Eric Carlson is a self-employed software engineer at Cisco. In his early 20s, he worked his way up to manager at Canada’s busiest Domino’s Pizza. He eventually went to college and studied liberal arts, then worked as a teacher for two decades before teaching programming himself using FreeCodeCamp.
He landed his first developer job at age 45, using his programming skills to move into a more technical role at a large telecom company. And since then he’s moved down the stack, returning work and now de-ops.
Tips for Eric to share:
Teaching yourself programming while raising young children
Increasing your mental capacity so you can program for hours in one sitting
Learn how just in time so you don’t waste time chasing “shiny object” tools
Basically how to reinforce your studies by taking detailed notes on everything
Watch podcasts on the freecodecamp.org YouTube channel or listen on your favorite podcast app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8qoyrsvaw
Links we discuss during the show:
Links to Community News Intro:
FreeCodeCamp has just published a course on how to build your own MCP server with Python. Model context protocols are like APIs for server AI agents. Many developers are now building them to help agents interact with their website data more accurately. This course will teach you how to leverage the open source Fast MCP library to create a calculator project that agents can then directly interact with. (1 Hour YouTube Course):
Learn how to pass Google’s new Generative AI Leader Certification exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps test under the sun, and he teaches this course. It will provide you with a business-level understanding of Google Cloud’s general AI offerings. By the end of this course, with the help of Andrew’s practice material, you will be ready to sit the exam. (3 hour YouTube course):
Teach your apps how to learn. These comprehensive machine learning fundamentals will walk you through building systems well enough to create your own algorithms. You’ll use C++ to implement a preprocessor, which will then look at images of shapes and figure out ways to reliably label them. (Interactive Course):
Strix is ​​a relatively new open source tool for protecting your apps and identifying vulnerabilities. It’s basically an AI-powered white hat attacker that you let loose in your codebase. This tutorial will explain how it works and how you can use it to harden your apps against common exploits. (Read 15 minutes):
Learn fun facts about the environment and space while riding the space elevator. Did you know that the world’s fastest elevator moves at a speed of 42 miles per hour and even at that speed, it will take 80 minutes to reach space?
Song of the Week: 1980 progressive rock classic Don’t Be Late by legendary Canadian band Saga. The song features lightning-fast keyboard arpeggios that are very precise (and pre-date sequencers). And the clearest tunes ever. It is perfect for late night driving.