Interviewed by Quincy Larson today Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prominent streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a “snowboard bum” working odd jobs at ski resorts to make it easier for him to spend as much time on the mountain as possible.
At the age of 28, he taught himself PHP programming and started building websites for friends. In 2018 he launched himself programming on Twitch, which exploded during the pandemic and led to more opportunities as a dev and developer advocate.
We talk about:
How he learned programming at age 28 and built projects for friends before turning pro
How Learning Go Made You a Better Rust Developer and Why You Should Be a Polyglot Programmer
How Chris uses LLM tools but still builds most of the codebase manually.
Tips for creating public projects for those interested in stream coding
Watch the full podcast at freeCodeCamp.org YouTube Channel Or listen on your favorite podcast app.
Links to our conversation:
Community News Section:
freeCodeCamp has just published a comprehensive course that will walk you through the popular AI-powered development tool Claude Code. You will learn about Code Harnesses, Agentic Loops, Sandboxing, and other key concepts. By the end of the course you’ll be rotating a whole fleet of agents to help fix bugs and build new features. (12 Hour YouTube Course):
We also published a course on the Hugging Face tool ecosystem. You’ll learn how to combine your models, datasets, and deployment tools into a single, unified build pipeline. (7 hour YouTube course):
Learn how to secure your Kubernetes cluster. This in-depth tutorial begins by exploring real-world security breaches at major companies like Tesla, Shopify, and Capital One. It then tells you how to prevent each of these types of attacks by hardening your setup. (Read 1 hour):
Tell your Spanish-speaking friends: freeCodeCamp has just published a new Spanish language course on SQL and related databases. This includes tables, foreign keys, queries, data manipulation and more. (4 hour YouTube course):
Today’s Song of the Week is a 1988 song by Genesis sideproject Mike + the Mechanics: “Nobody’s Perfect”. If you love synths and guitar solos, you’ll love this song. Paul Young’s voice is incredible. And I love the edifying message behind the song. The video is as ’80s as they get: