Shadowing Practice: How to friction-max your learning with software engineer Jessica Rose [Podcast #216] - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Welcome back to the free code camp podcast.

I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of free code camp.

And today I'm interviewing Jessica Rose.

She's a developer and a teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla.

And she is launching a free online bootcamp this month called the bad website club before we hear from her.

I just want to give you some quick updates from the community.

Free code camp just published a new Python course that will teach you how to program your own aerial drone.

You don't actually need to own a drone because you're going to be using Pi Simverse for simulation.

And you can practice autonomous flight with that.

You'll learn the basics of drone components, 3D movement, and common computer vision tasks.

Then you'll learn about navigation, image capture, hand gesture control, autonomous following, and more.

This is a free two-hour course on the Freeco Camp YouTube channel.

We also published a massive course that teach you how to program NVIDIA's H100 GPUs using CUDA.

You'll learn about cutlass optimizations, multi-GPU scaling, and the primitives that developers use to train large language models.

This is a 24-hour course,

extremely comprehensive, and I wish I could also send each of you a free H100 to use, but FreeCookHamp just doesn't have the budget for that.

If you are able to get a hold the one you will be ready

and you'll certainly learn a lot from this course whether you have access to those expensive gpus

or not if you've ever wanted to build a video editor

or live streaming tool

that runs entirely in a browser this handbook is worth bookmarking

you'll see how web codecs api can give you low level

hardware accelerated control over video processing you'll learn key concepts like video frames codecs containers

and mux check it out link in the description And Kubernetes doesn't have built-in user databases.

Instead, it relies on a chain of authenticators.

This course will teach you how X509 client certificates work, why they're not ideal for human users in production,

and how to instead deploy your own self-hosted browser-based OpenID Connect login.

That's approximately a 30-minute read over on the FreeCodeCamp publication.

and this week's song of the week 1983's oblivious by scottish

new wave band aztec camera i got a link to it

in the description i love this song's django reinhardt style flamenco guitars the mischievous bass line

and the stereo percussion believe it

or not the front man roddy frame wrote this song

when he's 18 years old sang it and played its iconic guitar soul 18 years old you're going to love it.

I think you'll really enjoy it.

Support for this podcast comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our charity each month, join them and support our mission at donate.freecodecamp.org.

You can also pick up an awesome free code camp shirt and rep the community with pride.

Get the shirt for only $20 shipped anywhere in the U S shop.freecodecamp.org.

And now for my interview with Jessica Rose, we're going to talk about how the whole world is hard

and how embracing

that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better

thinker the bad website club a free online boot camp where people learn front-end development together

that starts this april

and why building silly little things is one of the best

things you can do as a learner jessica rose welcome to the freeco camp podcast oh gosh thank you

so much for having me it's a delight yeah uh you

and i have known one another for years at this point like i don't know like 10 years

or something like that

uh we've time is a round circle like keeps going huh

yeah well i wanted to start off by just asking you

know you were building websites before css was even out like

literally just using the raw html like uh what are some tools

that have come out over the years that have really excited you

and gotten your creative juices flowing oh gosh um that's such a good question

so i'm i kind of bandy myself around as tool agnostic.

So yeah, everybody gets excited when there's a new tool.

Some of the things I've been really, really delighted to see are sort of some innovations in how we handle data on the web.

So WASM was really exciting to see.

So hey, we can do non-JavaScript programming languages on the web.

But really, I'm a little bit, I've been doing web stuff for a long time.

And it means that more than being excited about a lot of the tooling, I'm also just a little bit tired.

Like there's just been a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

And like, I guess what was like the point at

which you went from being excited with each new like JavaScript framework or something like that to where you started.

Oh, the JavaScript framework.

So actually, in a positive and negative way, it was working with learners.

So working with folks who were coming to learn web skills for the first time, that really got me a little bit more,

a little bit cooler, a little bit more suspicious about, yeah, about the amount of tooling that gets dumped on people.

So back in the day, I'm guessing we're roughly the same age.

I might be a little bit older.

If you wanted to build a website, you had a bunch of different options for places

that would just do all of the hosting and all of the unspooling your website into existence.

And really all you needed was either a website builder, love it, or a little bit of HTML as you begin to learn and grow and expand.

And that's not true anymore, partially because we have so much power.

We can fully-fledged applications.

We can do so much more with the web.

But as I talk to more and more learners, I get to hear, oh, do I need to learn this?

Do I need to learn this?

And it gets to be really hard.

There's so much.

And I hope this isn't unkind, but part of what makes me a little bit tired is the relentless and confident tone of all of the hype.

Oh, are you not using so-and-so?

Everyone's.

And talking to learners who say, oh, do I need to learn this?

Do I need to learn this?

Do I need to learn this? and bringing this incredible list of things

that I hope no individual person building on the web or no individual developer would actually need.

But we keep getting told you need more, you need more, you need more.

And it's a bit relentless.

Yeah.

And you're very much a back to basics type person, which we're going to get into when we start talking about website club.

But like, has there been a tool that's come out where it's been kind of like the monkey paw, where like, I wish I could do X, Y, Z.

And then one of the fingers on the monkey pot curls.

And next thing you know, like, oh no, what have I unleashed?

Like a good example of that would be react completely kind of redid.

Like, of course we have a lot more power, but now you have to completely rethink how you write, you know, code for the front end and things like that.

And you have to put all these kind of ugly HTML, you know, components into JavaScript functions and things like that.

So actually, monkey paw is a really interesting way to say it

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because I described this as a monkey paw to appear just

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the other week where I was kind of thinking back to website builders on the early web.

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And these were, they're not beautiful, but they're really sort of drag and drop, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

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And we still have something really similar with some like sort of CRM's like WordPress

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where you don't need to have these coding skills to build these.

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Um, but I was bemoaning, oh gosh, I really wish these existed again.

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Like these kinds of, hey, you're building a semantic HTML website and here's just a way to help you do it.

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Um, and instead we've got sort of the LLM driven, um, I often call, um, LLM or machine generated text.

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And it feels very much like spicy auto complete where it's just a very opinionated, it will do it for you.

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And that's not quite what I was hoping for, but it does indeed make it easier to do something.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And we'll definitely talk about AI, but I get the sense that you're one of the people

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that is a little bit reluctant to just hand all human thought over to machines.

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And that said, you have been trying to work on projects that help improve AI,

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such as your crowdsourced open data sets that are used by AI toolmakers.

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Can you talk a little bit about that?

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Yeah, so I'm not a pure Luddite.

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I'm a selective Luddite.

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But for the last three years or so, I was working over at the Mozilla Foundation on, oh gosh, sorry, we've got cats pounding about the table.

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I was working over at the Mozilla Foundation on Common Voice, which is a set of multilingual data sets that folks use to build models,

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yeah, AI models, to make speech technologies work better for speakers of a range of different languages.

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So I'm not, oh, no, no, no, no AI ever.

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But for me, these big models and these big tools

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tend to have widely scraped the web and often in confirmed and lawsuit-driven ways, just stolen.

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So consent in where this data comes from is a really big thing for me.

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But at the same time, if I want to make something, engaging my critical thinking, like, hey, why am I doing this?

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How does this work?

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Building to understand things?

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Yeah, kind of seems like a lot of the whole point, at least for me.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I mean, if you just sat in math class and just use your calculator every time your teacher tried to teach them.

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Oh, I've got the answer right here.

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Uh, yeah.

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Okay, cool.

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Whatever.

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Teach, you know, like you wouldn't learn a lot, would you?

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Like if you had the, um, the, uh, glue, I'm probably dating myself.

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Do these still exist?

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If you had the teacher's version of your room of Graal Hill textbook and it had all the answers in the back.

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Yeah.

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Cool.

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You're not doing that sort of, um, uh, free recall to who, uh, what year did married, toddlers can die.

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Which is probably not something we need to know.

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Yeah, it's probably something you can look up.

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But with like a mathematical procedure, for example, like I help my kids with their math homework to the extent

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that I can with my limited recall high school math.

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And essentially, they are always having to stress over it.

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And there's like the hair pulling, there's the gnashing of teeth.

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And then finally, the breakthrough that comes with actually grappling with things.

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And you seem to be a big advocate of grappling with things and not just jumping straight to the answer, not just flipping to the,

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or I guess with the teacher's version of the book, you don't even need to flip to the back to look at the answers.

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They're just like in line, there's the answer, you know?

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So I'm really lucky these days I get to just work on projects I like, like at website club, and don't have to do too much I don't like,

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which is very spoiled.

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I understand how lucky I am.

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and this gives me enough space to say hey why am I doing this am I doing this action

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because I just need it done am I doing this action

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because I want to learn something am I doing this

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because I want to be proud of what I've finished yeah

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like having a human thumb on the scale it feels like

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something I want to do for almost all of my writing

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and coding I'm much more ferocious about it for around art and music as well.

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Yeah.

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Well, you're, as you said, you're in a really good position where you can work on things that are very exciting to you, but I want, I want to quote something,

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uh, that you said to me before the interview, uh, you said, uh, I was supposed to work multiple minimum wage jobs around the clock until I died,

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taking you back to your, your teenage years, grew up in, uh, the U S um,

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like what was your, what can you walk us through like that context in which that major life decision happened.

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Yeah.

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Where you kind of became you or you set out on the journey to become you as opposed to

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somebody who, um, yeah.

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So I, I didn't grow up in a great, um, uh, great family situation.

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Um, I was the only one of my siblings to, to make it to 40.

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Um, yeah, it wasn't a really great situation.

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And for me, I, a large part of this was, I just got lucky.

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I got because it was easier back then it was a little bit cheaper

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but still hard I went to university which was a big deal

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and that meant that I qualified for a program to work overseas

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and could qualify for a visa and just getting out of the situation I was

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so being far from home having the opportunity to go for professional jobs meant that later on where I said,

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hey, I used to build websites for fun when I was a weird little kid.

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Maybe I do want to go through and professionalize some of these skills and do this professionally.

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It seemed more possible and it had this sort of stable base that I could do that from.

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Yeah.

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And so you were able to go abroad.

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And my understanding is you were able to teach in Japan.

