or a returning Citizen and just trying to like give them these skills and then um we had the idea of starting a boot camp and uh our founder dve dmar said hey like you've been running these other boot camp programs could you do it for RC said yes and then for the past six years we've built a program that can help folks uh traditionally of color that have um particularly not completed a degree go from zero to employable as a soft engineer and we've been pretty successful at it we've helped hundreds of folks get jobs um and with starting salaries around $992,000 and for us that's huge because for each person we can get from those communities we're talking about millions and millions of dollars back into those communities over the lifespan of their career so started doing uh resilient coders that eventually led me to 100 devs and that's kind of the the Long Way Forward I want to dive a little more into because we're going to talk a lot about 100 devs but like uh Brazilian coders you you said uh court involved youth uh I'm I'm not familiar with term but like you know I have lots of friends who are like convicted felons and I'm not sure if that if that is essentially like people who early on in life uh get into trouble maybe because they actually did something wrong or maybe they were profiled in like the the very unequal justice system in the United States didn't do its job very well and and you know gave them much harsher penalty than that kid should probably have in many cases uh but uh is that like accurate is like yeah so we had a lot of individuals that we say court involved because exactly of the things that you brought up a lot of the folks that we were working with they didn't do anything wrong uh and they were just at the wrong place the wrong time um we did have folks that um had gone down a different path in life to do the things they needed to do provide for themselves and their families and so we wanted to give them a clear path forward to do the the thing with their loved ones and so we trying to get them skills just skills that they could put into practice to to to get to a point to where they had a a strong stable high growth career and and that's that's kind of the birth of RC and our our our Dirty Little Secret that um I guess some folks know is that the first dollars we ever took in were from the Boston Police Department uh because they saw our program as hey we're going to spend all this money on incarceration Rehabilitation um why not get ahead of it and they gave us some funding to help run our first boot camp yeah that's awesome well it sounds like it was money well spent uh given the uh impact you all have had over the past six years I think you said um so so you got resilient coders going you're teaching there um and there it sounds like you're having a big impact but was there a moment where you're like I can have an even bigger impact by leveraging the power of the internet like what was the process that and and maybe I can back up a second and just say what is 100 devs yeah sure uh so 100 devs is a collection of Engineers that help build a completely free live software engineering training program for anyone anywhere uh that was kind of our our Genesis now we're also building and we're going to be piloting this year a full service digital agency where real clients come to us to build products and get to tap into our amazing alumni that have gone on to work at some of the best tech companies in the world we're talking Amazon LinkedIn slack You Name It We have an alumni there they come back to work on these projects uh each Project's getting broken down in individual tasks and then as you're learning you're also building real code for real companies and getting paid actual money to do it um we mentioned early on that free isn't always free because it requires you to have an extreme privilege of time to work through all this material to give up your nights and weekends and we want to do something that helps soften the blow for folks that are going through our program so our program is entirely free uh every resource I have ever given out is always free I don't work with anybody that doesn't have a free version or something that we can have access to but we did a poll not too long ago that said hey we realize a lot of you uh care can't commit the time or the the take the time away from putting food on the table what would it what would it take for you to be able to focus and it was $200 a week was the was the average we can make that happen we can figure out a way to get folks those fund so that they can focus and get through a program like a 100 devs and yeah so now we're a global Community our Discord is 60,000 plus strong uh we have alumni all around the world and we're just trying to figure out a way uh for folks to be able to unlock a stable high growth career put food on the table support themselves and their family and their loved ones and luckily we found a lot of folks that believe in that idea and Mission to and we build a wonderful Community around it yeah and uh so the mechanics of the community like first of all it goes without saying that I'm in awe of what you all are accomplishing with hund devs and uh I've had so many positive interactions with people who are both like the free Cod Camp curriculum and in the 100 devs I guess you call it like a cohort or an intake or like basically a bunch of people working together through a set kind of like week to week um program and I you know free Cod camp we have experimented with like cohorted programs and like let's see if we can get all these people uh but what we found is like it's it's a lot of work to organize which I'm sure you're very aware of and like free COC philosophy is like let's just build the resources at scale put them out there yes lots of kids who are the you know the son or daughter of like software engineers in poo Alto are going to use free Cod camp and they're going to use it for free and they you know probably could have paid a bunch of money to have a computer science student like tutor them or something right but also a whole lot of kids who are in like a village in rural India or uh in like kind of like a failed State uh which a lot of people have smartphones and can't get on the internet even in places like Somalia right uh North Korea right people in North Korea use freeo Camp sometimes that's wild and uh essentially they can they can learn even though uh it would be normally prohibitively expensive for them to buy you know a $20 course on like a course website uh for example and and so like our philosophy is like we need to make sure that there is a baseline that everybody has access to comprehensive math programming computer science and English education um so that everybody regardless of their circumstances if they have time which not everybody does but if they have time or they can figure out techniques to like make time yeah to learn even a little each day then they can make steady forward progress toward the eventual goal of working as a software engineer right uh so so that is kind of like our philosophy is like let's just make tons of really high quality free stuff that's essentially subsidized by the community like the the people who are able to give the alumni um sometimes like we got a gift for $250,000 the other day from comp saw CEO of coma is a fan of free Cod camp and uses free Cod Camp to expand his JavaScript knowledge super chill dude uh you know we darl silver uh founder of thinkful uh kicked in $150,000 um and then of course we're getting grants from like you know Linux foundation and mongodb and Google and a lot of other organizations but a vast majority of our support comes directly from the community from people who donate so rec.org donate all right but but my point is oh yeah and thank you thank you for supporting our charity uh Le I didn't even realize I apologize um but maybe you're getting my my periodic donor uh email like I said yeah so um my point in all all this little tangent is to say that like free C Camp like we don't have the bandwidth to do things that don't scale and you are doing things that don't scale at all really like maybe you figured out some techniques to get like cohorts to scale and get like because I mean you mentioned your Discord has 60,000 people in it uh but like actually getting on stream and like teaching for like a marathon 3 five hours like however long you go it's really inspiring uh definitely catch some of the live streams if you can or I've watched I I watch everything at Double speed so I watch like the video on demand Stu like that but uh like I guess you saw from coming from the like intensive program where you're teaching folks like you saw the Merit of quality not just quantity or like I guess like cont like I'm not like doing things that don't scale really uh and and helping in people individually uh doesn't really scale but that's not necessarily the idea the idea is to give a whole lot of attention to a a smaller number of people and to really make sure that those people can ramp up to you know an impressive he said like uh what was the uh the figure you said was like the the median income of people who graduated um 92,000 yeah for cters yeah that's a lot more than I made at my first developer job given if this is in Boston like the cost of living might be higher but but I mean that's a that's a lot of freaking money for people that like I I imagine some of these people don't have University degrees I didn't even know that you hadn't completed your degree although dropping out of Yale is probably very different from dropping out of like you know rather University right yeah but uh sorry I've been talking for the last three minutes I'm just very excited about how you approach this and I I want to make sure our audience appreciates the I guess counterintuitiveness of what you've done uh and how you've been able like people weren't doing this because it was perhaps counterintuitive to do so and it was like probably very idea don't yeah so so like maybe you can talk about that like how you have to do stuff that doesn't scale and like ways that it doesn't scale and then ways like techniques you figured out to scale it a little bit sure yeah happy to I think the first thing though is just like Shout Out free code camp like you all laid the the foundation for so many folks to learn and one of the things I'm always hyping uh especially in 100 devs on our Discord is I think a lot of folks that go into this space don't put in the work to do the things that really matter the most and so one of the things I've always admired about free code Camp is like this commitment to filling the gaps and so realizing that most people don't have the privilege of speaking English so we're going to build a full like how do you speak English course right uh that's that's huge it's like very progressively thinking about what do our folks going through our program absolutely need and so um that's why I'm so happy that free code Camp exists it's why it's one of the first things I always recommend to new folks getting into Tech and why like I I think you all will continue to be so successful cuz it's just like this Relentless pursuit of making Tech more Equitable to everyone and so um that's why I said really early on in this conversation I look up to you so much and it's a lot of that ethos is what I've tried to bring to 100 devs um for 400 devs we got started during the pandemic and the pandemic hit and things got really bad really quickly so people always like to talk in Boston about at 2% unemployment rate but I knew just from looking at the actual data when you looked in our communities of color is already at 12% this is pre pandemic if you look during the pandemic it jumped from 12 to like 33% in some communities and so it got real bad real quick and I I just if you are already in Tech or if you already come from a privilege background I don't think people really understand what that means when right now like if you look at the most recent like labor data like the the median income come median median is 56,000 in the US and so if we have that percent of folks under it and we're seeing 33% unemployment and then labor data actually includes like eligible workers it just got real bad real quick and it continues to be a really rough situation from folks and so I'm not a doctor uh I didn't have like a skill that I thought that could be helpful to folks that were being affected by the pandemic but I had been teaching for a while and I knew that I could get folks uh skills to make them more employable and so 100 devs started as a way of getting 100 folks into software engineering jobs we're way beyond that now and I wanted to make a live cohort where we would meet twice a week on the internet and I really thought it would be like you said just a handful of folks maybe five 10 people um we did a pilot that was really successful our first cohort was about 300 people every single class that was successful we did another cohort that was like 3,000 people every single live every single class and so we kind of just built slowly we we we were able to kind of jump from Zer to 300 300 to 3,000 and we always joke that we're baddies we're like we're we're baddies writing bad code like it doesn't matter uh it's about getting the skills that we need it's about figuring out things on the Fly um and we just live up to being kind always to ourselves to others and as long as you're willing to say you know what we got to figure this out we got to figure out how do we do this at scale how do we have 3,000 people live in a class getting help and not feeling lost um we had to figure systems and ways of doing that and um building community that wanted to support that number of folks awesome what you said there first like I just want to call it that that particular Insight we're baddies writing bad code it doesn't matter so when I was a you know a teenager like uh really interested in like writing and reading lots of you know fiction and Jour like literary journalism and stuff like that um I I would always hang out at Denny's like till 2: amm just talking to random people and learning from them and just writing and stuff and uh one time like our our server he he was kind of a grizzled old looking dude like he would he would not look at a place in like a bullpen in a newspaper Newsroom if such thing even exist in 2024 but uh but his advice to me was I'll never never forget what he said he he said throw away your first million words and I was love that damn a million words that's like years of writing uh but just accept that it's gonna suck and the same thing with your your code projects and really the same with any Endeavor you you take like I've been trying to get better at Bass for the past three or four years and like takes me forever to record the bass intros for like I thought you like the one of the videos I watched you did it and then sat down so that's what I was I'm telling you that's what I was expecting for for today so I'm a little sad that I didn't get the bass intro live just for me but I didn't want to bother you with like watching me screwed up several times I love it but but yeah like like you just have to accept that the first few thousand hours you spend with an instrument or with like a programming language or with anything is going to be not ready for prime time uh you know my wife uh she grew up in China we met in grad school and she's now a US citizen we we brought her over and naturalized her after grad school after we got married we've been married 19 years and um she she loved playing piano right and one of the things that she says in China like people take piano extremely seriously and they have the saying in Chinese which is basically like you spend thousands of hours um behind the stage practicing for you know five minutes on the stage you know like that's just the nature of the game and with code like if you're writing some serious system that's going to like code that's going to be run millions of times right like if you're making an open source contribution to free Cod camps codebase and it's in the platform itself and this component is going to be rendered 50,000 times a day or something like that like it's it's okay that it took you a whole lot of work to get that like code into the shape and it's okay that it took a lot of practice and trial and error before you got the skills to be able to create that code that code just going to keep going right like you know uh when Elvis goes up on the stage and he's being filmed uh and he's playing I use Elvis because I love Elvis I'm sure he's overrated or whatever but he he's he's the man so I mean like that guy practiced like crazy that's definitely the same with uh for example like James Jamerson the greatest basist of all time basically uh or um you know like pretty much any musician they're going to practice just like crazy they're going to rehearse obsessively and they're not going to be satisfied but once that recording is made once that record is cut if you if you uh there's this great um documentary about fonus monk uh the jazz pianist right and he would only do like two takes and he he's just like after two takes whatever I do is going to be garbage I'm done like use one of those takes but how it got how he got so good that he could actually nail it in one or two takes was he practiced like a maniac and he spent so much time at the piano uh where a lot of you know uh I guess amateurs would would just be like good enough he was not content with that and so I feel the same way about like any undertaking but but like certainly with coding it may seem like coding is not like a synchronous performative event like where you're having to sit down and perform in that regard you can go and you can edit your code you can iterate on it the tools have gotten so much better like free C Camp every millisecond or two you're going to get the tests like telling you whether you met all the test conditions or whether you need to keep tweaking your code right so you have all these tools to iterate but at the end of the day like you should still try to approach it like a performance you'll get a lot better if you don't rely so much on the tools catching uh what you're doing but anyway I'm kind of going on a tangent but I just wanted to to Riff on like the Insight that it is we're all baddies yeah we're writing bad Cod it doesn't matter because you throw away your first million words you spend thousands of hours at the piano before you're playing anything that's worth anybody listening to right like you just have to accept that this is the nature of reality this is the nature of doing anything that's hard is it's going to be hard you're going to have to work hard and you have to just have that mental fortitude and and that's something that comes through in your your video is like it's so supportive like I love the way that you're just like it's all good like just this happens to everybody everybody has to go through this you know I always like to say like there some people may be like slightly better at programming like aptitude wise or or like they may have some intrinsic like Quirk that makes them marginally better at programming but those people were probably just forgotten how much time they spent at the keyboard when they were a kid if they were privileged enough to grow up with computers right like uh you know when you hear like Bill Gates talk about how like oh I don't actually like write out the code until I figured everything out in my head and then I said that's nonsense Bill Gates did not just sit down and like write basic from memory because he'd like been moving everything around his head people can't do that I don't believe that that maybe there are some people that have like some extreme form of like like like extreme brains they could do something like that but I don't believe that Bill Gates could do that sort of stuff I think he's just talking up the Mythos you know he he's trying to build up hype for himself and like it's this old kind of like Old School elitism uh that a lot of the early devs the Old Guard have and uh just just don't buy that hype is is all I want to say and and I want to thank you for like dispelling a lot of that whether you're intentionally dispelling it or not just telling people like coding is right like not not sugar coating it we call it the trough of Sorrow which actually comes from like startup worlds is one of the things there's this very classic graph of like um this like really big hill that you go up when you're really excited about something like I'm going to learn the code you buy a thousand Demi courses because buying stuff feels good even though you're not going to do them and you at the very top and then you start like day one of any actual coding program and then you just Plum it once you realize how long it's going to take and then you spend all that time going through the trough of sorrow and then the most like sick thing about this is that I shouldn't say that but the the most Twisted thing about this is at the very end there's an even further dip that you have to go through uh where you it's the and then you get into what we call the Wiggles of false hope so even after you've gone through you've learned everything you needed to learn you start actually interviewing to get the job and you're just getting rejected rejected rejected and so there's just this huge curve long trough of Sorrow uh that for a lot of folks takes years to get through then once you get to the end where you're like trying to actually get something out of it it gets even worse and then slowly slowly gets better so I think the big thing for what we do like you mentioned at 100 devs is just helping folks manage that frustration we kind of have like three key things that we just say every class almost manage your frustration be consistent and take care of yourself when you look at how adults learn the reason why adults kind of probably don't learn is as well as they think they could is because they don't manage that frustration piece when they looked at language fluency and like language acquisition they thought that we probably lost the ability to be fluent in our teenage years but they found that that probably isn't true it's just once you get out of those years your time is entirely your own and so would you rather do this thing that sucks for two years or would you actually uh sit down and do it and so if folks that can manage that frustration to actually be get through the things they want to do and so that's a big part and it's also why we're live uh when you look at other programs I love uh Dr M out of Harvard cs50 I love that cs50 is now on on free cam I've read every single article they've ever put out and one of the ones that are really interesting is they actually published all of their data for cs50 in the beginning uh which was really cool to read through and you you notice that they had like 150,000 people that signed up for like the they're up and they'll help you get back up right so you help one another so that that's kind of the genius of 100 Dev so maybe you can talk a little about the mechanics of it obviously you've got the Discord you've got the twice weekly um streams when classes in session so to speak uh and and they are high energy streams man I just have to compliment like the you got like the like all these sound effects like the cool astronaut background and stuff it's like watching uh like a gamer on Twitch like like watching somebody playing like you know csgo at a high level or something but it it's education right like and in my mind like you're pioneering kind of a new approach to education that is based off of like people are already familiar with like games and Anime and all these other cultural kind of touchstones and you're just like hey let's let's relate this to software engineering right and so you're doing a great job of that but maybe you can talk about in addition to the stream in addition to the Discord what are the other aspects of 100 devs what are the other uh instruments sure so we do a live cohort model we basically do a cohort a year and when that cohort is live we're live on Twitch twice a week uh for about three hours for a class we take about an hour to do review space repetition active recall is super important uh so we spend that first hour just like reviewing and then about two hours of something new we do that twice a week and then we have office hours on Sunday which is another stream typically on Twitch or on Discord um but it's just people asking questions and getting things answered outside of that there are so many other expectations and things that you're working on that's about 10 to 20 hours outside of that twice a week