Caleb Garner is a software engineer working at a medical technology app company. He received a scholarship to play baseball at a state university, but a severe knee injury ended his career and he dropped out.
After moving back in with his parents and working in an optometry office, he decided to teach himself programming. He used FreeCodeCamp and 100 Devs to learn for free, and landed his first front-end developer job when he was just 19. He has since expanded his skills to work on large legacy Python and C# codebases.
We talk about:
How his big league baseball goals and his dream of becoming a doctor ended in that disastrous semester
His grind to land his first developer role after only 20 carefully researched job applications
Leaving before her marriage and losing all discipline in her job search
Tips for making your skills and your network more flexible
Links we discuss:
Watch the podcast on the free Kodicamp.org YouTube channel or on your favorite podcast app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM2T45QBIPI
Link to News Section:
Free CodeCamp has just published an in-depth Harvard course that will teach you SQL and relational databases. You will learn key concepts like CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete). You’ll also learn how to normalize data, join tables, and index your database for faster performance. Before working with PostgreSQL and SQL, you’ll use real-world datasets and write your queries in SQLLet. (11 hour YouTube course):
This advanced Python machine learning course will teach you the history of computer vision architectures. You will learn about design philosophies such as Lent, Alexant, Expression, and Vision Transformers. You’ll see side-by-side comparisons, and learn how they’ve evolved over the past few decades. (5 hour YouTube course):
FreeCodeCamp also published this handbook that will teach you all about JSON web tokens, which are the key to modern authentication and security. You learn their history and how they work through a series of helpful diagrams and code examples. (full length brochure):
Learn how developers are using the Compound Components design pattern to clean up their messy reactive code. You can code in house and refactor many components. This will help you solidify your understanding of this design pattern and tighten up the front-end logic on your projects. (Read 30 minutes):
These are just a few of the many open source learning resources that the Free CodeCamp community published this week. We have ridiculous speed right now. We are teaching more and more programming topics as well as world languages like Spanish and Chinese. If you’re looking for the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, well, we’re making it. Start supporting our charity and our mission today: