#194 First dev job at 45 – Interview with self-taught freeCodeCamp grad Eric Carlson

Eric Carlson is a self-taught software engineer at Cisco. In his early 20s, he worked his way up to manager at the busiest Dominos Pizza in Canada. He eventually went to college and studied liberal arts, then worked as a teacher for two decades before teaching himself programming using freeCodeCamp.

He got his first developer job at age 45 by using his programming skills to pivot into a more technical role within a big telecom company. And he's since gone further down the stack, doing back end work and now DevOps.

Eric shares tips for:
- Teaching yourself programming while raising young kids
- Building up your mental stamina so you can program for many hours in one sitting
- How to learn just-in-time so you don't waste time chasing "shiny object" tools
- How to reinforce your learning by taking detailed notes on basically everything

Links we discuss during the show:
- Eric's 2022 freeCodeCamp forum post about his journey into software development: https://forum.freecodecamp.org/t/i-got-a-dev-job-after-9-months-on-freecodecamp-or-was-it-2-years-and-9-months/516049
- The 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-teYcHSWkg

Links from the Community News intro:

1. freeCodeCamp just published a course on how to build your own MCP server with Python. Model Context Protocol Servers are like APIs for AI agents. Lots of developers are now building them to help agents interact with their websites' data more accurately. This course will teach you how to leverage the open source FastMCP library to build a calculator project that agents can then directly interact with. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-mcp-essentials-and-how-to-create-secure-agent-interfaces-with-fastmcp

2. Learn how to pass Google's new Generative AI Leader Certification Exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps exam under the sun, and he teaches this course. He'll give you a business-level understanding of Google Cloud's gen AI offerings. By the end of this course, with the help of Andrew's practice materials, you'll be ready to sit for the exam. (3 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/pass-the-google-generative-ai-leader-certification-exam/

3. Teach your apps how to learn. This comprehensive Machine Learning fundamentals course will walk you through building systems smart enough to create their own algorithms. You'll use C++ to implement a Preceptron, which will then look at images of shapes and figure out ways to reliably label them. (interactive course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/machine-learning-tutorial-how-to-program-without-creating-your-own-algorithms/

4. Strix is a relatively new open source tool for testing the security of your apps and identifying vulnerabilities. It's essentially an AI-powered white hat attacker that you set loose in your codebase. This tutorial will explain how it works and how you can use it to harden your apps against common exploits. (15 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-strix-the-open-source-ai-agent-for-security-testing/

5. Learn fun facts about the atmosphere and space while riding the space elevator. Did you know that the fastest elevator in the world moves 42 miles per hour and even at that speed, it would take 80 minutes to reach space? https://neal.fun/space-elevator/

6. Song of the week: 1980 progressive rock classic Don't Be Late by the legendary Canadian band Saga. This song features lightning fast keyboard arpeggios that are so precise (and before the era of sequencers). And the clearest annunciated lyrics ever. It's perfect for late night driving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYt7dWb2knc