class networking all the things are going to actually move the needle for you to get a job our our our joke is that we're not really a coding program we're getting a job program and so all the things you have to be doing to get a job have to be happening when we're not live then for folks that can't participate in a live experience we have our lustrious catchup crew which is a group of folks that are working through the classes at maybe a little bit more of their own pace we have a lot of folks that are around the world that can't make that live time work for them so they get together they're on our Discord working through the classes together you'll often see like 20 people just in a voice Channel watching a class together um that they've just they've come together to do uh and so you can move through the material at your own pace uh when we're outside of a cohort like right now now we have we have our huddles twice a week and the huddles are just like a traditional standup we're just trying to move away from that I I think it's a slightly ableist term so we interest them as as huddles and yeah that makes sense I've never thought about stand up as an ableist term but it is a lot of people can't stand up and so we we'll have anywhere from like 500 to 700 people every huddle just asking questions sharing we call the the job hunt the hunt sharing what's happening on the hunt uh how while they are negotiating they'll come up live we'll help them negotiate offers they'll talk about uh an interview that W great or poorly and just by showing up to these huddles you're learning all these like it's so hard to go through life with everything that you're experiencing being the first time you've experienced it it doesn't have to be that way specifically with when you have a community that's also doing it so the huddles are our way to expose people to the realities of getting a job going and interviewing and and and actually seeing all this knowledge and so that when you're in that situation uh you can experience it too so we have the huddles twice a week and then we have a lot of independently generated Community things so um we have Banky brunch shout out Banky brunch which is a group of folks that come together to work through behavioral questions technical questions pretty much every single day uh we have groups that are working on projects our voice channels are always going and uh none of this works without community and a wonderful group of mods uh i' be remiss to not say Miriam dier Mayan wolf Claire uh these folks that like blah that make like all this work um and for free and volunteering so much of their life to like make this happen amazing yeah like free Co Camp similarly to draw parallels to our organization very Community Driven like we have tons of mods on the Forum on Discord we have open source contributors that are just dropping in and like fixing little bugs making sure that like our copy is as readable as possible to non-native English speakers making sure that like you it's a lot of contributor driven activity and it sounds like you've figured out a way to encourage a lot of people in your community Empower them with like you know you can delegate uh some degree of uh I guess authority to them so that they can go out and they can just experiment and build out different things one of the things that you said uh that I thought was really interesting uh I do want to talk about let's just talk about space repetition and active recall I believe are the terms sure uh Barbara Oakley teaches the how to learn course the most popular moo massive open online course ever other than maybe like cs50 which we were talking about earlier uh learning how to learn it's not just obvious how to learn there tactics right there there are phenomena uh in that are ingrained in the human brain from you know Evol tion from like the you know savanas of Africa basically that we carry with us today uh that that we can use if we know how to use them and one of them you mentioned is space repetition what what is space repetition yeah sure so I I guess kind of to set the stage real quick is that a lot of folks that attempt to learn how to code are not successful we know that we know the drop offs we know that that's just a reality and a lot of time those people feel like that it is them that it's a they they do not have the ability to learn how to codee they do not have there's something about them that would stop them from being successful as a software engineer and as someone that's worked with thousands of people like literally in the classroom my finger is on their keyboard I just know fundamentally my heart of hearts like a outside of a a cognitive impairment that's just not true and the thing that I found is it's just that most people don't know how to learn and it's it's almost criminal that our school system doesn't actually teach us how to learn that every textbook doesn't have some very fundamental things at the beginning uh that help you remember and learn this material so the difficult thing about software engineering is that it's a cumulative career the things you learn this week you're might need two years from now and so there are two like really fundamental learning techniques that Dr Barbara Oakley does walk through that I really it's my favorite one of my favorite courses of all time uh brings up uh where as humans we forget stuff very quickly so if I gave you a three-letter code this is called the evos curve it's it was a study of one it's somewhat been replicated since then but basically this person just tracked a new three-letter word a three-letter code every day and they found within the first like 30 minutes there was a 20% chance they just forgotten it the first 30 minutes so imagine trying to learn this really complicated coding stuff and within the first 3 minutes you're going to forget it then if you look at that forgetting curve by the end of the month there's an 80% chance that you have forgotten that very simple thing and so for a lot of folks that are going into coding education they just don't realize that the forgetting curve is very steep they they'll learn something a month later they've completely forgotten and they start back over and that's super frustrating so space repetition is using a tool that makes the material come back to you when you need it most and so uh a typical tool for this is anky or Anki however you want to call it that's like it means to commit to memory in Japanese aod exactly and so it is a flashcard tool that has an algorithm behind it so that surfaces the information when you need to see it so if you're doing good study habits which is a huge portion of what we teach at 100 devs it's just like how to study you're using this tool so that the things you learned about HTML you're not forgetting when we're talking about like mongod DP right and so that space repetition is going to help you remember stuff for the long call which is really important for a cumulative career but then the other thing that's even more important in my opinion than space repetition is something called active recall coding can be done through like video tutorials it can be done through text but it's a lot of information the process and most people just go through it that's not active learning they they feel maybe some sort of productivity from having watched tutorial or having read a blog post but they didn't actually engage with that material or learn and a lot of times like for me I teleport through information like if I'm reading a book I'll get through three paragraphs and I'm like what the heck just happened I feel like I've just teleported through that T through I haven't heard that expression but that's a good way to describe the phenomenon especially you know people who have like ADHD and stuff they may just be like halfway through a you know a book maybe I don't know like you just your mind wanders and uh if you're not constantly kind of trying to engage with it you won't necessarily retain so active recall is the way that that helps me as someone that does have ADHD like do this and so active recall is just recalling the things that you just learned or just read or just watched and for folks that do have attention issues I recommend doing that after each paragraph uh I recommend doing after each chapter end and you're just literally talking to yourself what did I I just read what did I just learn and you're saying it out loud the research behind it is really shocking like staggering differences uh you can learn something once actively recall it once and do better than somebody that reread it four times yeah like you can do a quarter of the effort and have better results just with this one technique and the fact that that's not like stamped in every single textbook ever made is is absurd yeah it it's I mean like we could talk all day about like the shortcomings of the US uh uh education syst like both both uh K through2 and HED and be completely clear there are a lot of very smart people who are working very hard to address a lot of these deficiencies but but the fact that we're having to explain what active recall and uh you know space repetition are when they are you know like time- tested phenomena that you can leverage so just a quick note about active recall this is one of the reasons why freeo Camp's entire curriculum is interactive it's because you have to Grapple with things otherwise it's just it could have just blown right past you right like y everything needs some sort of evaluation criteria some sort of comprehension check and if you're doing something that doesn't have comprehension check if there's not some right or wrong answer taking a moment to summarize what you just learned or relate it to something else you've learned think thinking about it just grappling with it that that can absolutely help cement those you know synapses right like what's the thing that connects synapse Axion not Axion dendrites I can't remember it is you probably know but uh but yeah like and it's something anybody can do like when I when I'm uh you know reading a news article or something like that right that's not interactive now with GPT or something I could throw I could throw it in GPT and say like hey come up with like a multiple choice question based off this article and I'll do that sometimes uh and not not just for like active recall but space repetition like write a bunch of notes and then review them a few days later or use a tool like eny that can systematically do that where you can like load a bunch of flash cards s a lot of learning platforms have spaced repetition just built into them if you go through the free Cod Camp curriculum it's designed in such a way that we're going to reintroduce Concepts over and over and you're going to be like oh yeah I kind of remember this from like a few hours ago you know it's like or a few days ago like but but we're intentionally trying to you know incorporate that and one of the things I think talking about the free codame curriculum let's talk about 100 devs and like what you all are and is it 100 devs or 100 devs I you say either 100 Dev I just I couldn't remember I say 100 devs 100 devs is shorter yeah it sounds more uh more like easy to say so yeah with 100 devs like what is the coursework that you're going through like are are you using mukes are you using open textbooks are you creating a lot of the stuff yourself how are you do yeah so I think there's like two important things one I really don't believe the content matters it's all the other like we're we're jobs program and I think I think one the biggest mistakes people make is like an over an investment and the idea that the thing like that the learning aspect and not all the other things that move the needle so we're very much two kind of tracks like we have all this other stuff we're doing outside of the learning and then the learning as well so the learning is is very simple um we do full stack JavaScript and I do a lot of like custom like I make all the lectures basically with the slides and all the the funny stuff that you mentioned on Twitch and we we move through that material together but a lot of a lot of it is supplementing with other things that I think are just the best free courses out there so in the beginning our students will use some free code cab um as they get a little bit further along they'll they'll use um some things maybe from Full stack open um that are trying to supplement the things that we're doing in the classroom and anytime that's we're doing something it's always a free resource it always has a free trial or not a trial like a free level of access yeah um and so we we give you the skills to be a full stack web devel developer we do some of the other kind of rounding out to give you the software engineering skill set um the tooling and things that you might use and then uh as you're getting ready to go on the hunt the data structures and algorithms you're going to need to be successful um but that's kind of like the coding stuff outside of that from the very beginning there's pretty stringent requirements in terms of like your networking so you are supposed to be getting three connections and two coffee chats every single week uh throughout program you're doing things that are going to be opening all these doors to help you get a job and um that's kind of another really I think that's where our curriculum shines is those things that are really helpful and impactful for helping you get a job we actually have a lot of folks that do other boot camps which we love like like I don't really care where you come from what you do as long as like you're getting to where you want to go and a lot of folks will join us just for like the how to get a job portion which I think we're pretty strong at awesome so it it's so interesting and important that you distinguish yourself as like a not a learn coding program but a Get a Job Program uh and I just want to emphasize like like even though we put a great deal of time and energy into our curriculum it's AB absolutely like if you took it like look at where all the donations we get and things like that go toward its instructional design platform development mainly for the Core Curriculum uh because for us it is important that there's a really good Core Curriculum but I'll be the first to tell you or I guess the second since Leon just said it getting a job as a developer is really three things in my humble opinion and and if you haven't read my free book that uh I published about a year ago uh learn to code and get a developer job literally the name of the book just Google that or go Google code book and I or learn to code book I think you you should find it pretty quickly um and by finding it and clicking on it and spending a lot of time on the page you help ensure that Google continues to recommend it to people um so uh skills are only one leg of the stool y network and reputation are the other two and I we've talked enough about skills let's jump into networking and building your reputation which are two things that are also instrumental to the hundred devs program yeah yeah like like what is the value of a network why is networking worth your time and energy when it's such an awkward you know thing to do yeah we we have um it's so we have like a lot of like in jokes and things like that that if like you're not part of the community it's kind of like weird to bring up but we refer to most people as clickers uh people that learn how to code and then they just click apply uh and clickers don't get jobs maybe every once in a while somebody gets lucky and they click on a button and they magically get a job but especially in this market clickers don't get jobs and so we do everything in our power to never click apply we want to make sure that we're talking to like real humans that can see our Humanity that can see our ability and our skills and the things that we can do um so that we're not just discarded by some AI ATS system and so from the very beginning of 100 devs we're tasking you with generalized networking and networking I think it's like a scary term that I don't think should be to me networking is just making friends and you want to do things in the beginning that get you comfortable with making friends and so you don't have to start networking by going to like your local python Meetup that's like super hardcore like no if you like Pokemon go play Pokemon at your your local league right or like if you like hiking go on a join like a hiking group and just like share passion with some others get comfortable talking to people and then eventually apply those skills that you learn to places where developers are more likely to hang out and turn those acquaintances into friends and then by the time you're ready to go on the job hunt you ultimately want hundreds of people that you've interacted with over the past year that you could go to and say Hey you saw me where I was here's where I'm at now who should I talk to I'm looking for a job and that's really successful for people so that's phase one of networking phase two is once you go on the hunt it's very targeted we call it building our Hit List where we identify the companies that are Act ly hiring we identify like three to five people at each of those companies and we're doing Outreach to um get in communication with those folks learn more and what we're finding is that a lot of jobs just don't get posted a lot of times folks will be applying for one job that they wind up getting a different one just because they like the person like right we we have this idea that like Tech is this like meritocracy where if you know the skills you get the job it's not it's like people want to work with people that they like they want to work with people that they know and trust and you can you can make that happen for yourself by really kind of going this networking your way in pathway so the term meritocracy is it was like actually like a joke because the author was like this doesn't exist this is absurd like it's who you know and like you're skill unless you're I mean even like the most demonstrably good pianists for example to talk about pianos we talked about it earlier like somebody saw you know um skill in them and like help them get obser you know enrolled in some Observatory or they had the time to play piano a lot with all the other kids who were working in the shoe factory you know in the you know Industrial Revolution or whatever right like like it takes so and everybody's circumstances are different so I just want to like put the bed because I've never talked about this on the podcast but we don't use the word meritocracy on here except to say that things aren't a meritocracy because they aren't it's ridiculous to think that they are uh the the person who came up with it I think in a book was like just joking about it um yeah yeah he he defined meritocracy as like I think effort and intelligence and how do you build intelligence through effort right some of it may be like you know endowed upon you uh but for most part we all work really hard I study you know foreign languages like an hour a day I play bass an hour a day you know and like I still suck at those things but sucking at something is the first step to being good at something right um so I also wanted this describe or like Define like an acronym uh ATS is uh applicant tracking system system yeah yeah when you apply through like a web form you're like applying into some algorithm that's going to be say okay we didn't ask if they have a college degree because it's hip to say that we don't look for people who have college degrees but in reality our system is going to just filter you out because you don't have a college degree we didn't put it on the thing but you know I I think I I heard some uh study that like uh it was a recent study like 700 job postings that didn't say they required a degree like zero people got those jobs for software engineering for those roles even though they didn't say because if you don't have a degree the ATS just simply filters you out no human ever even reviews right but like the way I got my first job as a do as a developer was through meetup.com going to like local Ruby developer Meetup and I got a job as a rails developer and the interview was very similar maybe you can describe the typical interview the hunter devs folks go through because it's not like Elite code whiteboard maybe for some of them but a lot of it is like hey I've already seen your projects I know you can code are you a good fit for our organization right it's about 5050 we're talking across hundreds of people that have gotten jobs that I've like literally seen right and people have come and talked about them during our huddles so we have a celebrations channel on our Discord where you can like go through and see hundreds of people their stories how they got the jobs what the interviews were like and so that's really powerful to know that but it's about 50/50 and it's when they when they do an interview we're talking about sometimes there's not going to be like Elite code style portion there's still going to be behavioral questions there's still going to be technical questions you're still going to be walking through a process project you might do some light like coding together but for about half the folks that have gotten jobs they haven't done like a leak code style question the other half you will and then there's varying degrees of it and so so many folks focus on like grinding out Le code until their eyes bleed and it's like yeah if you're going for Fang sure that needs to be the thing that you do but if you're going for a local health care company in your medium-sized city they're probably not going to know like like they're probably not going to go through and do that level of interviewing and so one of the things we always say is like don't go into your interviews like an accident always ask what you're about to walk into they'll tell you like almost every single time if you just say like hey like I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this application I would really appreciate just being fully prepared what am I about to walk into in this interview and they'll tell you oh you're just going to meet with so and so and talk through a project great now you know how to prep for That interview don't ever go into an interview if you don't know what you're about to walk into and so about half of our jobs have been not really needing some of those more aggressive skills but it's a huge smell test it's a sniff test uh we like to say every single person that starts off at 100 Dev smells there's something about you that's going to stop you from getting the job and it's your job to like figure out what it is get rid of the smell and make sure you come across as a cool confident professional that's done this been there and has ready to get to work and if you can do that you're going to be really successful getting jobs and even focus that want to go the other more traditional interviews with like the leak codes and things like that you're still passing a sniff test I have seen folks that I consider just amazing even done like competitive programming that do well in interviews and don't get the job and they wonder why and then you look at the resume and you look at how they present themselves and their narrative all that stuff matters it really matters you need to invest time in opening that those doors as well yeah absolutely and I just want to emphasize like if you can figure out what that smell is maybe it's that I don't have a degree and like I'm getting filtered out of ATS or or people are just not looking at me as a serious per like a serious candidate just based on that virtue you can absolutely correct for that and I have lots of friends like free C like lots of people on the free C Camp team dropped out of college or never even went to college right um and it's it's just one of those things where you have to figure out like and empathize with like the HR person or whoever you're talking to and figure out what it is they're they're sniffing for because usually they're just trying to figure out a way to quickly weed people out yeah so to speak so they don't have to inter right once you know like I don't know one of the things we try really hard at 100 devs is to like make sure you know all the like hacks and the secrets and like what's really happening and so recruiters are using some sort of like we said ATS some sort of filter you know what to add to your resume to get past those filters we use things like CV compiler which is like a website that'll tell you like what you're missing um we have like our own resume template that's like battle tested we follow like the true f-shaped