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Can you walk us through like that period of your life and like how that kind of just very quickly,

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like transitioned into more and more technical roles and leadership roles and things like that?

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So, yeah, it got really, really lucky.

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You wound up, there's a government program to teach in Japan and headed out there

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and wound up in Kyoto and then Osaka

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which I'm a big fan of Birmingham the UK city

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and I always say Osaka is sort of the Birmingham of Japan just great great places to be

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but wound up picking up a little bit of extra work after I finished the government contract

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so I did some technical writing and as part of that I was I was like, oh, cool.

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Programmers over here seem to get paid.

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Y'all get paid double what I do?

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Oh, that's nice.

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What do you do?

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You just, it's just different words, huh?

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Y'all are just building stuff with different words.

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It seems difficult, but maybe not impossible.

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And having that space and being further from a difficult situation meant that I had that space and time too.

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Hey, maybe I want to try this.

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And it worked out.

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I feel pretty lucky with the way it turned out.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Well, so you just went through a series of opportunities, you know, technical writing, and then you've been working with Mozilla on some of their open data sets.

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And then ultimately, a few years ago, you had a podcast, which was excellent, The Pursuit.

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Oh, gosh.

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Yeah.

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It was me being selfish.

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I just wanted to chat to more people.

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Yeah.

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Well, you had me on there.

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You had a lot of people that I listened to a lot of the episodes.

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Dawal Shah, of course, Class Central, creator, past Free Code Camp podcast guest.

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And at some point you just decided like, hey, I actually want to help more people learn programming.

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Can you walk us through that decision and how we ultimately arrived at iteration N of the bad works?

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I couldn't even tell you which iteration it is.

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So I'm going to ask everybody to come back with me to 2020.

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It was a lot, right?

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So there were lockdowns.

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Everybody was afraid of losing their job.

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A lot of people were out of work or furloughed in different areas, so temporary out of work.

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But there was weirdly a big tech hiring boom.

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And for a couple years before 2020, there had been sort of a boot camp boom as well.

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And some of these were actually, I think that there have been some legal cases

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that let me just say a lot of these were just scams

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so you would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for not amazing coursework

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and i was doing i've been doing these um sort of

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open one-to-one advice calls with folks for a couple years

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and during the lockdowns i was talking to more

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and more people who said hey what should i do i've just done this so-and-so boot camp

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and I owe them 40 grand and it's crushing me

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and looking at the curriculum and talking to these folks I was infuriated

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and you don't give yourself enough credit

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but actually it was a conversation with yourself

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and DeWalt Shaw from Class Central

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or it's like look we've got the curriculum why don't we build a boot camp

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so the extra delivery the extra support structures around it.

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And really the success metrics I was looking for was every single time somebody didn't pay for a scammy boot camp,

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it felt like stealing 10 or 20 or 30 grand away from sort of the worst possible people in tech.

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It was very spite driven and it was the best thing I've ever done.

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Yeah, well, free code camp.

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One of the reasons it's called free code camp is code

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camp was like a term used just for kind of like cohorted, like learning.

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And it predates the bootcamp phenomenon.

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But I really liked that, that vibe of people coming together and learning together and building together.

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And part of it was a reaction to what I thought were,

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you know, promising, over-promising, under-delivering on technical education.

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You're kinder than I am.

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Yeah.

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But so you created this program.

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Why is it called the Bad Website Club?

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Oh, so it wasn't at first.

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So for 2020, 2021.

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And the thing is, when we launched this, Class Central hosted us for the first two cohorts, first three, and they were amazing.

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And they continue to be amazing.

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So much nice things to say about them.

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and we were just the the free code camp boot camp i think um

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and later after we broke off and started doing our own thing um

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and started working with carmen um what we started thinking about was what kind of tone we wanted to approach

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so i don't know if you've been outside recently

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but the whole world is hard like everything's stressful making rent

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is hard your boss is yelling at you all the time

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relationships are hard now you have to take care of all kinds of personal data on on the web

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that you never had to think about like everything in the world feels like it's getting harder

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and harder and these technical skills

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that we're asking people to learn with us they're hard too

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so we wanted to say the bad website club not

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because we're teaching you incorrect skills but

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because we just want to take this time when we're learning together and not worry about perfection let's make a bad website, let's make 10 bad websites.

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Let's have a silly, soft little time and experiment.

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And then after we've made beautiful, messy things and learned, we can go ahead and professionalize that

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and get good and become a good website developer

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or a good developer later on after we've sort of had an easy time together.

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Yeah.

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So essentially just like accepting that the initial process is going to be messy and not having any pretensions of like,

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oh, I'm going to be making insanely great websites like right off the bat, but by just acknowledging that, you know, before you can be good, you have to be mediocre.

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And the being mediocre kind of gets you a little bit of flexibility to actually learn.

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Um, I love tech.

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I love the things people wear.

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I especially love the web, but there's a lot of,

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I'm going to teach you to become the best JavaScript developer in the world in 18 weeks or 60 in six weeks.

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and you just need to follow my system and buy my ebook and no, no, no, like we're not selling anything and we're going to have a messy time together and it's going to be fine.

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Yeah.

