#166 From broke musician to working dev. How college drop-out Ryan Furrer taught himself to program

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Ryan Furrer. He's a Front End Engineer working on tools that help companies monitor their buildings for energy usage, water leaks, and other environmental factors.

Ryan dropped out of college and worked as a musician and violin instructor. He spent 5 years teaching himself how to program before getting freelance gigs, and ultimately landing developer jobs.

We talk about:
- Life as a broke musician
- Teaching yourself to code while working full-time
- How Ryan had to move back in with his parents after a divorce
- His 5-year journey to his first developer job

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.

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Links we talk about during our conversation:

Ryan's podcast, Web Dev Dialogues: https://www.webdevdialogues.com/episodes

Ryan's website: https://www.ryanfurrer.com

A freeCodeCamp course on the Astro front end development framework taught by freeCodeCamp podcast guest James Q Quick: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-the-astro-web-framework/