pattern like if you watch recruiters with eye tracking there's a video that's going really popular it's done it again where you like watch the way they look they read left or right like most folks that read English they're looking for those specific keywords at the frontload of the f-shape pattern right so if you know these things you can you can get past these like screen segments and the other thing is people really need to work on how they talk about themselves people people go into the hunt too humble this is your this is like your one chance in life to talk your talk uh be proud of your previous experience I don't care what you've done having that pre PRI pre like previous experience makes you a badass and brings different skills to the table than someone that did a four-year CS has only ever worked in computer science like they're there're you're different and that difference can be a value ad to a lot of companies and so knowing how to craft that into a narrative like a logical reason from what you were doing to why you're the best software engineer they have in their candidate pool and being able to talk about yourself highly is super important so if you're listening what is your narrative what is your story why are you the coolest thing since sliced bread walking into that interview and that's what we do a lot during like our huddles and at 100 do we have whole nights where we just craft stories we'll have dozens of people come up they give us their their life history and we craft the narrative live and then you just see an instant difference in in how they're going through applications yeah and so first of all I would love if you can share the links to those uh the CV I'll pull up C compil like if you have resume template and like we we've talked a lot about um 100s and I feel like we could talk a whole lot more first of all I want to make sure you still have a few minutes finish I'm good to go for as long as you'll have me awesome well that's great news um the the main uh the main limiter is going to be the fact that I've drinken like literally like two liters of tea while I'm standing here talking with you so I may have to go to the bathroom at some point but what we um what I really want is just to tease out as many like high level insights that we can get into this podcast like like I just want to end on as many pieces of actionable advice as you can share as somebody who has become a developer worked as a software engineer who's even like built a successful project I guess three or two projects and then you're very actively high high up in resilient coders too which sounds like a really uh and I want to tease as many of those out of you as I can sure uh for the for the benefit of the audience and for the benefit of myself I've been furiously taking notes through this whole thing so some questions I have are um I guess what are some questions I should be asking what what are some interesting things that people never ask you that like are really helpful um that would be helpful for the many people out there learning the code well well okay what is a big mistake we can we can think about that maybe you can think of some other uh things but what is a big mistake that you see developers make other than you know over optimizing on their skills for example and and not enough on their Network or their reputation or figuring out how to empathize with recruiters and and I I don't mean like he buddies with them but like you always want to understand other people's perspectives there's no disadvantage to having more perspectives kind of compacted in your head being able to build with more verisimilitude models of other people and how they're approaching the world and what they're looking for how you can find the job that needs to be done and you can do it for that person right yeah I guess I'll I'll gear it towards folks that are like learning how to code and trying to get a job I think the biggest mistake outside of the things like not investing early in networking and um over investing in things that aren't going to really move the needle in terms of you getting a job is there's there's two things that I think lead to most folks not being successful and the number one thing is going into your day is like an accident if you're going into your days like an accident and you don't have a game plan for your day your week your month and you're trying to commit to a process that's going to take years you're not going to be successful and I've worked from with folks from all different walks of life the folks that make a plan for what they want like what do you want for yourself what do you want for your family what do you want for your loved ones like what do you want and then what are the steps you're going to take to get there that plan helps you get through the trough ofar it helps you get through through the the days where you don't have motivation when the discipline is is is is fleeting how do you stay true to like what you want and you should have it written down you should have it on your wall you should you should there's a reason why I have your photo as like the background of my wallpaper every once in a while is because I need to know what I'm shooting for and like what do I want like what do I want for myself what do I want for my community and like having that why go everyone that's that's trying to learn code needs to go on some long walks with no podcast no music no anything thing and just ask yourself what do I want like what's my future like what do I want for myself because until you have that it's really hard to to push through and so I have a lot of people that come and they they say they want it but they only kind of want it right there's like a very famous Dr Eric Thomas speech like they just kind of want it and until you really want it and that can come from a lot of different ways it can come from being hungry it can come from uh wanting the respect of your your family like it can come from a lot of different places but until you have that you're not going to you're not going to make it through um and yeah so having that hammered down and really having it visible putting it somewhere on the wall like knowing what it is and then every day before I go to bed I write out the three things I want to get done the next day once a month I what are my goals for the month once a year like not once a year every couple months like what am I trying to get done for the year and I I hold myself to it and the last piece I'll say about this is I get Buy in from the folks that matter most to me so it's not something internal to me like I know if I want to be successful in this I need to get the Buy in of my my wife right hey this is the thing I want to do it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take some nights and weekends away from us being together and and with our family and I I need you to understand why I'm doing it why it's important and can I have a little bit of your trust and I'll prove that to you over time that it's worthwhile investment but I need you to know like why I'm doing this and get that buy in um because you don't have that buy in especially if you're like stay still at home with family that doesn't get it if you're um not being as present with your loved ones there that that's going to build up some resentment and for a lot of folks that's another reason why they're not successful so yeah don't go into your days like an accident have a plan for your days know what your why is and get Buy in from the folks that matter most yeah that getting Buy in is so important because learning to codes a long long journey and you get all hyped up you get like these uh you know probably YouTube ads or um you know ads on the side of your coding tutorials learn to code in just three months and get a job paying like 200k and like you know whatever you know and to be fair there are plenty of developers who do learn to code very quickly and do get jobs uh I've had lots of friends who transitioned from working on Wall Street and they went to some expensive intensive coding program and they were able to then go get a job in Silicon Valley but they already had college degrees uh they already had you know like probably figured out how to plan uh they they probably had an understanding of like a lot of the you know learning techniques that we've been talking about and and most importantly they had a lot of money and they were able to just focus on it exclusively and and attend an intensive in-person boot camp like and and that era may have passed it may be that it's just a little harder now uh to to be able to get a job just because you should learn math right like it used to be back in the day you could just learn some WordPress and you could probably go get some clients doing WordPress work and it may be that case but with the global market and the level of competition you're going to get from places like India Nigeria China like tons of extremely educated extremely hungry people are coming from all these places and you know frankly they're going to eat your lunch if you're not putting in the time and effort Benjamin Franklin said few people plan to fail most people who fail fail the plan that's a paraphrase of what he said it's not exct no it's perfect yeah but but it is like 100% what Leon's saying here um and uh yeah so I just want to emphasize like getting Buy in from your family like when I learned a code again I don't want to make this all about me but like I told my wife like hey like I've got this job as a soft as a School director right and I would like to become a software engineer and we had doubled income we had insurance which is a huge deal here in the US uh through her work and so even if I left my job we we could continue to have health insurance and I just grinded every single day and I every I did precisely what you're talking about planning out okay what am I going to accomplish the next few days because planning is everything like it it's so important to have a plan and to stick to a plan and to have goals that are measurable and that are within your control that's another mistake I see a lot of people make is people will be like my goal is to get you know 100,000 YouTube subscribers this year or my goal is to get you know a job paying like n1,000 or or to get n freelance clients you know those are not things that you can directly control you can't control the outcome but you can control the input my my goal is to play base for an hour a day right or you know whatever goal I might have at a given moment uh yeah James James Clear of like Atomic habits has that very famous quote that I love so much that he says we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the levels of our systems and so this idea like we can have all these lofty goals but if you're not putting in the systems the how you're going to study uh play the Basse for an hour each day study your languages for an hour each day and and the process for that uh it's just not going to work out for you in the long run absolutely so we've talked a lot and of course you and I we grew up in the US you grew up in Philly I grew up in Oklahoma City um and you know here in the US even though things are not equal by aone shot it's very unequal Society we still have vestages of you know history yeah going back 400 years right like uh they warp uh the essentially The Haves and the Have Nots and um but in the US we're pretty well off compared to folks in a lot of countries uh for example like the hyper competition in places like India and China where you've got like so many people getting like CS degrees and trying to compete and so few employers or Nigeria where there are so many amazing developers like I think it's like the third or fourth largest community in free Cod Camp people that use free C Camp is Nigeria but if you look at Nigeria there aren't a lot of big employers and the government's kind of a mess and as a result there's not a lot of opportunity even though there's a lot of talent so a lot of those people have to move overseas to like Europe or to to the United States or wherever they can find opportunity right like a lot of the what is the proportion of people doing 100 devs who are outside of the US and uh how what have you observed about those people that that might be helpful for them uh yeah and and like just a followup questional tack on is like do they need to move to the US to be able to be successful in software engineering or are there other paths you've seen people succeed with yeah so I would say about half our community is from the US and about half is from everywhere else in fact the first jobs we ever got got were not from the US they were from Brazil then Poland UK and then a bunch of other places in South America uh and so a lot of our community and folks that have gotten jobs haven't been from the like us Centric and so the first thing I always say is whenever somebody from outside the US says I want to get a job I just tell them bluntly it's way harder don't let anyone convince you that it's going to be the same pathway as somebody from the US it's going to be a way more difficult journey and there's a very couple of like very key things that you have to keep in mind um one the Visa sponsorship ISS issue in the United States is wild it goes to a lottery most years right and so banking on that is like a pathway into an engineering career if you're from a area that doesn't have like that strong of a local Tech economy is very hard the competition for companies that hire remotely is brutal and it's even more brutal when you look at the companies that hire globally so a lot of people think oh I'll get a remote Tech job no even even though they're remote they only hire folks from the US or from a very specific select countries so finding a a group of folks that hire globally remotely uh that's a very narrow pool so the first thing I would recommend that you do is build a hit list of those companies there are list you can find online there are couple hundred of those companies you need to be best friends with everybody that works at that company and you mentioned building your reputation this is something I really recommend folks that are coming from from uh a location do to have a traditional Tech economy is your reputation matters a lot we talk about building authority a lot in 100 Dev so picking a niche or a topic that you know very very well generating content around it so when somebody thinks about I don't know authentication they think about you and the blog post you've written and the depth of knowledge that you can bring that way when you're applying to these Global remote companies you have something that nobody else really has this like intangible thing that helps set you apart and so the first thing I say it's harder building authority or reputation is super important and not going into your job search like an accident it's not going to happen if you don't have a very strong game plan and you're building the references and helping pass that sniff test that these companies are putting out there if you do those things you'll be successful we've helped hundreds of people in that situation get a job it's just a way more difficult pathway yeah and uh just on that note of like building authority like what are some of the most I guess immediate things someone can do like let's say you already have the skills let's say you've been coding for a long time and you just want to be able to get a job preferably at like a multinational company many of which are of course us-based um and you would love over the next five or 10 years to eventually get a visa and come to the US where salaries are like double what they are in Europe and and where we have a high degree of Freedom that people in other countries don't necessarily enjoy I mean it it is a good place to live like uh I like living in the us right I guess it's easier for me to say that it's like a middle class guy uh who speaks English natively and has US citizenship and doesn't have to deal with like my H1B you know being shifted around and like getting companies to sponsor me and all that stuff but like like I can definitely understand the appeal I can understand why so many people are trying you know to immigrate to the US every day but like what would be some uh practical ways that they can establish Authority as you said yeah so I think when you are trying to stand out amongst lots of other talented individuals doesn't have to be anything wild uh I really do think building a list of companies that are on your targeted range um and the H1B processes we I I've helped sponsor a lot of h-1bs like it's we could talk about like that's a whole other beast in of itself that's like you have to be of an exceptional talent you have to do these things to help you stand out like that's a whole other thing you're talking about like Global remote company like what can you do right now I'm thinking about somebody right now that wants to to to to get a a job my my process probably wouldn't be the H1B coming to the US right away it' be these like Global remote companies and then maybe expanding to companies that could sponsor um but a lot of times you're going to need more more credentials you're going to need like degrees might actually become a Thing If you're trying to go that sponsorship route um so I recommend right now if you're someone in Nigeria or India um looking at these Global hire in remote companies figuring out what they do building a list of them building a list of all the people that you know that work there adding them to a Twitter list right like each person add them to a Twitter list start engaging with their content just liking stuff at first don't be spamming don't be weird just like engaging with them liking their content congratulating them when they get a a new project built right like building that network of folks that know who you are over time like you become like an acquaintance like you can go from nobody to like they have no idea who you are to an acquaintance just by regular interaction on LinkedIn Twitter and it's there's a fine line between like being weird with it right we at 100 do we always joke it's not stalking it's networking and so you want to make sure that you're not like Crossing that line um and then starting to realize what these companies have trouble with right like you're you're engaging with these content you're seeing the things that they're doing are they having trouble implementing I don't know AI or llms great right that's the content you need to start generating build your Authority about how do they integrate these tools into their daily process you should have a Blog you should have um a YouTube you should have something where you're putting content out there you're getting feedback from them and from community of some sort to where you're building up that hey I I'm not just somebody that says I do this you can you can look at my content you can look at the things I'm doing uh you can look at the the things that I say I've done and be able to see that very clearly and also by doing that you're practicing how you talk about these things you're practicing um maybe if English is your second language you're getting more comfortable with these things that when it comes time the pass the sniff test you are because these people you've been engaging with for a year plus they've seen your content they know who you are they know what you're capable of that makes getting into these orgs a little bit easier absolutely 100% agreed uh based on my limited knowledge I I think it sounds like you have a lot more knowledge about that so what I would like to ask then is like let's flip this around employers who want to bring in more folks uh and and this can we can we can definitely start by talking about folks from overseas if you want Talent if you want to be able to tap that talent and you don't want to like go to some consultancy or something in some other country and say give me like 20 devs right go to infosis or whatever like you want to literally get the best talent from India or from Nigeria just by picking developer by developer yourself you're trying to build out your company or or you're a hiring manager and you're just trying to build a team you're you know like what strategies what advice would you give to those people so that they can actually find talented people and what should they be looking for yeah I think Partnerships are really great so we work with a lot of hiring Partners at resilient coders we've sent dozens of folks to Amazon through resilient coders we sent we have these very strong Partnerships with a lot of orgs that need a good solid pipeline of talent and so partnering with communities is a really good way to do that um if you came to RC res coders or you came to 100 devs and you said give me the best of the best I would talk to you I'd make sure that your job is doing all the things that it needs to be done to be do to be done equitably and if I felt that that was the case I would give you all the folks you would have a pipeline that was full for days of Highly qualified incredibly talented Talent um from wherever you needed them to be from or or or anywhere you'd want to support as well like we can make that happen and so I think think for folks that are looking for a good pipeline just working with communities so I would of course say working with myself you um I always think of uh Paris black Tech pipeline does this work really well where they're able to get you a very strong source of talent um from anywhere from entry level to super senior uh and so figuring out these different orgs that have a surplus of talented engineering Talent um could be a great way to build those those funnels for you yeah absolutely and then uh for organizations that just want to be more representative of the folks in their Community let's say like it's not necessarily remote but here in the US uh Los Angeles for example like there's a tech startup and they're looking for engineers what I guess General tips would you give to employers so that they can they can be inclusive and they can make sure that they're bringing on talent that actually represents the local population instead of just bringing in a bunch of you know Stanford GRS or something like that right yeah I I think it takes Champions within a company that actually care about these things of course you can read like the McKenzie reports a more diverse Workforce equals better outcomes right so a lot of companies know these things to be true but it takes someone on the inside that cares about building an equitable Workforce for this to actually happen especially when things like Dei and these initiatives are being contested in the courts a lot of companies are becoming a little bit more um shy around being ten toes down right and so I think if this is the case it really doesn't come from top down it comes from individuals looking around and saying you know what I live in a community that is 25% black and brown but only 1% of our Workforce is of color there's something fundamentally wrong here when we looked in Boston where I spent most of my career we had the second largest tech economy but double digit unemployment rates in our communities of color there's a there's a fundamental mismatch and so we had a group of individuals that realized that this is just woly inequitable and they would go to town they would go to fight the fight every single day to bring one person along than to bring two along and the thing is it can compound once you have folks in these positions of power you can turn around and help lift up more along with you so I don't think it needs to be like like a companywide thing I think anybody that's listening to this call has this ability to fight for what they know is right to turn around and say you know what I want want to make an equitable pathway in my company and I'm going to work really really hard for the next open rule for it to be someone that deserves to be here but might not have the opportunity yeah and that's a huge part of 100 devs like as far as I can tell from like listening to a lot of your episodes and stuff like instead of asking people to like necessarily donate to 100 FS or uh like you tell them send the elevator back down is is something you've said a few times like like try for every one of the 100 devs cohort members the the Learners they should try to find somebody else who's in Alum and bring them onto their company so they can kind of uh essentially be increasing the number of alumni within these organizations in the free software Community we have a word grus right it's not it's not free it's grus meaning that there's like no cost like there's no like monetary cost and so 100 devs is grce I mean there's no like money should no money should ever come out of your pocket I never want to see a dollar come out of your pocket for anything um there's no way that you can give us that dollar we don't want it but it's not free and the reason why it's not free is because we expect that when you get the job that you turn around and help three more get into the same position that you have whether it's helping answer questions whether it is literally helping people apply and get into the pipeline for your company the the expectation is that this community has in invested thousands and hours into your success and the thing that we ask is that you turn around and give a little bit of that time back and that's the reason why 100 death has been so successful is that we have folks that have made it to the the upper echelon that are now senior developers at the best tech companies in the world that are still giving up their time every single day on our Discord and our huddles to make sure that the next folks are successful that is a beautiful note to end on just the the the virtue of this organization that You' birthed into the world uh but let's not end quite yet because I want to ask what are the future initiatives what yeah does the next what what does 2024 the rest of 2024 maybe even 2025 2026 free we think literally a decade out like we're working on this computer science degree program that will take another six years to complete all the course workk for plus another five years to gather longitudinal data plus probably another five years to have the data AC you know approved by accreditor so we can get uh the degree program accredited free computer science uh bachelor's degree free which I was super on I don't I I was tweeting up a story I was telling everybody and their mom I was running and showing my wife like look this is this is this is the future like this is this is the thing that uh we need the most in the world right now and so I'm super happy that that's like on your your vision education wants to be free yeah exactly like this is it right like doing the work like and like we said earlier I I think free C Camp is amazing at identifying the real gaps like the things that people really need to be successful and filling them and having a community that's willing to step up and do that work to fill those gaps um so something I the reason why it's the best donation I make every single week it's the reason why um I always uh send folks to free code count because I know that they're in safe hands to like get the things they need done yeah um free isn't free for everyone right in terms of time and commitment a lot of folks that would be extremely successful at 100 devs right like the the the cliche line is that like um skill and talent is distributed opportunity is not right and so we have a lot of folks that are extremely talented that um could be phenomenal software Engineers but don't have the opportunity or the privilege of time they need to take that time they would be spending learning d driving for Uber doing door Dash they they need to take that time to put food on the table for their family and when we pulled our our our Collective we we saw that folks really only needed around $200 a week to like make this a viable pathway so our huge big goal is to build out an agency model where real companies come they have work that they need for us to to accomplish we have super season profession Professional Engineers that lead those projects and then we break those projects down into individual issues or tasks so that as you're learning you're also maybe picking up some of these tasks in a real code base like your skills become intensely practical and by the time you graduate or leave 100 devs you've built real projects for real companies with production level code and all the money that comes into the agency goes directly into those issues so that you're also getting a little bit of money coming in as you're working through it and we think that might make our program more Equitable for folks that just don't have that last little bit of privilege of free time and so like I said we talked about earlier we're a group of people that run head first into really big audacious goals sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't we're going to have a lot of mistakes a lot of things are going to go wrong but we're going to figure it out and our goal is that when we launch our next cohort uh we also have this agency model in place as well so that you're not only learning but getting this practical paid experience as well yeah that's so cool I mean that's like we're all about taking away excuses from people like and and like to be fair like a lot of excuses like if you have young kids or if you're taking care of your folks if you're working like three jobs to be able to pay exorbitant rent in your city you know like those are very reasonable reasons for not being able to spend a lot of time coding but if there are things you can do to remove some of those barriers uh to to make it easier for people to commit to an already arduous process of learning the code right and nobody anybody who says learning to code is easy is trying to tell you something like it is hard as heck it's getting easier every year it's we're not dealing with Punch Cards you know we're getting higher levels of abstraction it is becoming easier but it's not Star Trek easy where you just talk to the computer right uh eventually it will be but maybe in the 21th century the more immediate problem how helping people free up their time so they can actually learn I just want to commend you on this program like I love the idea of getting people out there doing real world work getting compensation through some sort of program where they can just I mean even $200 a week it sounds like it's going to be a huge Lifeline for a lot of these folks and free up a lot of time and energy um this is extremely exciting and I would be very excited to have you back on in the future catch up and like see what you learned from running this this new uh experiment that you're running this bold endeavor I'll let you know how it goes awesome man well it's been such a joy learning so much from you not just from this conversation but just you know following you on Twitter I'm going to add links to a lot of stuff that we' talked about in here I'm going to of course link to 100 devs and I just encourage people to learn more about the work of Leon learn more about uh 100 devs resilient coders these organizations that uh you know like resilient coders is a charity like Freo Camp 51 C3 and um you know like there are lots of Charities out there that are doing important work I'm going to try to like uh encourage people to do what we've done the two of us and yes you can create a startup and make a lot of money and you know life-changing money especially if you've got like family that are back in a home country that that need support right or if you have like any number of different there I will never give people a hard time about just wanting to make a whole lot of money but if you have the means if you are somebody who's midcareer and wants to do something in the charity space I hope that uh the accomplishments of Leon and and modestly free Co camp and the pro like modestly there's no mod that needs to to be had there yeah yeah I I I hope some of this will inspire you to also consider you know doing work in the public space right as a tax exempt public charity uh and and again I just want to commend the work you're doing Leon and um I hope everybody has learned a great deal I appreciate it thank you so much like I said this is a a dream come true uh you've inspired me so much throughout my entire journey into this and uh I know you do the same for so many other folks each and every single day so thank you for the work that you do and uh and our communities right that that help push this stuff through yeah and and to everybody in the hund devs community that's watching this uh hang in there keep it up man there we go man and woman uh you all are doing a long grueling process but you're helping one another and you know you're making friends along the way so um with that I I just want to thank everybody for tuning in until next week happy codingthe welcome back to the free Coke Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larsson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people that are getting into Tech today we're talking with Leon Noel who I don't know if you've heard of 100 devs but it's amazing and it's a huge source of inspiration for me personally he is the founder of 100 devs and he head of engineering at resilient coders Leon joining us from Sunny Los Angeles how's everything going with you it's it's a little early we'll see if the sun comes out things are going well uh this is uh surreal experience thank you so much for having me and uh we we'll get weird with it real quick uh I I always joke that like my my wife knows how serious I am if your face is like the background of my like screens or or I've had a picture of you on my desk for a little while uh so she knows if it's go time or not based off of like she's seeing you so uh IM honor it's a huge privilege like this is a dream come true for me uh you're a huge hero of mine and have done so much to help so many folks and uh you're who I want to be when I grow up so I really appreciate it thanks for having me on yeah well I just want to say that it's like very kind uh and I want to say that that goes both ways like uh often when I'm feeling like a little but low energy and I just like ah you know I don't know if I can get a lot done today maybe I'll just you know go and answer a bunch of emails and not um do like curriculum design or or you know I'll I'll I'll go into like the I'm like what would Leon do he would dive in head first he would have so much energy overflowing and he would just go in there and get things done and so uh yeah like I I do think about you a lot when I'm just feeling low energy because I've watched your streams and I've seen the amount of energy both like literal energy like bursting forth and the positive energy that you bring to the community so uh thank you for that and uh I'll make a little meme of you know Wolverine holding the picture frame and then go holding holding the picture of me I won't really do that but like I when you said that that just fell hot in my mind because I love X-Men so um Leon did did you see the new the new announcement 97 what's happened they're redoing the old school cartoon oh my goodness like post Professor X the original 9s Saturday morning all right no more everybody we stop the podcast we go watch the trailer it's really good it looks really good i i l link to the trailer in a little bit of tears in my eyes when there's a specific catchphrase that is said but yeah okay uh I'm going to link to that be sure to watch that immediately after you finish watching or listening to this podcast interview because we've got a ton of advice that's practical and not just you know something that you can do to escape from your day-to-day experience but to build up your day-to-day experience and accomplish your goals so Leon before we dive into 100 devs uh and Brazilian coders and all the work you've done uh I like to always start these interviews with more autobiographical stuff just so people can have context into like who you are your lived experience uh where you're coming from and where you're heading and things like that so maybe you could take us back to uh where you grew up and like what your earliest Ambitions were as a kid yeah so uh I grew up in Philly um definitely 100% a product of Philly I was always kind of the very kind of tinkering wanting to build type of kid uh I grew up with a a huge household a a big family uh all in one uh row home in South Philly which was amazing and uh I was blessed to have amazing libraries where I had access to computers and could tinker and build and uh I was very blessed even have a lot of even just Computer Science Education early throughout my life I had a q basic class in middle school where I would get a sailboat to go from one side of the screen to the other I thought it had magical powers and so I was very lucky to have these skills so so early uh we also in Philly have magnet schools which are kind of like EXA schools that you test into and so I went to engineering and science where I had two years of C++ in high school and this is like 20 years ago and so yeah I just I'm very lucky to have grown up in an environment that supported my passions and interest even when I didn't have access to those Technologies or knowledge that there was a way for me to get access to it so very very thankful for that that's awesome yeah that that's it sounds like a really kind of like adelic upbringing in the sense that like you've got access to what about teachers did you have any teachers as a kid who like really propelled you forward I always talk very passionately about my um my seventh grade teacher uh or eighth grade teacher uh science teacher Mr creger um whom I've failed to track down if you know Mr creger who taught at uh you know Hoover Middle School which was is is like a now destroyed bulldozed um School in Oklahoma City if anybody's heard of that person let me know but uh did you have anybody like a Mr creger in your life who was eccentric and interesting but kept giving you like interesting books about space and stuff like that yeah so i' I've have been lucky to have a few um so miss franchine was my fifth grade teacher that when I was done my coursework would not let me just sit there twiddling my thumbs but always had like puzzles and things to build and Tinker with in the background and likewise I've tried to find them I haven't been able to find them but they really kind of showed me that I could be in control of my learning that it wasn't a a one-way depositing of knowledge that I could have some sort of control or command over the things I was doing with my free time that would enable me to think creatively and and to do the things I wanted to do uh I had a lot of wonderful folks throughout High school that really helped guide me um that pushed me that uh maybe saw something inside of me that I didn't see inside of myself and would try and pull that out my we're talking about like code education Shout Out Mr shipper would uh push me to learn my my C++ and we had the old school like Matrix printers where you'd print out your code on them and and I would look through it and take it to them and try to point out bugs or errors and you talk about folks in your life that do like the small things right and Mr shipper every every birthday for years and years would just send me like a happy birthday message so talking about folks that just support you long term uh that was there and then in University it was Dr Bri esus the person that showed me that I could be what I wanted to be and supported my ability to learn supported what I wanted to do made sure that I had funding over the summer to like live uh made sure that I got to do the research I wanted to do and ultimately gave me the the skills that I thought I needed to be the person I wanted to be in life and so yeah definitely the product of amazing teachers throughout my entire life and definitely something that I try to think of with resilient coders and uh 100 devs like what what was about those folks that inspired me to to do more to learn to feel comfortable and try and bring that into the classroom as well yeah yeah it's so cool to talk with another teacher because obviously you're a software engineer but you're also a teacher to many many people not necessarily in the conventional way uh maybe in the conventional way too maybe you actually give lectures occasionally in person but like through 100 devs you're essentially like the classroom teacher that people need you know like yeah you know the the bat signals up in the air the the 100 Dev signal and and you're answering that call and you're helping people uh with the not just uh practical challenges of learning to code but the motivational challenges as well and that's that's a huge thing I take away from your Stream So sounds uh like you went on to do really well academically uh I presume because you went to one of the best universities in the world uh maybe you could talk a little bit about like what that process was like what what is it like getting into a relatively Elite cool and um you know like was that how long did you have that plan at what age did you kind of like Snap to awareness I always like to tell people like I kind of snapped to awareness much later in life uh I was maybe like 20 21 and that's when I like got really into like journalism and studying foreign languages and stuff like themes that would kind of run throughout the rest of my life living abroad and and and ultimately like much later I had kind of like a second thing where I learned like technology is really really gosh darn useful like and uh that's when I I learned to code and like automated stuff from my school and stuff but like did you have like an early kind of Awakening at some point do you remember a a distinct period of your life where you're like hey you know I can do a lot more than other people around me are doing my my peers was there such an Awakening for you yeah I think I I want it to be comfortable I wanted to have um a good life and I think early on especially as like a kid of color you're kind of taught this very it's just like Dr lur dentist it comes up over and over and over again and it comes from maybe our families and the folks in our community not knowing kind of all of the opportunities that are available but that those are the safe Pathways the Dr La dentist and so yeah for hundreds of years yeah hundreds years yeah so it's it's proven so that's kind of the path that I got put on as someone that who was successful pretty early academically I did well in elementary school I got I used to have to go from my school to another school every week to do like other programs and I saw how hard my grandparents had to work I saw how hard my grandfather worked specifically uh in a boiler room every day it was hot they were pulling Valves and I saw what Hardware could do and I wanted to do something that would enable me to have a good life but maybe not be so sweaty right and so the the that idea led me to look into Dr l dentist Dr l dentist and as I went through Middle School I was very focused on getting into one of our magnet schools so Philly has some amazing schools that you kind of test in and it's more of like a lottery now too as well and I went to engineering and science and engineering and science was geared around getting folks into engineering and Science and had tracks that you could follow and a really good placement rate into universities and so for a while my sophomore junior senior year pretty much every lunch period was spent with Miss Brown who's my guidance counselor and would make sure that I was getting access to everything I needed to do well academically and to get into really good schools and coming from a low-income family it's really expensive so Miss Brown would U make sure that I had vouchers for everything that I could take the SAT for free that I could apply to schools for free that would get me into all the best summer programs that could help me academically I was a I did upper Bound for a while um made sure I had access to things that I didn't like calculators and things like that and so my school I owe a lot too in terms of getting me prepared um for eventually what I would go to is Yale and so for me I think I've just been really blessed to be the product of a school system that if I wanted it if I wanted to work hard if I wanted to put in the hours and I played three Sports I did every Club imaginable but I had really amazing people that guided me through that process and then uh was able to to make it from from ens into Yale and then um went into hard sciences and was on this track to be a a doctor right I I Dr La dentist I chose doctor uh my mom was uh uh an LPN and um I got to grow up in do offices and see and and talk to folks and that was kind of the path I was on and it's kind of funny because I was doing computer science I was in an engineering high school and I just didn't allow myself to see that as my path or my career even though that's where eventually I should have been or and eventually did make it to and so that's kind of the the long winding path into yeah awesome and LPN is licensed practitioner licensed practicing nurse yeah it's like a vocation nurse basically so instead of doing now I guess the track is like your bachelors and you get like your RN this was a vocational pathway okay to being a nurse yeah yeah yeah I just want to make sure I got that right and I have like this policy that like no matter how common the acronym is I always try to like spell it out uh for especially for our listeners abroad non native English speaker listeners as well um uh so okay so just recapitulate something that I've been taking detailed notice as you talk just because this is so so interesting and I um I'll email these to myself these are not for publiction but it's basically the contents of this conversation is public now so um it sounds like it you didn't it just didn't even click it didn't even really occur to you that software engineering was a field you could go into because like so many people coming from underprivileged backgrounds so many you know second generation immigrants or even first generation immigrants so many people growing up who are kind of still in the shadow of inequality like racial inequality that's systemic that is the reason one of the reasons why you know wealth among black families is like something like one/ tenth of like white families that have been in the US the same duration of time I mean it's like ridiculous but because of these circumstances uh you were pushed to do Dr lawyer dentist and again like most of my doctors dentists that I haven't had any lawyers that uh like over the years have been people who came from a different country like their parents came from a different country or the in many cases as doctors they literally came from like India past the US mle which is this incredibly stringent test ESS like recertified as doctors a very lengthy costly process uh just so they could practice in the US because the US is like you know a great place to live and it's a great place to work as a physician uh generally I I guess I shouldn't speak for all there may be some physicians in the audience to take issue with that because of regulatory you know issues and like all this other stuff but my point is you were so focused on that because that is what success sounded like uh that like that was like the family's perception of success and software engineer is like a relatively new thing that is you know not well understood and it's not a surprise because software engineering has only existed a few decades right yeah um maybe you could talk about like what that Awakening to software engineering was like and how you went about okay I'm GNA go much deeper on coding and learning about computer science and math like all these things that you need to be a successful software engineer um now now I you may take issue with me saying like you need a whole lot of math for example or something like that I don't think that's necessarily true for a lot of jobs but I I always tell people like there is no knowledge that is not power like you should definitely learn math if if you have the time it's probably not the highest priority if you just want to go get a job as a developer Sor right uh but my question for You Leon mathematics all right a complete introduction right on okay so uh I'm glad to hear that like yeah because a lot of times I hear like I think one of the pieces of misinformation that's going around is like oh you don't need math to be a developer like I don't know any math like I just took high school math and I'm a developer and like that is true to an extent but there is kind of like a ceiling that you're going to hit in your engineering career if you don't like at least take some time to learn some mathem matics and you can learn mathematics right here on Freo Camp's YouTube channel we have courses on pretty much every engineering math topic that you would learned at like an undergraduate engineering program so uh you know it's just investment of time and that's a big thing we'll talk about in a little bit is like isn't really free in the sense that you have to invest your time and energy and not everybody has equal time and energy some people have all kinds of different circumstances that inform their