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And one of the things that people may not be aware of is this is a completely free program.

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There's no credit card sign up.

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You basically just join the cohort and you start learning and can you walk through what people can expect joining that website?

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Oh yeah.

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So the other thing I'd also say is like there is

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an email list to get sort of weekly lessons you can hang out with us on discord

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but there's also zero obligation to sign up for anything you never have to sign up sign in

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so what we do is we take thank you very much

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Quincy the free code camp we're looking at this cohort we're gonna be learning on the responsive web design curriculum

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and we're working from that curriculum together

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and what we've done is we've added a shared schedule

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so hey here's a shared pace we're going to keep each

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other accountable a community of other learners going through the same thing at the same time

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but also live streamed lessons Monday to Friday

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so hey during the week we're not going to show you

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how to do everything we're not going to do it for you

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but we are hey here's an especially weird concept

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or hey let's talk through what a variable really means

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and the thing I really wanted to make sure we had is question answer.

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So even today, like you still get stuck working on technical stuff, right?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Same, same.

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And I always say to learners that the things you can do when you get stuck are you can look it up,

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you can ask someone, or you can experiment and get weird.

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So hey, does this work?

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Does this work?

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And just being able to unblock folks by letting them ask a question

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and work through that question in real time and show them what we're working on

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is really one of my favorite things about it yeah

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and the experience of asking a human being is very different

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from just asking you know like free co-camp early on we

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had read search ask was uh the kind of uh the rubric

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or the the sequence the idea is it's much easier to like read the error read the exception,

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read whatever is in the documentation, then search around and try to find additional supplemental information, which will probably lead you to like Stack Overflow,

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Free Code Camp Forum, places like that.

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And then asking was like, if you do it in that sequence, you're being the most respectful of somebody else's time, but you don't have to respect an LLM's time.

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In theory, you could just go right in and skip those first two

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and just go ask your question to get a quick and easy answer, right?

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But, like, what is the merit in asking an actual human dev who actually understands things as opposed to,

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you know, an LLM that doesn't really understand anything in the sense that, like, it has never actually, you know, sat in the room and,

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like, banged its head against the keyboard trying to get, like, something to work, right?

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It just has the answer because it's read all the answers and can synthesize an answer from those.

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What's the merit in asking questions?

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Because you really emphasize there when you were talking about the Bad Website Club, that the question and answer is a very important part of the experience.

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Yeah.

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So in order to talk a little bit about why I enjoy working with people instead of working with LLMs on learning,

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talking a little bit about how these LLMs work in a very abstracted way might be helpful.

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So these LLMs are models and they get fed a data set of things they've seen.

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usually for these big tools it means mass scraping the web

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and getting people's copyrighted material that they didn't consent for but

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if i said hey quincy i'm going to go

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and look at everything on the internet

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and i'm going to give you back sort of an amalgamation

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of things from this topic yeah um not everything on the internet is right

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and not everything on the internet is reasonable right there's a lot of 4chan mixed in

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and stuff like that the fact

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that this is considered like the the there's a lot of training data

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that i would not necessarily consider great training data

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mixed into these tools um but like that advice is hoovered up with the same

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confidence and regurgitated with the same confidence but it also means

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that like these these llms are so confident where they're

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and they're not always right and not only they're not always right

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but the way they're delivering the learning the learning the way

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they're delivering information isn't yeah we still have quite a lot

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of information that's being uh research that's being done right now

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but we're not seeing any of the promised games in ai learning so there was just this Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon.

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I'll try and find that and chunk it to you in the show notes.

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We can include a link to the study.

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To the study.

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There's the Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon one recently, I think, a reasonably small sample size, maybe 400 people.

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And they found that the folks who were the more AI skeptical, who didn't turn to these tools as quickly, were engaging their critical thinking more,

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that not just having this given to you.

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Yeah.

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Well, I want to move on to another question I have about the bad website club

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and because I imagine you encounter a lot of people who are, I'm not sure if this is for me, they're intimidated.

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Uh, they don't necessarily want to like join a community of like strangers online who are building their skills

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and they're going to come up with a lot of excuses to preserve their own personal energy.

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Uh, maybe they, uh, identify as like introverted

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and there's just like it's really taxing for me to put myself out there

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and talk with people like can i just you know be heads down on my computer

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and do this myself

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and not have to talk to other people like what are some of the excuses

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that you think people might have in mind

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that would essentially they'd use to talk themselves out of debating

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and something like bad website click um

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so the big thing i'd add is this isn't the best

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fit for everybody the whole point behind me being free and there's no sign up is folks can come along and say, oh, is this for me?

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I don't get a lot of value out of the lessons.

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Oh, I'm going to come along to just the guest session.

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Oh, that doesn't work for me.

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Oh, I'm just going to come along to some of the show and tell.

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So really the ability to say, cool, not all of the things that the bootcamp offers is going to work for everybody.

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And if somebody says, oh, I'm not very outgoing.

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I don't like to get into these discussions.

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Folks can go ahead and just take the pieces they want.

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I'm careful about excuses as the term.

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Some of the concerns, sorry, I'm real soft-hearted.

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Some of the concerns I've heard folks say in the past are, this is really hard.