availability to learn the code yeah so we'll talk about that in a minute but like how did you approach this and like maybe how old were you were were you still in school when you realized that you wanted to do CS yeah so I was always building so when I started in sixth grade I learned Q basic and I would go to the libraries and tinker and build when I was in high school Upward Bound got me a TI 83 Plus calculator which I still have it's like in my drawer over here some where and you could write code for that calculator and I remember swapping I felt like it was like old school you know like how people used to swap floppies I would swap the games and programs from the calculator and go to the library and like I I remember the thing I wanted for one Christmas was like the cable that connected the the calculator to the computer so that I could like put my code on it and so uh I remember very early working on calculator games and other fun stuff that I just wanted to to bring into the world or modify and hack God and so that was always really fun and then I had that kind of formal C++ in high school and then when I got to University it all went out the window I was doing hard biology uh I was doing U eventually biological anthropology I was looking at hormones testas and stuff like that but this entire time I'd always been building tinkering I really liked entrepreneurship I was always trying to start ideas small companies uh things like that and I had started um one kind of simple project that went pretty viral in in New Haven New York area um and that kind of really showed me some of the power of these skills that I've been kind of accumulating but the real kind of Awakening for me for computer science was uh every summer I was doing lab work and I had figured out how to like survive uh when you're lowincome going into like an Ivy League school basically they give you a full ride right off the rip and so I had figured out that if I didn't live on campus they would give me like whatever the amount of money was to stay on campus they would give me and I was able to use that to like do stuff I would pay rent and food but I was happy eating pasta and pasta sauce and so I actually had money to like live and and do all the things that all my my fellow students were doing because i' had figured out this like way of doing it um but I ran out of money one summer and it was getting pretty dicey pretty quickly I I really didn't have any money for food left and I was literally hungry and I realized that I I could do things like I was looking up like quick jobs and then I was like wait a minute let me let me see if I can build somebody a website I know how to do it I've been building all these like landing pages and and small things with code before so I put on Craigslist hey I'll build you a site I can get it done today and somebody responded and they paid a deposit and my life changed from that moment I I skipped all the way to the grocery store I bought my pasta I bought my pasta sauce for the month I built them the site and in that moment something very clear happened in my brain that I had a real skill uh a skill that could provide that could put food on the table a skill that would make it so I was never hungry again sorry oops sorry chis uh it's cool again yeah if anybody like like we don't edit this podcast at all so I'm not going to edit out the square word that's like a unless there's like something really bad that happens like I had a coughing fit once and so that that changed everything um until this day I still freelance and I that's the reason why a lot of the things I do today the the resilient coders the 100 DS is like I want anybody that's ever felt that way to know that there is this option this ability to to develop skills that no one can take away from you that can put legitimate food on the table and so that's when I kind of went all in on more of the engineering piece awesome yeah well um that sounds like an amazing discovery of like powers that you just had Laten within you that necessity brought forth you know necessity is the mother of invention right uh you were forced to basically by your circumstance to like think outside the proverbial box come up with a way to to get money to buy your pasta um I you know I definitely uh remember the lean College here is subsisting off pasta we got the smack Ramen if anybody like not the good like sh ramun like Korean Ramen but like it was just called smack we'd always joke about it like when you're hungry enough it's almost like you know like a drug because it's just like you feel so sated afterward course like terrible for you but what kind of pasta did you always just like did you have a particular like build of pasta that you liked uh I this is like way back whatever the cheapest was I was I was trying to survive I didn't care nowadays I probably have some preferences but back then whatever whatever was on sale whatever is the cheapest uh there was the supermarket nearest had like this like clearance aisle and in that clearance aisle they would put like the stuff they couldn't sell and so whatever was on that that rack is what I I would grab yeah yeah uh and and to this day by the way like a lot of grocery stores like Walmart like they'll take their baked goods and they'll put them on a rack like right by the like exit like the staff only place where they have like the garbage compactor where they compact the boxes like I I worked in a grocery stores for a few years so basically back where they keep all the mops and they keep all the you know inventory shelves there will be like a little rack and sometimes they'll have baked goods they're like it's still good but we can't really sell it because it's going to expire in like a day or two so like I sto snacks and Bargains from there uh but but yeah just Pro tip if you're going to a US uh grocery store you can often find like food that's about to expire that you can get like at a heavy discount so um that's really cool so how did things unfold from there so how did you um how did you go from that first contract work essentially that that client that you landed through Craigslist which is how I land I think I landed some early clients through Craigslist Craigslist amazing tool I'm not sure if it's still amazing today like 12 years since I last used it but yeah uh yeah like a lot of early G were found on Craigslist how did you go from that to the deciding I am a Dev like taking that identity if you will and going deeper with it yeah sure so um my junior year at Yale I started a small website called List full of hope it was kind of like a reverse Craigslist where uh if you needed something you could say what you needed so if you needed a jacket and someone in the area had a jacket jacket you would meet up and they would give you a jacket so it was kind of like a gift economy um it was very simple site that was just enabling folks to help others in their community and it really kind of popped off in New Haven and so there was the one winter where it was like really popular I remember people getting Christmas presents jackets gloves anything you needed um and I could really see that transition from something that was like just a raw skill to like me having to build an actual application and having real users and I was hooked like I could I saw the power I saw that it could help so many people and I knew that these skills would be really advantageous to keep going so my junior year I kind of slowly stopped kind of really wanting to do coursework senior year it became an even bigger problem and I was trying to finish my thesis to to graduate and I had to get like 300 men to spit in a tube tell me about their sexual history so I could correlate it to their testosterone levels I was trying to like show that um or find something about BPA and relation to testosterone so you drank a lot of like plastic water bottles yeah and so I was trying to do that before before it became really popular like something people would actually think about free plastic which for the kids like just in case D does have like deleterious effects we don't want our kids to be drinking from so I was having a really hard time running that that experiment and uh apparently people didn't want to you know spit in a tube and tell me about their sexual history for like a bottle of Gatorade and like a pack of gum or something and so uh I wasn't able to recruit enough people for that experiment and I decided to use my like coding skills to set up it was just like a landing page where a lot of students were always trying to find studies or experiments to participate in because one they were a lot of fun sometimes and you actually got paid pretty well to do the experiments and so there is one really famous One that people loved where you basically went to a lab they got you drunk and you played poker and they're just like watching you like how you make risky decisions and things like that and you got paid a couple hundred dollars to do it wow and so I made a landing page that had all the studies from Yale Harvard Princeton that were like trying to get people to come and I just slipped mine in there and it took off because we had all these professors that were promoting it we had all these students that got real value they went to the site they found something fun to do they got money and and um I dropped out my senior year to turn that into a business um which became social sigh and um we wound up building academic surveying tools we had over 4,000 different universities that used our tools to power their academic research uh and even though that company has been wrapped up for a long time now we still have research that gets published based off of the data that they collected I needed to know more my Engineers had these like magical powers and I needed to to like learn that skill for myself and so I took my coding education more seriously uh eventually uh I was building other products other startups as well and and started teaching at General Assembly helping others kind of acquire these skills too so that was kind of the the journey it's interesting so first of all congratulations on building something that 4,000 universities use it's not easy to get universities to use your stuff like there's like this notorious like sales cycle adoption cycle among universities they're they're very like slow to adopt new tools um yeah I mean that's that's phenomenal to go from basically like Mechanical Turk for being a human test subject to having like an actual project that is getting wide usage like that that's really funny that you bring up Mechanical Turk that was the reason why we were able to raise like VC funding was because M Turk was becoming more popular um and what social size saw was not just the the survey creation but the participants taking the surveys and so part of my pitch deck and I'll never forget it was I decided to get my mom a Christmas card and I had people on mtk like just like hold up like the the merry Christmas sign and what we had was this one person with a hundred different like not 100 but like a lot of different accounts that was just like Chang ing their hat putting on a different shirt but it was like clearly the same person and so at this point Mechanical Turk hadn't solved the like identity online and like how do you stop like false participants and that was kind of why we were able to be um able to raise money and why we were able to have so many universities trust and use our service because we were solving that problem specifically so was your mom like who is this person and why are they so you know passionate about like wishing me a happy birthday it was cool there was like 100 people from all over the world with like different backgrounds different cities different places and they all were saying Merry Christmas now you could probably facilitate that but back when we did it it was yeah it was pretty cool yeah and mechanical turque just for people that are unfamiliar with it is like they call it artificial artificial intelligence obviously nowadays like a lot of things you would pay someone on mechanical TK to do you just like form out to like an llm or something but it was like um like hey I need you like early on it was like hey I need you to solve a capture for me or hey I need you to create a Facebook account and like like this this Facebook group or something like that was like basically getting around the restrictions that different like platforms might have in place uh but uh event but you know in the good like as designed use would be for example getting people to do precisely what Leon said so uh it was everybody would get like maybe just like a few pennies for doing a a hit I think or job or something I can't remember what they were called but uh yeah you you would do those is that accurate like I haven't actually used it yeah no that that's that's pretty close uh there was it's this whole subfield called human computation right so human computation there's there's some things that computers can't yet do that humans can still do but figuring out how to do them at scale um is really important and so Mechanical Turk you can take an a task break it down into a very small subtask and have thousands and thousands of people do it need for human computation is like labeling data think of like AI training and things like that who were the people like there had to be real people that said that was a a fired hose or that was a car or that was a bicycle that's a Chihuahua and not a muffin exactly that's like a famous like chihuahuas look a lot like muffins to a computer and so figuring out all of that was necessary for a lot of the advancements that we're seeing now and there are still things that humans can do very quickly that machines just can't do yet and so um M Turk still has like a place um there are other companies that do similar things nowadays of course but that labeling and small tasks done at scale and there are other cool things you can do too so where it's like um instead of giving it to just one person you give it to five and if four out of the five do one thing you know that you can probably trust that thing as opposed to the one person that did it as opposed to The Minority Report yeah the dissenting uh the asentic opinion yeah that that's a good kind of consensus mechanism so um Okay cool so you built this project we could talk about that a lot more but we have so much more to talk about like where do you go from there you you basically had a successful project right like everybody's dream especially at this point sounds like you were pretty young like yeah like had you finished college at this point like I I so I dropped out and never finished um oh wow and my senior year at Yale um I had this idea for social sigh I dropped out I did Tech Stars um techar is an accelerator popular like they they give you some some seed money and then you're in like a program where they kind of Coach you exactly they help you yeah exactly they help you lay the foundation for a company and all the skills you might need to know to to do that effectively uh techstars really changed my life it really gave me a lot of the skills that I was missing um gave me my initial Network outside of University and yeah initial seed funding and then helped me going to raise more funds for for social sigh and yeah while I was running social sigh I started teaching uh a general assembly and so general assembly is one of the first like really big uh coding boot camp programs and I was doing their part-time courses for a very long time I'm distinguished faculty with uh GA even until today and I was having just hundreds if not thousands of people be successful like learning these new skills learning how to code getting great jobs and at one point it kind of just got overwhelming that I didn't notice anyone that looked like me taking advantage of this program one because it cost a lot of money it also cost a lot of time um and so I started looking for orgs uh near me in Boston that I could help or support and I came across resilient coders which at that time our founder David delmare I was really trying to work with court involved Youth and show them that hey like there are these things you could be doing like coding or things like that that might help you longterm in life and so I started just going to we had what are called Community hours where it was just myself a few other mentors and a bunch of young folks that um were typically court involved or or a returning Citizen and just trying to like give them these skills and then um we had the idea of starting a boot camp and uh our founder dve dmar said hey like you've been running these other boot camp programs could you do it for RC said yes and then for the past six years we've built a program that can help folks uh traditionally of color that have um particularly not completed a degree go from zero to employable as a soft engineer and we've been pretty successful at it we've helped hundreds of folks get jobs um and with starting salaries around $992,000 and for us that's huge because for each person we can get from those communities we're talking about millions and millions of dollars back into those communities over the lifespan of their career so started doing uh resilient coders that eventually led me to 100 devs and that's kind of the the Long Way Forward I want to dive a little more into because we're going to talk a lot about 100 devs but like uh Brazilian coders you you said uh court involved youth uh I'm I'm not familiar with term but like you know I have lots of friends who are like convicted felons and I'm not sure if that if that is essentially like people who early on in life uh get into trouble maybe because they actually did something wrong or maybe they were profiled in like the the very unequal justice system in the United States didn't do its job very well and and you know gave them much harsher penalty than that kid should probably have in many cases uh but uh is that like accurate is like yeah so we had a lot of individuals that we say court involved because exactly of the things that you brought up a lot of the folks that we were working with they didn't do anything wrong uh and they were just at the wrong place the wrong time um we did have folks that um had gone down a different path in life to do the things they needed to do provide for themselves and their families and so we wanted to give them a clear path forward to do the the thing with their loved ones and so we trying to get them skills just skills that they could put into practice to to to get to a point to where they had a a strong stable high growth career and and that's that's kind of the birth of RC and our our our Dirty Little Secret that um I guess some folks know is that the first dollars we ever took in were from the Boston Police Department uh because they saw our program as hey we're going to spend all this money on incarceration Rehabilitation um why not get ahead of it and they gave us some funding to help run our first boot camp yeah that's awesome well it sounds like it was money well spent uh given the uh impact you all have had over the past six years I think you said um so so you got resilient coders going you're teaching there um and there it sounds like you're having a big impact but was there a moment where you're like I can have an even bigger impact by leveraging the power of the internet like what was the process that and and maybe I can back up a second and just say what is 100 devs yeah sure uh so 100 devs is a collection of Engineers that help build a completely free live software engineering training program for anyone anywhere uh that was kind of our our Genesis now we're also building and we're going to be piloting this year a full service digital agency where real clients come to us to build products and get to tap into our amazing alumni that have gone on to work at some of the best tech companies in the world we're talking Amazon LinkedIn slack You Name It We have an alumni there they come back to work on these projects uh each Project's getting broken down in individual tasks and then as you're learning you're also building real code for real companies and getting paid actual money to do it um we mentioned early on that free isn't always free because it requires you to have an extreme privilege of time to work through all this material to give up your nights and weekends and we want to do something that helps soften the blow for folks that are going through our program so our program is entirely free uh every resource I have ever given out is always free I don't work with anybody that doesn't have a free version or something that we can have access to but we did a poll not too long ago that said hey we realize a lot of you uh care can't commit the time or the the take the time away from putting food on the table what would it what would it take for you to be able to focus and it was $200 a week was the was the average we can make that happen we can figure out a way to get folks those fund so that they can focus and get through a program like a 100 devs and yeah so now we're a global Community our Discord is 60,000 plus strong uh we have alumni all around the world and we're just trying to figure out a way uh for folks to be able to unlock a stable high growth career put food on the table support themselves and their family and their loved ones and luckily we found a lot of folks that believe in that idea and Mission to and we build a wonderful Community around it yeah and uh so the mechanics of the community like first of all it goes without saying that I'm in awe of what you all are accomplishing with hund devs and uh I've had so many positive interactions with people who are both like the free Cod Camp curriculum and in the 100 devs I guess you call it like a cohort or an intake or like basically a bunch of people working together through a set kind of like week to week um program and I you know free Cod camp we have experimented with like cohorted programs and like let's see if we can get all these people uh but what we found is like it's it's a lot of work to organize which I'm sure you're very aware of and like free COC philosophy is like let's just build the resources at scale put them out there yes lots of kids who are the you know the son or daughter of like software engineers in poo Alto are going to use free Cod camp and they're going to use it for free and they you know probably could have paid a bunch of money to have a computer science student like tutor them or something right but also a whole lot of kids who are in like a village in rural India or uh in like kind of like a failed State uh which a lot of people have smartphones and can't get on the internet even in places like Somalia right uh North Korea right people in North Korea use freeo Camp sometimes that's wild and uh essentially they can they can learn even though uh it would be normally prohibitively expensive for them to buy you know a $20 course on like a course website uh for example and and so like our philosophy is like we need to make sure that there is a baseline that everybody has access to comprehensive math programming computer science and English education um so that everybody regardless of their circumstances if they have time which not everybody does but if they have time or they can figure out techniques to like make time yeah to learn even a little each day then they can make steady forward progress toward the eventual goal of working as a software engineer right uh so so that is kind of like our philosophy is like let's just make tons of really high quality free stuff that's essentially subsidized by the community like the the people who are able to give the alumni um sometimes like we got a gift for $250,000 the other day from comp saw CEO of coma is a fan of free Cod camp and uses free Cod Camp to expand his JavaScript knowledge super chill dude uh you know we darl silver uh founder of thinkful uh kicked in $150,000 um and then of course we're getting grants from like you know Linux foundation and mongodb and Google and a lot of other organizations but a vast majority of our support comes directly from the community from people who donate so rec.org donate all right but but my point is oh yeah and thank you thank you for supporting our charity uh Le I didn't even realize I apologize um but maybe you're getting my my periodic donor uh email like I said yeah so um my point in all all this little tangent is to say that like free C Camp like we don't have the bandwidth to do things that don't scale and you are doing things that don't scale at all really like maybe you figured out some techniques to get like cohorts to scale and get like because I mean you mentioned your Discord has 60,000 people in it uh but like actually getting on stream and like teaching for like a marathon 3 five hours like however long you go it's really inspiring uh definitely catch some of the live streams if you can or I've watched I I watch everything at Double speed so I watch like the video on demand Stu like that but uh like I guess you saw from coming from the like intensive program where you're teaching folks like you saw the Merit of quality not just quantity or like I guess like cont like I'm not like doing things that don't scale really uh and and helping in people individually uh doesn't really scale but that's not necessarily the idea the idea is to give a whole lot of attention to a a smaller number of people and to really make sure that those people can ramp up to you know an impressive he said like uh what was the uh the figure you said was like the the median income of people who graduated um 92,000 yeah for cters yeah that's a lot more than I made at my first developer job given if this is in Boston like the cost of living might be higher but but I mean that's a that's a lot of freaking money for people that like I I imagine some of these people don't have University degrees I didn't even know that you hadn't completed your degree although dropping out of Yale is probably very different from dropping out of like you know rather University right yeah but uh sorry I've been talking for the last three minutes I'm just very excited about how you approach this and I I want to make sure our audience appreciates the I guess counterintuitiveness of what you've done uh and how you've been able like people weren't doing this because it was perhaps counterintuitive to do so and it was like probably very idea don't yeah so so like maybe you can talk about that like how you have to do stuff that doesn't scale and like ways that it doesn't scale and then ways like techniques you figured out to scale it a little bit sure yeah happy to I think the first thing though is just like Shout Out free code camp like you all laid the the foundation for so many folks to learn and one of the things I'm always hyping uh especially in 100 devs on our Discord is I think a lot of folks that go into this space don't put in the work to do the things that really matter the most and so one of the things I've always admired about free code Camp is like this commitment to filling the gaps and so realizing that most people don't have the privilege of speaking English so we're going to build a full like how do you speak English course right uh that's that's huge it's like very progressively thinking about what do our folks going through our program absolutely need and so um that's why I'm so happy that free code Camp exists it's why it's one of the first things I always recommend to new folks getting into Tech and why like I I think you all will continue to be so successful cuz it's just like this Relentless pursuit of making Tech more Equitable to everyone and so um that's why I said really early on in this conversation I look up to you so much and it's a lot of that ethos is what I've tried to bring to 100 devs um for 400 devs we got started during the pandemic and the pandemic hit and things got really bad really quickly so people always like to talk in Boston about at 2% unemployment rate but I knew just from looking at the actual data when you looked in our communities of color is already at 12% this is pre pandemic if you look during the pandemic it jumped from 12 to like 33% in some communities and so it got real bad real quick and I I just if you are already in Tech or if you already come from a privilege background I don't think people really understand what that means when right now like if you look at the most recent like labor data like the the median income come median median is 56,000 in the US and so if we have that percent of folks under it and we're seeing 33% unemployment and then labor data actually includes like eligible workers it just got real bad real quick and it continues to be a really rough situation from folks and so I'm not a doctor uh I didn't have like a skill that I thought that could be helpful to folks that were being affected by the pandemic but I had been teaching for a while and I knew that I could get folks uh skills to make them more employable and so 100 devs started as a way of getting 100 folks into software engineering jobs we're way beyond that now and I wanted to make a live cohort where we would meet twice a week on the internet and I really thought it would be like you said just a handful of folks maybe five 10 people um we did a pilot that was really successful our first cohort was about 300 people every single class that was successful we did another cohort that was like 3,000 people every single live every single class and so we kind of just built slowly we we we were able to kind of jump from Zer to 300 300 to 3,000 and we always joke that we're baddies we're like we're we're baddies writing bad code like it doesn't matter uh it's about getting the skills that we need it's about figuring out things on the Fly um and we just live up to being kind always to ourselves to others and as long as you're willing to say you know what we got to figure this out we got to figure out how do we do this at scale how do we have 3,000 people live in a class getting help and not feeling lost um we had to figure systems and ways of doing that and um building community that wanted to support that number of folks awesome what you said there first like I just want to call it that that particular Insight we're baddies writing bad code it doesn't matter so when I was a you know a teenager like uh really interested in like writing and reading lots of you know fiction and Jour like literary journalism and stuff like that um I I would always hang out at Denny's like till 2: amm just talking to random people and learning from them and just writing and stuff and uh one time like our our server he he was kind of a grizzled old looking dude like he would he would not look at a place in like a bullpen in a newspaper Newsroom if such thing even exist in 2024 but uh but his advice to me was I'll never never forget what he said he he said throw away your first million words and I was love that damn a million words that's like years of writing uh but just accept that it's gonna suck and the same thing with your your code projects and really the same with any Endeavor you you take like I've been trying to get better at Bass for the past three or four years and like takes me forever to record the bass intros for like I thought you like the one of the videos I watched you did it and then sat down so that's what I was I'm telling you that's what I was expecting for for today so I'm a little sad that I didn't get the bass intro live just for me but I didn't want to bother you with like watching me screwed up several times I love it but but yeah like like you just have to accept that the first few thousand hours you spend with an instrument or with like a programming language or with anything is going to be not ready for prime time uh you know my wife uh she grew up in China we met in grad school and she's now a US citizen we we brought her over and naturalized her after grad school after we got married we've been married 19 years and um she she loved playing piano right and one of the things that she says in China like people take piano extremely seriously and they have the saying in Chinese which is basically like you spend thousands of hours um behind the stage practicing for you know five minutes on the stage you know like that's just the nature of the game and with code like if you're writing some serious system that's going to like code that's going to be run millions of times right like if you're making an open source contribution to free Cod camps codebase and it's in the platform itself and this component is going to be rendered 50,000 times a day or something like that like it's it's okay that it took you a whole lot of work to get that like code into the shape and it's okay that it took a lot of practice and trial and error before you got the skills to be able to create that code that code just going to keep going right like you know uh when Elvis goes up on the stage and he's being filmed uh and he's playing I use Elvis because I love Elvis I'm sure he's overrated or whatever but he he's he's the man so I mean like that guy practiced like crazy that's definitely the same with uh for example like James Jamerson the greatest basist of all time basically uh or um you know like pretty much any musician they're going to practice just like crazy they're going to rehearse obsessively and they're not going to be satisfied but once that recording is made once that record is cut if you if you uh there's this great um documentary about fonus monk uh the jazz pianist right and he would only do like two takes and he he's just like after two takes whatever I do is going to be garbage I'm done like use one of those takes but how it got how he got so good that he could actually nail it in one or two takes was he practiced like a maniac and he spent so much time at the piano uh where a lot of you know uh I guess amateurs would would just be like good enough he was not content with that and so I feel the same way about like any undertaking but but like certainly with coding it may seem like coding is not like a synchronous performative event like where you're having to sit down and perform in that regard you can go and you can edit your code you can iterate on it the tools have gotten so much better like free C Camp every millisecond or two you're going to get the tests like telling you whether you met all the test conditions or whether you need to keep tweaking your code right so you have all these tools to iterate but at the end of the day like you should still try to approach it like a performance you'll get a lot better if you don't rely so much on the tools catching uh what you're doing but anyway I'm kind of going on a tangent but I just wanted to to Riff on like the Insight that it is we're all baddies yeah we're writing bad Cod it doesn't matter because you throw away your first million words you spend thousands of hours at the piano before you're playing anything that's worth anybody listening to right like you just have to accept that this is the nature of reality this is the nature of doing anything that's hard is it's going to be hard you're going to have to work hard and you have to just have that mental fortitude and and that's something that comes through in your your video is like it's so supportive like I love the way that you're just like it's all good like just this happens to everybody everybody has to go through this you know I always like to say like there some people may be like slightly better at programming like aptitude wise or or like they may have some intrinsic like Quirk that makes them marginally better at programming but those people were probably just forgotten how much time they spent at the keyboard when they were a kid if they were privileged enough to grow up with computers right like uh you know when you hear like Bill Gates talk about how like oh I don't actually like write out the code until I figured everything out in my head and then I said that's nonsense Bill Gates did not just sit down and like write basic from memory because he'd like been moving everything around his head people can't do that I don't believe that that maybe there are some people that have like some extreme form of like like like extreme brains they could do something like that but I don't believe that Bill Gates could do that sort of stuff I think he's just talking up the Mythos you know he he's trying to build up hype for himself and like it's this old kind of like Old School elitism uh that a lot of the early devs the Old Guard have and uh just just don't buy that hype is is all I want to say and and I want to thank you for like dispelling a lot of that whether you're intentionally dispelling it or not just telling people like coding is right like not not sugar coating it we call it the trough of Sorrow which actually comes from like startup worlds is one of the things there's this very classic graph of like um this like really big hill that you go up when you're really excited about something like I'm going to learn the code you buy a thousand Demi courses because buying stuff feels good even though you're not going to do them and you at the very top and then you start like day one of any actual coding program and then you just Plum it once you realize how long it's going to take and then you spend all that time going through the trough of sorrow and then the most like sick thing about this is that I shouldn't say that but the the most Twisted thing about this is at the very end there's an even further dip that you have to go through uh where you it's the and then you get into what we call the Wiggles of false hope so even after you've gone through you've learned everything you needed to learn you start actually interviewing to get the job and you're just getting rejected rejected rejected and so there's just this huge curve long trough of Sorrow uh that for a lot of folks takes years to get through then once you get to the end where you're like trying to actually get something out of it it gets even worse and then slowly slowly gets better so I think the big thing for what we do like you mentioned at 100 devs is just helping folks manage that frustration we kind of have like three key things that we just say every class almost manage your frustration be consistent and take care of yourself when you look at how adults learn the reason why adults kind of probably don't learn is as well as they think they could is because they don't manage that frustration piece when they looked at language fluency and like language acquisition they thought that we probably lost the ability to be fluent in our teenage years but they found that that probably isn't true it's just once you get out of those years your time is entirely your own and so would you rather do this thing that sucks for two years or would you actually uh sit down and do it and so if folks that can manage that frustration to actually be get through the things they want to do and so that's a big part and it's also why we're live uh when you look at other programs I love uh Dr M out of Harvard cs50 I love that cs50 is now on on free cam I've read every single article they've ever put out and one of the ones that are really interesting is they actually published all of their data for cs50 in the beginning uh which was really cool to read through and you you notice that they had like 150,000 people that signed up for like the they're up and they'll help you get back up right so you help one another so that that's kind of the genius of 100 Dev so maybe you can talk a little about the mechanics of it obviously you've got the Discord you've got the twice weekly um streams when classes in session so to speak uh and and they are high energy streams man I just have to compliment like the you got like the like all these sound effects like the cool astronaut background and stuff it's like watching uh like a gamer on Twitch like like watching somebody playing like you know csgo at a high level or something but it it's education right like and in my mind like you're pioneering kind of a new approach to education that is based off of like people are already familiar with like games and Anime and all these other cultural kind of touchstones and you're just like hey let's let's relate this to software engineering right and so you're doing a great job of that but maybe you can talk about in addition to the stream in addition to the Discord what are the other aspects of 100 devs what are the other uh instruments sure so we do a live cohort model we basically do a cohort a year and when that cohort is live we're live on Twitch twice a week uh for about three hours for a class we take about an hour to do review space repetition active recall is super important uh so we spend that first hour just like reviewing and then about two hours of something new we do that twice a week and then we have office hours on Sunday which is another stream typically on Twitch or on Discord um but it's just people asking questions and getting things answered outside of that there are so many other expectations and things that you're working on that's about 10 to 20 hours outside of that twice a week class networking all the things are going to actually move the needle for you to get a job our our our joke is that we're not really a coding program we're getting a job program and so all the things you have to be doing to get a job have to be happening when we're not live then for folks that can't participate in a live experience we have our lustrious catchup crew which is a group of folks that are working through the classes at maybe a little bit more of their own pace we have a lot of folks that are around the world that can't make that live time work for them so they get together they're on our Discord working through the classes together you'll often see like 20 people just in a voice Channel watching a class together um that they've just they've come together to do uh and so you can move through the material at your own pace uh when we're outside of a cohort like right now now we have we have our huddles twice a week and the huddles are just like a traditional standup we're just trying to move away from that I I think it's a slightly ableist term so we interest them as as huddles and yeah that makes sense I've never thought about stand up as an ableist term but it is a lot of people can't stand up and so we we'll have anywhere from like 500 to 700 people every huddle just asking questions sharing we call the the job hunt the hunt sharing what's happening on the hunt uh how while they are negotiating they'll come up live we'll help them negotiate offers they'll talk about uh an interview that W great or poorly and just by showing up to these huddles you're learning all these like it's so hard to go through life with everything that you're experiencing being the first time you've experienced it it doesn't have to be that way specifically with when you have a community that's also doing it so the huddles are our way to expose people to the realities of getting a job going and interviewing and and and actually seeing all this knowledge and so that when you're in that situation uh you can experience it too so we have the huddles twice a week and then we have a lot of independently generated Community things so um we have Banky brunch shout out Banky brunch which is a group of folks that come together to work through behavioral questions technical questions pretty much every single day uh we have groups that are working on projects our voice channels are always going and uh none of this works without community and a wonderful group of mods uh i' be remiss to not say Miriam dier Mayan wolf Claire uh these folks that like blah that make like all this work um and for free and volunteering so much of their life to like make this happen amazing yeah like free Co Camp similarly to draw parallels to our organization very Community Driven like we have tons of mods on the Forum on Discord we have open source contributors that are just dropping in and like fixing little bugs making sure that like our copy is as readable as possible to non-native English speakers making sure that like you it's a lot of contributor driven activity and it sounds like you've figured out a way to encourage a lot of people in your community Empower them with like you know you can delegate uh some degree of uh I guess authority to them so that they can go out and they can just experiment and build out different things one of the things that you said uh that I thought was really interesting uh I do want to talk about let's just talk about space repetition and active recall I believe are the terms sure uh Barbara Oakley teaches the how to learn course the most popular moo massive open online course ever other than maybe like cs50 which we were talking about earlier uh learning how to learn it's not just obvious how to learn there tactics right there there are phenomena uh in that are ingrained in the human brain from you know Evol tion from like the you know savanas of Africa basically that we carry with us today uh that that we can use if we know how to use them and one of them you mentioned is space repetition what what is space repetition yeah sure so I I guess kind of to set the stage real quick is that a lot of folks that attempt to learn how to code are not successful we know that we know the drop offs we know that that's just a reality and a lot of time those people feel like that it is them that it's a they they do not have the ability to learn how to codee they do not have there's something about them that would stop them from being successful as a software engineer and as someone that's worked with thousands of people like literally in the classroom my finger is on their keyboard I just know fundamentally my heart of hearts like a outside of a a cognitive impairment that's just not true and the thing that I found is it's just that most people don't know how to learn and it's it's almost criminal that our school system doesn't actually teach us how to learn that every textbook doesn't have some very fundamental things at the beginning uh that help you remember and learn this material so the difficult thing about software engineering is that it's a cumulative career the things you learn this week you're might need two years from now and so there are two like really fundamental learning techniques that Dr Barbara Oakley does walk through that I really it's my favorite one of my favorite courses of all time uh brings up uh where as humans we forget stuff very quickly so if I gave you a three-letter code this is called the evos curve it's it was a study of one it's somewhat been replicated since then but basically this person just tracked a new three-letter word a three-letter code every day and they found within the first like 30 minutes there was a 20% chance they just forgotten it the first 30 minutes so imagine trying to learn this really complicated coding stuff and within the first 3 minutes you're going to forget it then if you look at that forgetting curve by the end of the month there's an 80% chance that you have forgotten that very simple thing and so for a lot of folks that are going into coding education they just don't realize that the forgetting curve is very steep they they'll learn something a month later they've completely forgotten and they start back over and that's super frustrating so space repetition is using a tool that makes the material come back to you when you need it most and so uh a typical tool for this is anky or Anki however you want to call it that's like it means to commit to memory in Japanese aod exactly and so it is a flashcard tool that has an algorithm behind it so that surfaces the information when you need to see it so if you're doing good study habits which is a huge portion of what we teach at 100 devs it's just like how to study you're using this tool so that the things you learned about HTML you're not forgetting when we're talking about like mongod DP right and so that space repetition is going to help you remember stuff for the long call which is really important for a cumulative career but then the other thing that's even more important in my opinion than space repetition is something called active recall coding can be done through like video tutorials it can be done through text but it's a lot of information the process and most people just go through it that's not active learning they they feel maybe some sort of productivity from having watched tutorial or having read a blog post but they didn't actually engage with that material or learn and a lot of times like for me I teleport through information like if I'm reading a book I'll get through three paragraphs and I'm like what the heck just happened I feel like I've just teleported through that T through I haven't heard that expression but that's a good way to describe the phenomenon especially you know people who have like ADHD and stuff they may just be like halfway through a you know a book maybe I don't know like you just your mind wanders and uh if you're not constantly kind of trying to engage with it you won't necessarily retain so active recall is the way that that helps me as someone that does have ADHD like do this and so active recall is just recalling the things that you just learned or just read or just watched and for folks that do have attention issues I recommend doing that after each paragraph uh I