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These technical skills are, because a lot of the folks in tech are like, this is hardcore.

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We're the smartest people in the room.

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So really a lot of it is, am I good enough?

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Am I smart enough?

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Can I keep up? And the things

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that I always kind of bring back is the way we've

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paced this bootcamp is we're going to start on April 24th with a little kickoff party.

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We'll have a lesson stream Monday to Friday all the way through until July 3rd.

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But all of the material you're working on is within Free Code camp.

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If you go ahead and join and you get sick or you hurt or you're tired and you need to stop, that progress doesn't go away.

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There's no pass or fail.

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I mean, the only way to fail is to stop and not come back.

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But one thing I'm really, really proud of is a lot of our learners from the first cohort came back and finished on the third.

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Like the ability to say, cool, this is just a really, really laid back community.

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There are deadlines that we're working on this this day, but we don't expect everybody to have everything finished on July 3rd.

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That's a lot of stuff to do.

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The big thing I'd try and say to anybody who's concerned

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that this might be too hard or too much is websites are, like the web, is hard.

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There are a lot of really advanced technical skills you can get to in time.

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But all we're going to do in this boot camp is learn some of the really important foundational technology.

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We're going to learn some of the core concepts.

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And what I really like about the web is you're getting the opportunity to paint with light and pixels.

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We're just going to make some silly little things for the web.

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Come and see if you like it.

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And if you don't, not even a big deal.

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yeah let's paint with light and pixels um let's make some silly little things love it

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so you're a volunteer you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart i want

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that to be abundantly clear to everybody here

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and you are not alone you've got a couple other volunteers

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that work alongside you right you i was just about to interrupt to big them up and i really appreciate it.

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So since 2021, 2022, she's going to get me.

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I've forgotten this.

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I've been working with Carmen on this and she is a much better programmer than I am.

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So she does a ton of JavaScript stuff, a ton of like Windows applications.

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She's been doing this for a little bit of time as well.

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So she's just done all of it and she's fantastic.

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She's much, much chiller than I am as well.

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So she's been teaching, we've been teaching together this whole time.

423

And we've got a brand new instructor joining us this year, who's Etta.

424

And Etta was actually a student in our very first cohort in 2020.

425

So she's my favorite, not my favorite, not my favorite, I don't have favorites.

426

She's a fantastic example of, hey, we're going to just experiment with the basics first and give you a foundation to continue to learn.

427

So she's gone on and she does quite a bit of programming in Rust these days, which is possibly a bit beyond my own skill set.

428

So she builds really interesting things and she explains them in ways that are very accessible.

429

But she's just gone on to continue to do a ton of open source work, a ton of freelance work as a dev,

430

and it's been really delightful to see her grow and to see her come back and join us as an instructor.

431

Yeah, that's so cool that the teacher becomes the student.

432

Right, right.

433

And she's unnecessarily modest.

434

I promised I wouldn't embarrass her.

435

So I will save it for the streams.

436

Yeah, and I meant to say student becomes the teacher.

437

I think that's like, yeah, in the Kung Fu movies and stuff.

438

You watch a lot of old 70s Kung Fu movies.

439

That's always like a recurring theme.

440

So there's a lot of hype right now around just basically having machines write a lot of code for you.

441

How would you justify to somebody that is like, are these skills, these basic kind of primitives of web development,

442

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like how much more mileage are we going to get out of these?

443

Like, does any of this really matter?

444

Because I'm sure a lot of people are hearing, you know, the AI hype people who often have,

445

you know, multi-billion dollar vested interests in people just letting go and letting machines do all the work.

446

Like, what would your pitch to someone who is maybe on

447

the fence about whether they really even need to learn this stuff anymore?

448

Because they keep hearing, oh, you don't need to learn to code anymore.

449

You don't even need to bother learning computer science anymore.

450

I've got a direct quote from Jensen Huang, the founder of NVIDIA that I'm going to read to you.

451

And you can react directly to that if you'd like.

452

Does that sound cool?

453

Yeah.

454

All right.

455

So the quote is, almost everyone says, it's vital that your children learn computer science.

456

Everybody should learn how to program.

457

And in fact, it's almost exactly the opposite.

458

That's a direct quote.

459

So I think it's a very interesting thing

460

that a bunch of folks who work in these toolmakers and a bunch of folks that work in, that run tech companies are saying,

461

no, no, no, don't worry about it.

462

Development jobs, which have traditionally been, we think of them being especially high paid,

463

but really development jobs, when we look at sort of the productivity, they haven't had that fall off in the 70s

464

that a lot of other other jobs have had

465

so they've sort of continued to grow salary wise with what

466

we would have wanted to see all jobs continue to grow with in in the u.s

467

and western europe um i i try never to take advice from my ideological opponents

468

so here we've got folks who are saying, do you know what?

469

For a long time, I've had to pay these stuck-up developers quite a bit of money, but no, no, no, this tooling, this tooling is magical, and this will replace those very,

470

very finicky, very expensive developers.

471

That doesn't seem supported with the code I'm seeing turned out by a lot of the tooling.

472

But also, these tools are fantastic, and props, at building small standalone prototypes.