recommend doing after each chapter end and you're just literally talking to yourself what did I I just read what did I just learn and you're saying it out loud the research behind it is really shocking like staggering differences uh you can learn something once actively recall it once and do better than somebody that reread it four times yeah like you can do a quarter of the effort and have better results just with this one technique and the fact that that's not like stamped in every single textbook ever made is is absurd yeah it it's I mean like we could talk all day about like the shortcomings of the US uh uh education syst like both both uh K through2 and HED and be completely clear there are a lot of very smart people who are working very hard to address a lot of these deficiencies but but the fact that we're having to explain what active recall and uh you know space repetition are when they are you know like time- tested phenomena that you can leverage so just a quick note about active recall this is one of the reasons why freeo Camp's entire curriculum is interactive it's because you have to Grapple with things otherwise it's just it could have just blown right past you right like y everything needs some sort of evaluation criteria some sort of comprehension check and if you're doing something that doesn't have comprehension check if there's not some right or wrong answer taking a moment to summarize what you just learned or relate it to something else you've learned think thinking about it just grappling with it that that can absolutely help cement those you know synapses right like what's the thing that connects synapse Axion not Axion dendrites I can't remember it is you probably know but uh but yeah like and it's something anybody can do like when I when I'm uh you know reading a news article or something like that right that's not interactive now with GPT or something I could throw I could throw it in GPT and say like hey come up with like a multiple choice question based off this article and I'll do that sometimes uh and not not just for like active recall but space repetition like write a bunch of notes and then review them a few days later or use a tool like eny that can systematically do that where you can like load a bunch of flash cards s a lot of learning platforms have spaced repetition just built into them if you go through the free Cod Camp curriculum it's designed in such a way that we're going to reintroduce Concepts over and over and you're going to be like oh yeah I kind of remember this from like a few hours ago you know it's like or a few days ago like but but we're intentionally trying to you know incorporate that and one of the things I think talking about the free codame curriculum let's talk about 100 devs and like what you all are and is it 100 devs or 100 devs I you say either 100 Dev I just I couldn't remember I say 100 devs 100 devs is shorter yeah it sounds more uh more like easy to say so yeah with 100 devs like what is the coursework that you're going through like are are you using mukes are you using open textbooks are you creating a lot of the stuff yourself how are you do yeah so I think there's like two important things one I really don't believe the content matters it's all the other like we're we're jobs program and I think I think one the biggest mistakes people make is like an over an investment and the idea that the thing like that the learning aspect and not all the other things that move the needle so we're very much two kind of tracks like we have all this other stuff we're doing outside of the learning and then the learning as well so the learning is is very simple um we do full stack JavaScript and I do a lot of like custom like I make all the lectures basically with the slides and all the the funny stuff that you mentioned on Twitch and we we move through that material together but a lot of a lot of it is supplementing with other things that I think are just the best free courses out there so in the beginning our students will use some free code cab um as they get a little bit further along they'll they'll use um some things maybe from Full stack open um that are trying to supplement the things that we're doing in the classroom and anytime that's we're doing something it's always a free resource it always has a free trial or not a trial like a free level of access yeah um and so we we give you the skills to be a full stack web devel developer we do some of the other kind of rounding out to give you the software engineering skill set um the tooling and things that you might use and then uh as you're getting ready to go on the hunt the data structures and algorithms you're going to need to be successful um but that's kind of like the coding stuff outside of that from the very beginning there's pretty stringent requirements in terms of like your networking so you are supposed to be getting three connections and two coffee chats every single week uh throughout program you're doing things that are going to be opening all these doors to help you get a job and um that's kind of another really I think that's where our curriculum shines is those things that are really helpful and impactful for helping you get a job we actually have a lot of folks that do other boot camps which we love like like I don't really care where you come from what you do as long as like you're getting to where you want to go and a lot of folks will join us just for like the how to get a job portion which I think we're pretty strong at awesome so it it's so interesting and important that you distinguish yourself as like a not a learn coding program but a Get a Job Program uh and I just want to emphasize like like even though we put a great deal of time and energy into our curriculum it's AB absolutely like if you took it like look at where all the donations we get and things like that go toward its instructional design platform development mainly for the Core Curriculum uh because for us it is important that there's a really good Core Curriculum but I'll be the first to tell you or I guess the second since Leon just said it getting a job as a developer is really three things in my humble opinion and and if you haven't read my free book that uh I published about a year ago uh learn to code and get a developer job literally the name of the book just Google that or go Google code book and I or learn to code book I think you you should find it pretty quickly um and by finding it and clicking on it and spending a lot of time on the page you help ensure that Google continues to recommend it to people um so uh skills are only one leg of the stool y network and reputation are the other two and I we've talked enough about skills let's jump into networking and building your reputation which are two things that are also instrumental to the hundred devs program yeah yeah like like what is the value of a network why is networking worth your time and energy when it's such an awkward you know thing to do yeah we we have um it's so we have like a lot of like in jokes and things like that that if like you're not part of the community it's kind of like weird to bring up but we refer to most people as clickers uh people that learn how to code and then they just click apply uh and clickers don't get jobs maybe every once in a while somebody gets lucky and they click on a button and they magically get a job but especially in this market clickers don't get jobs and so we do everything in our power to never click apply we want to make sure that we're talking to like real humans that can see our Humanity that can see our ability and our skills and the things that we can do um so that we're not just discarded by some AI ATS system and so from the very beginning of 100 devs we're tasking you with generalized networking and networking I think it's like a scary term that I don't think should be to me networking is just making friends and you want to do things in the beginning that get you comfortable with making friends and so you don't have to start networking by going to like your local python Meetup that's like super hardcore like no if you like Pokemon go play Pokemon at your your local league right or like if you like hiking go on a join like a hiking group and just like share passion with some others get comfortable talking to people and then eventually apply those skills that you learn to places where developers are more likely to hang out and turn those acquaintances into friends and then by the time you're ready to go on the job hunt you ultimately want hundreds of people that you've interacted with over the past year that you could go to and say Hey you saw me where I was here's where I'm at now who should I talk to I'm looking for a job and that's really successful for people so that's phase one of networking phase two is once you go on the hunt it's very targeted we call it building our Hit List where we identify the companies that are Act ly hiring we identify like three to five people at each of those companies and we're doing Outreach to um get in communication with those folks learn more and what we're finding is that a lot of jobs just don't get posted a lot of times folks will be applying for one job that they wind up getting a different one just because they like the person like right we we have this idea that like Tech is this like meritocracy where if you know the skills you get the job it's not it's like people want to work with people that they like they want to work with people that they know and trust and you can you can make that happen for yourself by really kind of going this networking your way in pathway so the term meritocracy is it was like actually like a joke because the author was like this doesn't exist this is absurd like it's who you know and like you're skill unless you're I mean even like the most demonstrably good pianists for example to talk about pianos we talked about it earlier like somebody saw you know um skill in them and like help them get obser you know enrolled in some Observatory or they had the time to play piano a lot with all the other kids who were working in the shoe factory you know in the you know Industrial Revolution or whatever right like like it takes so and everybody's circumstances are different so I just want to like put the bed because I've never talked about this on the podcast but we don't use the word meritocracy on here except to say that things aren't a meritocracy because they aren't it's ridiculous to think that they are uh the the person who came up with it I think in a book was like just joking about it um yeah yeah he he defined meritocracy as like I think effort and intelligence and how do you build intelligence through effort right some of it may be like you know endowed upon you uh but for most part we all work really hard I study you know foreign languages like an hour a day I play bass an hour a day you know and like I still suck at those things but sucking at something is the first step to being good at something right um so I also wanted this describe or like Define like an acronym uh ATS is uh applicant tracking system system yeah yeah when you apply through like a web form you're like applying into some algorithm that's going to be say okay we didn't ask if they have a college degree because it's hip to say that we don't look for people who have college degrees but in reality our system is going to just filter you out because you don't have a college degree we didn't put it on the thing but you know I I think I I heard some uh study that like uh it was a recent study like 700 job postings that didn't say they required a degree like zero people got those jobs for software engineering for those roles even though they didn't say because if you don't have a degree the ATS just simply filters you out no human ever even reviews right but like the way I got my first job as a do as a developer was through meetup.com going to like local Ruby developer Meetup and I got a job as a rails developer and the interview was very similar maybe you can describe the typical interview the hunter devs folks go through because it's not like Elite code whiteboard maybe for some of them but a lot of it is like hey I've already seen your projects I know you can code are you a good fit for our organization right it's about 5050 we're talking across hundreds of people that have gotten jobs that I've like literally seen right and people have come and talked about them during our huddles so we have a celebrations channel on our Discord where you can like go through and see hundreds of people their stories how they got the jobs what the interviews were like and so that's really powerful to know that but it's about 50/50 and it's when they when they do an interview we're talking about sometimes there's not going to be like Elite code style portion there's still going to be behavioral questions there's still going to be technical questions you're still going to be walking through a process project you might do some light like coding together but for about half the folks that have gotten jobs they haven't done like a leak code style question the other half you will and then there's varying degrees of it and so so many folks focus on like grinding out Le code until their eyes bleed and it's like yeah if you're going for Fang sure that needs to be the thing that you do but if you're going for a local health care company in your medium-sized city they're probably not going to know like like they're probably not going to go through and do that level of interviewing and so one of the things we always say is like don't go into your interviews like an accident always ask what you're about to walk into they'll tell you like almost every single time if you just say like hey like I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this application I would really appreciate just being fully prepared what am I about to walk into in this interview and they'll tell you oh you're just going to meet with so and so and talk through a project great now you know how to prep for That interview don't ever go into an interview if you don't know what you're about to walk into and so about half of our jobs have been not really needing some of those more aggressive skills but it's a huge smell test it's a sniff test uh we like to say every single person that starts off at 100 Dev smells there's something about you that's going to stop you from getting the job and it's your job to like figure out what it is get rid of the smell and make sure you come across as a cool confident professional that's done this been there and has ready to get to work and if you can do that you're going to be really successful getting jobs and even focus that want to go the other more traditional interviews with like the leak codes and things like that you're still passing a sniff test I have seen folks that I consider just amazing even done like competitive programming that do well in interviews and don't get the job and they wonder why and then you look at the resume and you look at how they present themselves and their narrative all that stuff matters it really matters you need to invest time in opening that those doors as well yeah absolutely and I just want to emphasize like if you can figure out what that smell is maybe it's that I don't have a degree and like I'm getting filtered out of ATS or or people are just not looking at me as a serious per like a serious candidate just based on that virtue you can absolutely correct for that and I have lots of friends like free C like lots of people on the free C Camp team dropped out of college or never even went to college right um and it's it's just one of those things where you have to figure out like and empathize with like the HR person or whoever you're talking to and figure out what it is they're they're sniffing for because usually they're just trying to figure out a way to quickly weed people out yeah so to speak so they don't have to inter right once you know like I don't know one of the things we try really hard at 100 devs is to like make sure you know all the like hacks and the secrets and like what's really happening and so recruiters are using some sort of like we said ATS some sort of filter you know what to add to your resume to get past those filters we use things like CV compiler which is like a website that'll tell you like what you're missing um we have like our own resume template that's like battle tested we follow like the true f-shaped pattern like if you watch recruiters with eye tracking there's a video that's going really popular it's done it again where you like watch the way they look they read left or right like most folks that read English they're looking for those specific keywords at the frontload of the f-shape pattern right so if you know these things you can you can get past these like screen segments and the other thing is people really need to work on how they talk about themselves people people go into the hunt too humble this is your this is like your one chance in life to talk your talk uh be proud of your previous experience I don't care what you've done having that pre PRI pre like previous experience makes you a badass and brings different skills to the table than someone that did a four-year CS has only ever worked in computer science like they're there're you're different and that difference can be a value ad to a lot of companies and so knowing how to craft that into a narrative like a logical reason from what you were doing to why you're the best software engineer they have in their candidate pool and being able to talk about yourself highly is super important so if you're listening what is your narrative what is your story why are you the coolest thing since sliced bread walking into that interview and that's what we do a lot during like our huddles and at 100 do we have whole nights where we just craft stories we'll have dozens of people come up they give us their their life history and we craft the narrative live and then you just see an instant difference in in how they're going through applications yeah and so first of all I would love if you can share the links to those uh the CV I'll pull up C compil like if you have resume template and like we we've talked a lot about um 100s and I feel like we could talk a whole lot more first of all I want to make sure you still have a few minutes finish I'm good to go for as long as you'll have me awesome well that's great news um the the main uh the main limiter is going to be the fact that I've drinken like literally like two liters of tea while I'm standing here talking with you so I may have to go to the bathroom at some point but what we um what I really want is just to tease out as many like high level insights that we can get into this podcast like like I just want to end on as many pieces of actionable advice as you can share as somebody who has become a developer worked as a software engineer who's even like built a successful project I guess three or two projects and then you're very actively high high up in resilient coders too which sounds like a really uh and I want to tease as many of those out of you as I can sure uh for the for the benefit of the audience and for the benefit of myself I've been furiously taking notes through this whole thing so some questions I have are um I guess what are some questions I should be asking what what are some interesting things that people never ask you that like are really helpful um that would be helpful for the many people out there learning the code well well okay what is a big mistake we can we can think about that maybe you can think of some other uh things but what is a big mistake that you see developers make other than you know over optimizing on their skills for example and and not enough on their Network or their reputation or figuring out how to empathize with recruiters and and I I don't mean like he buddies with them but like you always want to understand other people's perspectives there's no disadvantage to having more perspectives kind of compacted in your head being able to build with more verisimilitude models of other people and how they're approaching the world and what they're looking for how you can find the job that needs to be done and you can do it for that person right yeah I guess I'll I'll gear it towards folks that are like learning how to code and trying to get a job I think the biggest mistake outside of the things like not investing early in networking and um over investing in things that aren't going to really move the needle in terms of you getting a job is there's there's two things that I think lead to most folks not being successful and the number one thing is going into your day is like an accident if you're going into your days like an accident and you don't have a game plan for your day your week your month and you're trying to commit to a process that's going to take years you're not going to be successful and I've worked from with folks from all different walks of life the folks that make a plan for what they want like what do you want for yourself what do you want for your family what do you want for your loved ones like what do you want and then what are the steps you're going to take to get there that plan helps you get through the trough ofar it helps you get through through the the days where you don't have motivation when the discipline is is is is fleeting how do you stay true to like what you want and you should have it written down you should have it on your wall you should you should there's a reason why I have your photo as like the background of my wallpaper every once in a while is because I need to know what I'm shooting for and like what do I want like what do I want for myself what do I want for my community and like having that why go everyone that's that's trying to learn code needs to go on some long walks with no podcast no music no anything thing and just ask yourself what do I want like what's my future like what do I want for myself because until you have that it's really hard to to push through and so I have a lot of people that come and they they say they want it but they only kind of want it right there's like a very famous Dr Eric Thomas speech like they just kind of want it and until you really want it and that can come from a lot of different ways it can come from being hungry it can come from uh wanting the respect of your your family like it can come from a lot of different places but until you have that you're not going to you're not going to make it through um and yeah so having that hammered down and really having it visible putting it somewhere on the wall like knowing what it is and then every day before I go to bed I write out the three things I want to get done the next day once a month I what are my goals for the month once a year like not once a year every couple months like what am I trying to get done for the year and I I hold myself to it and the last piece I'll say about this is I get Buy in from the folks that matter most to me so it's not something internal to me like I know if I want to be successful in this I need to get the Buy in of my my wife right hey this is the thing I want to do it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take some nights and weekends away from us being together and and with our family and I I need you to understand why I'm doing it why it's important and can I have a little bit of your trust and I'll prove that to you over time that it's worthwhile investment but I need you to know like why I'm doing this and get that buy in um because you don't have that buy in especially if you're like stay still at home with family that doesn't get it if you're um not being as present with your loved ones there that that's going to build up some resentment and for a lot of folks that's another reason why they're not successful so yeah don't go into your days like an accident have a plan for your days know what your why is and get Buy in from the folks that matter most yeah that getting Buy in is so important because learning to codes a long long journey and you get all hyped up you get like these uh you know probably YouTube ads or um you know ads on the side of your coding tutorials learn to code in just three months and get a job paying like 200k and like you know whatever you know and to be fair there are plenty of developers who do learn to code very quickly and do get jobs uh I've had lots of friends who transitioned from working on Wall Street and they went to some expensive intensive coding program and they were able to then go get a job in Silicon Valley but they already had college degrees uh they already had you know like probably figured out how to plan uh they they probably had an