473

You want want to build a complex system, you're going to need software engineers systems thinking.

474

Folks were telling you, don't worry about it.

475

Don't bother building expertise.

476

What a deeply suspect piece of advice.

477

Yeah.

478

I mean, it does seem like, okay, you know, the scouts motto here in the US, be prepared, you know, like,

479

why not learn how things work you know life is long is what i like to tell people like people if you're

480

if you're only like you know 18 you're listening to this like it may not feel like life is

481

that long but believe me you're like less than a fourth of the way through your natural life assuming

482

that you're lucky right um you're gonna have plenty of time to actually learn these skills

483

and i will say like anecdotally i do a lot of development with ai assistance

484

and like the whole free coaching team we use AI assistance for building things.

485

And it is only because we are software engineers that know what we're doing, that we can steer these kind of dumb models to like actually do productive things for us,

486

and that we can QA it.

487

And I do think that people who don't understand how or why of things are going to struggle with these tools.

488

So, I mean, that would be my quick take to kind of reflect on what you said.

489

And you've also said something that I'm going to quote directly.

490

Any new novel creative code will still need to be written by people.

491

Why is that?

492

Oh, so the way these work, the sort of collecting a data set, building a model, using a tokenizer to spit out the output.

493

So data set, build a model on the data set.

494

And then you ask the model a query, and then it's going to sort of use a fancy sort of tokenizer,

495

a weird parser to give you the answer based on what's seen in its dataset.

496

It, I often think of them kind of as Huel,

497

so, or, um, SlimFast, they're the same thing.

498

Yeah.

499

So for people who don't know what that is, basically like liquid diet type stuff that in theory, like all the nutrients you need,

500

and maybe even has some drugs in it to make you feel full, but you're just drinking it like a shake.

501

So the output of these models are just sort of a mixed up, very mid slurry of what it's seen in its dataset.

502

The ability to make something new, the ability to make something they hasn't seen, the ability to make something creative.

503

Like if you've got, and admittedly, these models are very complex.

504

These are very, very interesting bits of text.

505

But what they're doing is they're spitting out copies of what they've seen.

506

There's no, yeah.

507

Yeah, so by virtue of them, they're not going to recombine a bunch of existing knowledge into something that's truly novel and interesting.

508

Would be like your assertion there.

509

There's not the opportunity to combine like you can't blend a bunch of different types of food

510

and wind up with a brand new beautiful creation of a

511

recipe you're just going to wind up with a different kind of slurry

512

and it might work but I think the question here is

513

if you have a boss where they just want this done and the LLM model does this.

514

Yeah, it might be want to be what you do.

515

If you want to build something beautiful or meaningful or silly or technically complex or weird.

516

Yeah, I don't.

517

I don't think they do weird especially well.

518

Yeah.

519

Another question that a lot of people are going to have.

520

And this is a question I answer a lot.

521

But I want to hear your answer to it.

522

Why should I use any textbooks or any courses or anything like that

523

when the LLM has read all these things in theory it's

524

representing the training data why don't I just ask a bunch of questions the LLM isn't

525

that faster wow so um I I just I gave a talk in February

526

that sounds about right um actually with Edda I was quite proud talking about um AI is forgetting machines

527

so how to continue to learn and continue to build stuff and in an era of just spitting out the answer.

528

And that's really the challenge, isn't it?

529

That there, so I really recommend Barbara Oakley is a neuroscientist who works in sort of the space of how we learn.

530

She's got some books and courses, just fantastic.

531

And usually comes to as a guest speaker to our bootcamp as well.

532

And she talks a lot about the sort of diffuse

533

and focused thinking patterns that you need sort of build learning and like journey through the neurons in our brain,

534

which is quite interesting, but also talks a bit about the friction we need.

535

So if you were just getting the answers all the time,

536

and especially getting the answers all the time from a model that is very confidently and very,

537

like they praise a lot, right?

538

Like they're very incorrect a lot of the time, and they're very incorrect in a very confident way.

539

And they'll tell you how smart you are while they're lying to you.

540

So Quincy, here's the incorrect answer.

541

That was such a good question.

542

Good job.

543

Isn't always the best way to learn.

544

One thing that you said earlier, the whole world is hard.

545

Things are getting harder.

546

And yet you're telling people, Hey, do even harder things like do things the hard way

547

like even as the world's getting harder around them why not save your energy

548

and just like kind of like hunker down

549

and you know to survive this storm and like for a bunch of folks

550

if you do not have the energy to learn a big new thing

551

that is completely fine like if just showing up

552

and getting through the day absolutely respect that

553

but for some of the same reasons people like woodworking

554

or pottery I've just started getting into book binding

555

and it is it is a real hard way to wind

556

up with a book it is much much easier to go to the shop

557

and get a little off the shelf blank notebook

558

but the idea of hey here's a new set of skills yes these are skills

559

that when you bring them up into higher levels of expertise they're still really valuable

560

but the opportunity to slow down learn something

561

and in a really low stakes way no one's going to

562

yell at you you're not going to get in trouble the way to slow down

563

and build something there was this um sort of software craftsmanship movement a while back

564

and it sounded um at the the time to me a

565

bit a bit sort of um it sounded a bit old-fashioned

566

we're gonna slow down we're gonna consider this a craft yeah

567

and in my ceaselessly advancing age hey let's slow down let's

568

understand this let's learn it together let's have a low-key silly little time yeah even if it's just me learning with me,

569

I'm going to have a really nice time.

570

Yeah.

571

I mean, when I'm trying to learn something, I intentionally slow down and like, I want to jump to this conclusion.

572

I went a little bit, let's, let's slow down and let's like learn more.

573

And it's hard because you have that extrinsic pressure, like, Oh, you know, like time is money,

574

like the rents do, or, um, you know, people are waiting on me or like, I could be doing anything in the world right now.

575

And I'm sitting here

576

reading this book in the library like what am I doing you know like like there are all these voices

577

that this entire course in your mind that you have to like quiet down if you want to slow down

578

and and really focus and be in the moment um is that your experience and like how do you

579

cope with like the competing priorities and doubt that you feel

580

so one thing one sort of big constant in my life is I'm lightly but persistently annoyed when we take

581

systemic problems and put them on an individual side oh it's your fault

582

and it's your fault you're broke it's your fault you're having

583

a hard time getting to work in a city with bad transport it's I think it's not a coincidence

584

that that the way we live right now, we're beset by time pressures, notifications.

585

We've got people teaching about, writing about how to make applications more addictive, how to make platforms stickier,

586

which is sort of the tech term for more addictive.

587

Yeah, I mean, one of the books that was really seminal back in like 2012, 2013, when I was like,

588

you know, building Free Code Camp and kind of thinking about it was called Hooked.

589

And it was literally about like, kind of like Skinner Box type reward, like hijacking people's reward center, because that's how you get engagement.

590

And that's how you get your multi-billion dollar exit.

591

Yeah.

592

So with you saying, I could be doing anything in the world, and I'm here in the library reading this book,

593

I often think of this as an incredible type of luxury.

594

You could be doing whatever you want.

595

But for a lot of us, a lot of the time that, And I include myself.

596

That might be looking at my phone.

597

That might be worrying.

598

That might be doom scrolling.

599

I can't tell other folks.

600

I shouldn't tell other folks how to live.

601

But one thing that I've started slowly introducing into my life is less phone.

602

And please find me on social media.

603

See me after class.

604

I've got very concrete structures around this because they're addictive.

605

They're intentionally addictive.

606

but less screen time, less phone when you can and

607

when you can afford it and more time in this glorious luxury of I'm interested in.

608

And it might not be web development.

609

It might be right now I'm really into reading about the sociology of conspiracy theories

610

and how the underlying factors with which people form groups

611

and start to believe in sometimes weird sometimes harmful things

612

but that's such a luxury to say I'm gonna go read some academic papers instead of doing another email

613

if folks have the time and

614

if something they might want to learn is building websites for

615

and not just for work I want to build a website

616

to show you pictures my cat I want to ship build website for my sister's salon.

617

I want to build a website for recipes.

618

I want to build a website for art.

619

If you, yeah, if there's folks out there who might want to spend their very, very precious time learning with us, gosh, what an honor, what a joy.

620

Yeah, and one of the things you're hitting on there is like building websites is a form of expression.

621

Not every website has to be some utilitarian

622

like let's convert this widget into this widget

623

or let's uh convey this very specific piece of information

624

or let's get people to whip out their credit card

625

and pay for this thing

626

that they didn't know they needed you know um there there's a lot of exciting weirdness on the web uh

627

and a lot of beauty

628

and you can find a lot of those projects a lot of them unfortunately have been kind of like centralized, but there was always like centralized, like, you know, geo spaces.

629

Yeah.

630

Geo cities.

631

What was there?

632

There were like a Neil pets where you could like customize.

633

You used to be able to customize your, uh, my space page.

634

You could do a lot of that kind of personal expression.

635

You can look for that sort of stuff coming to free code camp soon, by the way.

636

I love how, like, as you were saying these things, different generations of people whose back hurts were going, yeah, yeah.

637

At different points.

638

one of the reads

639

that I have about bad website club is people are going to get in there and they're going to learn a lot.

640

And it's going to be like a creative kind of low pressure environment where they can express themselves

641

and they'll learn the tools and the techniques to further express themselves.

642

And one of the things that like, I would observe about these core, you know, primordial tools that you're using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like these.

643

They've been around since the very early days of the web, basically.

644

Like you learned HTML before CSS was out, but the CSS has been around for, I don't know, like 30, 35 years at this point.

645

I don't know.

646

Like a long time, 30 years probably.

647

I don't know.

648

CSS first release.

649

But, yeah, they're not going anywhere.

650

Almost everything that you see when you go to a website now is just using those under the hood, even if there's a lot of additional layers of abstraction on top of it.

651

So it sounds like this is something where people are going to learn skills that they can turn around and apply.

652

And they're also going to learn strategies and ways of thinking about things

653

that are going to be relevant for a long time coming.

654

Yeah.

655

And I'm always really, really cautious.

656

So we do focus a lot on, hey, a lot of people want these.