understanding of like a lot of the you know learning techniques that we've been talking about and and most importantly they had a lot of money and they were able to just focus on it exclusively and and attend an intensive in-person boot camp like and and that era may have passed it may be that it's just a little harder now uh to to be able to get a job just because you should learn math right like it used to be back in the day you could just learn some WordPress and you could probably go get some clients doing WordPress work and it may be that case but with the global market and the level of competition you're going to get from places like India Nigeria China like tons of extremely educated extremely hungry people are coming from all these places and you know frankly they're going to eat your lunch if you're not putting in the time and effort Benjamin Franklin said few people plan to fail most people who fail fail the plan that's a paraphrase of what he said it's not exct no it's perfect yeah but but it is like 100% what Leon's saying here um and uh yeah so I just want to emphasize like getting Buy in from your family like when I learned a code again I don't want to make this all about me but like I told my wife like hey like I've got this job as a soft as a School director right and I would like to become a software engineer and we had doubled income we had insurance which is a huge deal here in the US uh through her work and so even if I left my job we we could continue to have health insurance and I just grinded every single day and I every I did precisely what you're talking about planning out okay what am I going to accomplish the next few days because planning is everything like it it's so important to have a plan and to stick to a plan and to have goals that are measurable and that are within your control that's another mistake I see a lot of people make is people will be like my goal is to get you know 100,000 YouTube subscribers this year or my goal is to get you know a job paying like n1,000 or or to get n freelance clients you know those are not things that you can directly control you can't control the outcome but you can control the input my my goal is to play base for an hour a day right or you know whatever goal I might have at a given moment uh yeah James James Clear of like Atomic habits has that very famous quote that I love so much that he says we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the levels of our systems and so this idea like we can have all these lofty goals but if you're not putting in the systems the how you're going to study uh play the Basse for an hour each day study your languages for an hour each day and and the process for that uh it's just not going to work out for you in the long run absolutely so we've talked a lot and of course you and I we grew up in the US you grew up in Philly I grew up in Oklahoma City um and you know here in the US even though things are not equal by aone shot it's very unequal Society we still have vestages of you know history yeah going back 400 years right like uh they warp uh the essentially The Haves and the Have Nots and um but in the US we're pretty well off compared to folks in a lot of countries uh for example like the hyper competition in places like India and China where you've got like so many people getting like CS degrees and trying to compete and so few employers or Nigeria where there are so many amazing developers like I think it's like the third or fourth largest community in free Cod Camp people that use free C Camp is Nigeria but if you look at Nigeria there aren't a lot of big employers and the government's kind of a mess and as a result there's not a lot of opportunity even though there's a lot of talent so a lot of those people have to move overseas to like Europe or to to the United States or wherever they can find opportunity right like a lot of the what is the proportion of people doing 100 devs who are outside of the US and uh how what have you observed about those people that that might be helpful for them uh yeah and and like just a followup questional tack on is like do they need to move to the US to be able to be successful in software engineering or are there other paths you've seen people succeed with yeah so I would say about half our community is from the US and about half is from everywhere else in fact the first jobs we ever got got were not from the US they were from Brazil then Poland UK and then a bunch of other places in South America uh and so a lot of our community and folks that have gotten jobs haven't been from the like us Centric and so the first thing I always say is whenever somebody from outside the US says I want to get a job I just tell them bluntly it's way harder don't let anyone convince you that it's going to be the same pathway as somebody from the US it's going to be a way more difficult journey and there's a very couple of like very key things that you have to keep in mind um one the Visa sponsorship ISS issue in the United States is wild it goes to a lottery most years right and so banking on that is like a pathway into an engineering career if you're from a area that doesn't have like that strong of a local Tech economy is very hard the competition for companies that hire remotely is brutal and it's even more brutal when you look at the companies that hire globally so a lot of people think oh I'll get a remote Tech job no even even though they're remote they only hire folks from the US or from a very specific select countries so finding a a group of folks that hire globally remotely uh that's a very narrow pool so the first thing I would recommend that you do is build a hit list of those companies there are list you can find online there are couple hundred of those companies you need to be best friends with everybody that works at that company and you mentioned building your reputation this is something I really recommend folks that are coming from from uh a location do to have a traditional Tech economy is your reputation matters a lot we talk about building authority a lot in 100 Dev so picking a niche or a topic that you know very very well generating content around it so when somebody thinks about I don't know authentication they think about you and the blog post you've written and the depth of knowledge that you can bring that way when you're applying to these Global remote companies you have something that nobody else really has this like intangible thing that helps set you apart and so the first thing I say it's harder building authority or reputation is super important and not going into your job search like an accident it's not going to happen if you don't have a very strong game plan and you're building the references and helping pass that sniff test that these companies are putting out there if you do those things you'll be successful we've helped hundreds of people in that situation get a job it's just a way more difficult pathway yeah and uh just on that note of like building authority like what are some of the most I guess immediate things someone can do like let's say you already have the skills let's say you've been coding for a long time and you just want to be able to get a job preferably at like a multinational company many of which are of course us-based um and you would love over the next five or 10 years to eventually get a visa and come to the US where salaries are like double what they are in Europe and and where we have a high degree of Freedom that people in other countries don't necessarily enjoy I mean it it is a good place to live like uh I like living in the us right I guess it's easier for me to say that it's like a middle class guy uh who speaks English natively and has US citizenship and doesn't have to deal with like my H1B you know being shifted around and like getting companies to sponsor me and all that stuff but like like I can definitely understand the appeal I can understand why so many people are trying you know to immigrate to the US every day but like what would be some uh practical ways that they can establish Authority as you said yeah so I think when you are trying to stand out amongst lots of other talented individuals doesn't have to be anything wild uh I really do think building a list of companies that are on your targeted range um and the H1B processes we I I've helped sponsor a lot of h-1bs like it's we could talk about like that's a whole other beast in of itself that's like you have to be of an exceptional talent you have to do these things to help you stand out like that's a whole other thing you're talking about like Global remote company like what can you do right now I'm thinking about somebody right now that wants to to to to get a a job my my process probably wouldn't be the H1B coming to the US right away it' be these like Global remote companies and then maybe expanding to companies that could sponsor um but a lot of times you're going to need more more credentials you're going to need like degrees might actually become a Thing If you're trying to go that sponsorship route um so I recommend right now if you're someone in Nigeria or India um looking at these Global hire in remote companies figuring out what they do building a list of them building a list of all the people that you know that work there adding them to a Twitter list right like each person add them to a Twitter list start engaging with their content just liking stuff at first don't be spamming don't be weird just like engaging with them liking their content congratulating them when they get a a new project built right like building that network of folks that know who you are over time like you become like an acquaintance like you can go from nobody to like they have no idea who you are to an acquaintance just by regular interaction on LinkedIn Twitter and it's there's a fine line between like being weird with it right we at 100 do we always joke it's not stalking it's networking and so you want to make sure that you're not like Crossing that line um and then starting to realize what these companies have trouble with right like you're you're engaging with these content you're seeing the things that they're doing are they having trouble implementing I don't know AI or llms great right that's the content you need to start generating build your Authority about how do they integrate these tools into their daily process you should have a Blog you should have um a YouTube you should have something where you're putting content out there you're getting feedback from them and from community of some sort to where you're building up that hey I I'm not just somebody that says I do this you can you can look at my content you can look at the things I'm doing uh you can look at the the things that I say I've done and be able to see that very clearly and also by doing that you're practicing how you talk about these things you're practicing um maybe if English is your second language you're getting more comfortable with these things that when it comes time the pass the sniff test you are because these people you've been engaging with for a year plus they've seen your content they know who you are they know what you're capable of that makes getting into these orgs a little bit easier absolutely 100% agreed uh based on my limited knowledge I I think it sounds like you have a lot more knowledge about that so what I would like to ask then is like let's flip this around employers who want to bring in more folks uh and and this can we can we can definitely start by talking about folks from overseas if you want Talent if you want to be able to tap that talent and you don't want to like go to some consultancy or something in some other country and say give me like 20 devs right go to infosis or whatever like you want to literally get the best talent from India or from Nigeria just by picking developer by developer yourself you're trying to build out your company or or you're a hiring manager and you're just trying to build a team you're you know like what strategies what advice would you give to those people so that they can actually find talented people and what should they be looking for yeah I think Partnerships are really great so we work with a lot of hiring Partners at resilient coders we've sent dozens of folks to Amazon through resilient coders we sent we have these very strong Partnerships with a lot of orgs that need a good solid pipeline of talent and so partnering with communities is a really good way to do that um if you came to RC res coders or you came to 100 devs and you said give me the best of the best I would talk to you I'd make sure that your job is doing all the things that it needs to be done to be do to be done equitably and if I felt that that was the case I would give you all the folks you would have a pipeline that was full for days of Highly qualified incredibly talented Talent um from wherever you needed them to be from or or or anywhere you'd want to support as well like we can make that happen and so I think think for folks that are looking for a good pipeline just working with communities so I would of course say working with myself you um I always think of uh Paris black Tech pipeline does this work really well where they're able to get you a very strong source of talent um from anywhere from entry level to super senior uh and so figuring out these different orgs that have a surplus of talented engineering Talent um could be a great way to build those those funnels for you yeah absolutely and then uh for organizations that just want to be more representative of the folks in their Community let's say like it's not necessarily remote but here in the US uh Los Angeles for example like there's a tech startup and they're looking for engineers what I guess General tips would you give to employers so that they can they can be inclusive and they can make sure that they're bringing on talent that actually represents the local population instead of just bringing in a bunch of you know Stanford GRS or something like that right yeah I I think it takes Champions within a company that actually care about these things of course you can read like the McKenzie reports a more diverse Workforce equals better outcomes right so a lot of companies know these things to be true but it takes someone on the inside that cares about building an equitable Workforce for this to actually happen especially when things like Dei and these initiatives are being contested in the courts a lot of companies are becoming a little bit more um shy around being ten toes down right and so I think if this is the case it really doesn't come from top down it comes from individuals looking around and saying you know what I live in a community that is 25% black and brown but only 1% of our Workforce is of color there's something fundamentally wrong here when we looked in Boston where I spent most of my career we had the second largest tech economy but double digit unemployment rates in our communities of color there's a there's a fundamental mismatch and so we had a group of individuals that realized that this is just woly inequitable and they would go to town they would go to fight the fight every single day to bring one person along than to bring two along and the thing is it can compound once you have folks in these positions of power you can turn around and help lift up more along with you so I don't think it needs to be like like a companywide thing I think anybody that's listening to this call has this ability to fight for what they know is right to turn around and say you know what I want want to make an equitable pathway in my company and I'm going to work really really hard for the next open rule for it to be someone that deserves to be here but might not have the opportunity yeah and that's a huge part of 100 devs like as far as I can tell from like listening to a lot of your episodes and stuff like instead of asking people to like necessarily donate to 100 FS or uh like you tell them send the elevator back down is is something you've said a few times like like try for every one of the 100 devs cohort members the the Learners they should try to find somebody else who's in Alum and bring them onto their company so they can kind of uh essentially be increasing the number of alumni within these organizations in the free software Community we have a word grus right it's not it's not free it's grus meaning that there's like no cost like there's no like monetary cost and so 100 devs is grce I mean there's no like money should no money should ever come out of your pocket I never want to see a dollar come out of your pocket for anything um there's no way that you can give us that dollar we don't want it but it's not free and the reason why it's not free is because we expect that when you get the job that you turn around and help three more get into the same position that you have whether it's helping answer questions whether it is literally helping people apply and get into the pipeline for your company the the expectation is that this community has in invested thousands and hours into your success and the thing that we ask is that you turn around and give a little bit of that time back and that's the reason why 100 death has been so successful is that we have folks that have made it to the the upper echelon that are now senior developers at the best tech companies in the world that are still giving up their time every single day on our Discord and our huddles to make sure that the next folks are successful that is a beautiful note to end on just the the the virtue of this organization that You' birthed into the world uh but let's not end quite yet because I want to ask what are the future initiatives what yeah does the next what what does 2024 the rest of 2024 maybe even 2025 2026 free we think literally a decade out like we're working on this computer science degree program that will take another six years to complete all the course workk for plus another five years to gather longitudinal data plus probably another five years to have the data AC you know approved by accreditor so we can get uh the degree program accredited free computer science uh bachelor's degree free which I was super on I don't I I was tweeting up a story I was telling everybody and their mom I was running and showing my wife like look this is this is this is the future like this is this is the thing that uh we need the most in the world right now and so I'm super happy that that's like on your your vision education wants to be free yeah exactly like this is it right like doing the work like and like we said earlier I I think free C Camp is amazing at identifying the real gaps like the things that people really need to be successful and filling them and having a community that's willing to step up and do that work to fill those gaps um so something I the reason why it's the best donation I make every single week it's the reason why um I always uh send folks to free code count because I know that they're in safe hands to like get the things they need done yeah um free isn't free for everyone right in terms of time and commitment a lot of folks that would be extremely successful at 100 devs right like the the the cliche line is that like um skill and talent is distributed opportunity is not right and so we have a lot of folks that are extremely talented that um could be phenomenal software Engineers but don't have the opportunity or the privilege of time they need to take that time they would be spending learning d driving for Uber doing door Dash they they need to take that time to put food on the table for their family and when we pulled our our our Collective we we saw that folks really only needed around $200 a week to like make this a viable pathway so our huge big goal is to build out an agency model where real companies come they have work that they need for us to to accomplish we have super season profession Professional Engineers that lead those projects and then we break those projects down into individual issues or tasks so that as you're learning you're also maybe picking up some of these tasks in a real code base like your skills become intensely practical and by the time you graduate or leave 100 devs you've built real projects for real companies with production level code and all the money that comes into the agency goes directly into those issues so that you're also getting a little bit of money coming in as you're working through it and we think that might make our program more Equitable for folks that just don't have that last little bit of privilege of free time and so like I said we talked about earlier we're a group of people that run head first into really big audacious goals sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't we're going to have a lot of mistakes a lot of things are going to go wrong but we're going to figure it out and our goal is that when we launch our next cohort uh we also have this agency model in place as well so that you're not only learning but getting this practical paid experience as well yeah that's so cool I mean that's like we're all about taking away excuses from people like and and like to be fair like a lot of excuses like if you have young kids or if you're taking care of your folks if you're working like three jobs to be able to pay exorbitant rent in your city you know like those are very reasonable reasons for not being able to spend a lot of time coding but if there are things you can do to remove some of those barriers uh to to make it easier for people to commit to an already arduous process of learning the code right and nobody anybody who says learning to code is easy is trying to tell you something like it is hard as heck it's getting easier every year it's we're not dealing with Punch Cards you know we're getting higher levels of abstraction it is becoming easier but it's not Star Trek easy where you just talk to the computer right uh eventually it will be but maybe in the 21th century the more immediate problem how helping people free up their time so they can actually learn I just want to commend you on this program like I love the idea of getting people out there doing real world work getting compensation through some sort of program where they can just I mean even $200 a week it sounds like it's going to be a huge Lifeline for a lot of these folks and free up a lot of time and energy um this is extremely exciting and I would be very excited to have you back on in the future catch up and like see what you learned from running this this new uh experiment that you're running this bold endeavor I'll let you know how it goes awesome man well it's been such a joy learning so much from you not just from this conversation but just you know following you on Twitter I'm going to add links to a lot of stuff that we' talked about in here I'm going to of course link to 100 devs and I just encourage people to learn more about the work of Leon learn more about uh 100 devs resilient coders these organizations that uh you know like resilient coders is a charity like Freo Camp 51 C3 and um you know like there are lots of Charities out there that are doing important work I'm going to try to like uh encourage people to do what we've done the two of us and yes you can create a startup and make a lot of money and you know life-changing money especially if you've got like family that are back in a home country that that need support right or if you have like any number of different there I will never give people a hard time about just wanting to make a whole lot of money but if you have the means if you are somebody who's midcareer and wants to do something in the charity space I hope that uh the accomplishments of Leon and and modestly free Co camp and the pro like modestly there's no mod that needs to to be had there yeah yeah I I I hope some of this will inspire you to also consider you know doing work in the public space right as a tax exempt public charity uh and and again I just want to commend the work you're doing Leon and um I hope everybody has learned a great deal I appreciate it thank you so much like I said this is a a dream come true uh you've inspired me so much throughout my entire journey into this and uh I know you do the same for so many other folks each and every single day so thank you for the work that you do and uh and our communities right that that help push this stuff through yeah and and to everybody in the hund devs community that's watching this uh hang in there keep it up man there we go man and woman uh you all are doing a long grueling process but you're helping one another and you know you're making friends along the way so um with that I I just want to thank everybody for tuning in until next week happy coding\n"