657

A lot of people want these skills for getting a job, for getting a different job, for doing better at their job. and it's difficult

658

because secretly in my little goblin heart I want to push

659

hey this doesn't always have to be about making money about being more financially secure

660

but in the same way that I wouldn't be teaching this

661

if I was still working two part-time minimum wage jobs forever yeah one thing I'm really conscious of

662

when the boot camp is I'd love to say like you said hey building for the web is.

663

It's art.

664

It's making silly things.

665

It's making beautiful things.

666

It's expression.

667

But a lot of time in the boot camp, we focus on people want to build these skills in order to get a better job, in order to do better work.

668

A lot of the incentives are financial.

669

And there's a temptation to say, oh no, we're doing this for art.

670

We're doing this for human expression.

671

but being able to pay your bills

672

and being able to eat is a pretty big like in

673

that Maslow's hierarchy of needs getting closed housed fed

674

and safe has to happen before we've got space to build

675

silly things um I would not be able to build the boot camp

676

and work on it every year if I was still working, yeah, two full-time minimum wage jobs until I died.

677

It would seem really churlish for me to say, oh, now that I'm housed,

678

fed, okay, stable, I demand other people meet me at a level of purity I wouldn't have been able to meet.

679

So these skills are creative, but people can use them for whatever they need them for.

680

Yeah.

681

And that is the practical reality is that we all have bills and we do have to address that.

682

You said earlier, again, to go back to your quote, I was supposed to work multiple minimum wage jobs around the clock until I died.

683

Like if we could say, send some encouraging words or some practical advice back to

684

that young Jessica before you'd gone abroad before you kind of like figured out a way to, to, to break out and found a path out of that life.

685

What would you say yourself that might make your life a little bit easier?

686

Um, or just, just save you time and thrashing.

687

Yeah.

688

Oh gosh.

689

Thrashing is such a good way to say it.

690

Um, I think that's kind of cheating as well, because I, I left in the two thousands and I was that I was younger in the 90s.

691

And things were easier then, like stuff was still expensive, stuff was still hard, but social mobility was felt a lot easier.

692

What I'd say to me is probably nothing.

693

I haven't always taken the most direct route, but I wouldn't want any spoilers.

694

695

and do you know what for folks who might be in

696

a similar position today I do not have the misplaced confidence

697

to offer any kind of advice people are coming from a

698

whole bunch of different situations everything's hard I'm not gonna say oh you just need to um

699

but for me a big part of why I run the bootcamp every year is, I guess, spite.

700

I got really lucky.

701

I had a whole bunch of people help me.

702

And other people deserve this.

703

Other people deserve help.

704

Other people deserve support.

705

Everyone.

706

We can't means test access to happiness.

707

We can't means test.

708

Yeah, giving people skills that might improve things for them.

709

I wouldn't give myself any hints.

710

I would probably just keep bumbling along with my weird,

711

spiteful little desire to make sure that as many people as possible get as many breaks as I did.

712

Awesome.

713

Well, I want to thank you for all the work you're doing through Bad Website Club.

714

It's my delight.

715

The other work you've been doing around the communities, helping more people get into tech, get these skills.

716

It's super helpful.

717

Uh, I want to encourage everybody to consider joining bad website club.

718

Uh, the opening date is, uh, actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to come along to, Oh, yes, you on the air.

719

If you wanted to come along and welcome people at the kickoff party, which is going to be on the 24th of April.

720

So just a couple of weeks, 24th of April.

721

Uh, I'm going to be there and there's going to be a lot of other really cool, chill human beings.

722

They're, uh, coming together to build creative stuff to help other people learn how to build creative stuff.

723

And, uh, yeah, that'll be fantastic.

724

I'm hyped about it.

725

Yeah.

726

I'll look forward to them.

727

And then maybe some of you lovely people watching along, I'd be so delighted to learn with you as well.

728

Awesome.

729

Well, everybody, thanks for tuning in Until next week, happy coding.

730

Have the easiest time possible.

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Learn English Through Real Conversations: A Podcast Breakdown

The video features a casual podcast interview between two developers, covering topics like coding courses, community updates, and learning strategies. This real-world dialogue mirrors everyday conversations, making it perfect for practicing natural English rhythm and pronunciation.

Useful Chunks & Collocations to Master

"embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it": A common structure for contrasting actions, ideal for discussing growth.
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Your Shadowing Challenge: Practice Like a Pro

Ready to boost your shadowing technique? Here's how: Pick a 1-minute segment from the dialogue (try the intro where Quincy lists new courses). Play the clip, pause, and repeat each sentence immediately, mimicking the tone, speed, and stress. Focus on matching the natural "shadowspeak" flow—how words connect (e.g., "free online bootcamp" becomes "freeonlinebootcamp"). For extra practice, use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare. This method sharpens english pronunciation and trains your brain to think in English. Remember: The goal isn't perfection—it's imitation. Do this daily, and you'll notice your "shadow speak" sounding more natural in no time!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been doing · have been trying · you've been working
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to build · used to be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've ever wanted · have built · have known
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Voice, which is · university which was · podcast, which was

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How to friction-max your learning with software engineer Jessica Rose [Podcast #216] - Learn English Speaking with Video

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