Quincy Larson might be responsible for at least one very important part of your career: the beginning. That's because Quincy is the founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit teaching millions of people to code. In this and the last episode we talk all about what it means to be a beginner.
Quincy Larson might be responsible for at least one very important part of your career: the beginning. That's because Quincy is the founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit teaching millions of people to code.
In this and the last episode we talk all about what it means to be a beginner.
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Do you feel like you're not learning enough, quickly enough, as a software engineer? That is the feeling that I talk about, amongst other things, with today's guest, Quincy Larson. And if you missed out on the first part of my interview with Quincy, I suggest you go back and listen to that part first. Quincy is, of course, the founder and creator of FreeCodeCamp, which is something that many of you probably either came to this show as a result of, you actually heard about DeveloperTea because of FreeCodeCamp, or you are going through it right now. FreeCodeCamp.org. And, of course, FreeCodeCamp.org slash donate if you want to support other engineers who are going through the beginning of their career. And by the way, Quincy, just to be clear, did not pay us in any way to plug that here on the show. Thank you so much to Quincy for joining me. Let's get straight into the interview with Quincy Larson. And that feeling is something I'd love to hear your thoughts on. The feeling of inadequacy, because you're dealing with a lot of people who are probably in vulnerable points in their lives, especially people who are changing careers or they're at the beginning of their career. They have a lot of uncertainty. And there's a mountain of learning in front of them. I'm curious, do you see a lot of people who are in that vulnerable place? And what advice do you have for them when you encounter them? Well, empathy is very important. And it's one of the things that I perceived a lack of when I was learning the code. And keep in mind, I'm a middle-class white male who has a graduate degree. Right? Like, imagine if you're somebody who's been working as a cashier, whose job just evaporated or, you know, a server at a restaurant. And you don't have all those benefits of those layers of privilege. Right? And those layers of, like, just general, like, oh, yeah, I see how this works. I understand the system, so I'm not afraid of it. Right? I understand how higher education works, for example. A lot of people don't have that benefit. So for them, it can be even more daunting. And one of the things that we do is we just try to frame everything as realistically, as possible. We start from the premise, coding is hard. And, in fact, when you create a new FreeCodeCamp account, I added this blurb at the top. When you first get into FreeCodeCamp, it basically tells you, like, this is going to be hard. Anybody who tells you that learning the code is easy is trying to sell you something. Right? Because it's going to take years. And you're going to be daunted. And you're going to be baffled. And you're going to have tests telling you, failed, failed, failed. You're going to have, you know, your interpreter telling you, error, error, error. And you need to be able to power through that. And the most important thing is to know that everybody goes through this process. A lot of people don't remember it. They don't remember what it was like learning the code because it's so long ago. Maybe they were one of the lucky people who got a computer when they were a kid and their parents, you know, encouraged them to learn programming. Or maybe they just had a natural inclination toward it early on. If they have years and years of extra experience, that counts. I mean, that counts. It definitely speeds up the rate at which they can learn new things. So I would tell people, you know, I learned when I was 30, I didn't have a lot of experience with programming. I just was, you know, undaunted, essentially. And I think that more people, if they can remain undaunted, and if they can just power through the doubt, then they can learn it too. So the community aspect is really important. And just having a support network. And I think a lot of people can find that on Twitter. They can find that through, like, subreddits. They can find that through different forums and Discord groups. They can find it on the Free Code Camp forum. There are lots of ways that you can find kind of your tribe and have them have your back and help push you forward. And I think that that is absolutely key. But the most important thing, again, just know that this is hard. Know that anybody who says programming is easy has just forgotten how hard it was when they were first starting. I agree with this. And I think there are different kinds of hards. There are different kinds of hards. And I think this is where people go wrong. The perception that I've heard from a lot of people who are not totally outside of this industry, and the kind of people who view coders as super smart geeks, that's a perception outside of this industry or outside of the many industries. The perception that they have when they start getting interested in maybe figuring out, oh, maybe I could do this. The misperception that I see very commonly is, oh, this takes a lot of specific knowledge that I don't have to even get started. There's a basis of this really specific knowledge, or there's some base and much higher than average IQ required to be able to do this. To be able to learn to code. Oh, I have to have a very deep mathematical. I've gotten asked very specific questions like, do you need a lot of trigonometry to be able to code? And in my head, I'm thinking, I don't remember the last time I used trigonometry in my job, directly at least. Maybe there's some point at which I did use it, but it was certainly nothing deep in my, you know, the class that I took about trigonometry wasn't the thing that made me, you know, capable of becoming a developer. So I think there's these two kinds of hard, right? The kind of hard that I'm talking about right now is the intellectual or book knowledge hard, right? The hard is you must have done a lot to get here kind of hard, right? It's difficult in the sense that you've done a lot of preparation. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of investment. There's a lot that has gone into it already. And the second kind of hard is this is mental fortitude difficulty. This is commitment difficulty. This is continuous and repeated failure after failure and still being able to get up and do it again kind of difficulty, right? Totally different kind of hard. And that's not to say that being a developer doesn't have its intellectual, like pieces of the puzzle, right? To be able to break down a difficult set of features. That's not trivial. It's not something that just anybody can do. But I believe that the hardest part of learning how to code is less about book knowledge. It's less about linear algebra, and it's more about persistence and about commitment and about, you know, taking the long path, right? Taking the path, that helps you understand how you fail and how you can learn from each of those failures. Yeah, I agree. And one thing I'll say is learning to code is a motivational challenge. It's not an intellectual challenge. I do believe that any sufficiently motivated person can learn to code if they stick with it and if they keep at it. And if they actually apply basic common sense. Well, I shouldn't say common sense, but, but, but, but if they're continuing to push their boundaries, if they stay in their comfort zone and they're just like, hey, look, I've got a cool web page. And years later, they're like, yeah, I made another really cool web page. It's just similar to this. They haven't really expanded their horizons. They haven't really pushed out and, and learn new things. So I would definitely encourage people. One of the biggest pieces of feedback, you know, we get at free code camp is like, oh, you should cover this. You should cover this. And we want to keep the curriculum completely linear. We don't want to, to explode into a whole bunch of different electives where people don't know what to take a lot of other, you know, coding tools, like learning resources. You can just choose like what language you want to learn, you know, what database you want to learn. It's all, it's all on the cause. So, and that's great, but you quickly run into like, oh, I learned the basics of like six different languages, but I don't actually know how to build anything. Or I feel like I'm, you know, retreading ground that I don't need to retread at this point. And that I should be going out and, you know, going, deeper into the woods, so to speak. So by virtue of having like an extra, you know, a single linear curriculum that everybody goes through, we had the benefit of being able to kind of sequence things in a way that's optimal and make sure that we're kind of having a continuous, you know, piling on a pressure. But it's not at no point does it become overwhelming. It's just like, there's just a slow buildup and you're using more and more of your programming skills with each passing day. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of years ago we did an episode where I talked about this specific Yeah. idea that you can kind of start down the trail and then return back to where you were and start down another trail and return back to where you were and never get anywhere. Uh, essentially you can kind of know what is at the beginning of those trails, but nothing beyond that. Uh, and I recommended at the time that you, uh, and this is just a heuristic, you commit to six months in one direction or learning one particular, uh, technology to a further depth, right? Whether that technology is a language or a, a framework and the associated things that go with it. Um, and that was the recommendation at the time. Uh, six months is, you know, substitute your number that is as large or so as six months, maybe it's a year or whatever it is. Um, but certainly not two weeks, right? It's, it's very easy to get, I won't say bored, but feeling like almost a sense of guilt that you haven't learned other things, right? You're learning one thing. And, and, and, and, and, and it doesn't feel like you're progressing incredibly fast and it's not as interesting as it was on day one. And this other thing came up on hacker news and they're saying that it's the big thing, right? And, and so you're going to set aside the thing that you have to go and chase the big thing. And that happens every two weeks, right? Or probably even faster than that. And so it's very easy to imagine that you're falling behind and that the only way to keep up is to swap out your learning material, um, rather than, rather than focusing on, on that pathway. So that's a really good endorsement, um, for, for the, for your approach, which is much more continuous and, and focused in one direction. Quincy, I want to ask you, I know we're, we've kind of run up on our time here, but I want to ask you about something that you mentioned that you're, that you're doing now. Uh, and the, and it's kind of a unique overlap. So you mentioned before, before we started recording that, uh, free code camp is starting down this pathway of developing data science curriculum. And also this, this is where the overlap is that you are a fully nonprofit organization. And this is very interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Uh, the first reason is that you're developing a curriculum for people to kind of expand. And this is, this is kind of fundamentally new in some ways, but also you're doing this through this nonprofit lens. I'm curious, how is this, how does this work? How does it work to build a product for people? Um, and to this level, right to this level of exposure, uh, because, and, and the context for this is I know a lot of companies that are built on the idea of drawing, uh, professional interest, right? The idea of, of, uh, bettering my career is, is a lucrative business. It really is. But you're doing this, you're doing this through the nonprofit pathway. And I'm curious about how that is going to work. Number one. And number two, why did you choose the nonprofit pathway? Yeah. So first of all, um, we, from the very beginning, like I put free at the beginning of free code camp, cause I knew I wanted it to be free. The reasoning for that is I wanted it to be accessible and the most significant, uh, you know, significant, uh, you know, significant, stumbling block to being able to access things is often money. Most people on earth, about 60% of them live off less than $10 a day. Think about that. And then think about the fact that like most of those people are unblocked, unbanked. They don't have like a credit card. They don't have a means through which they could potentially pay for an educational product if it requires a credit card. Uh, so I was like, well, we should just do it free. And then if it's a five, one C three donor supported nonprofit, we can just, you know, have a very, very, very small percentage in our case, less than, you know, 0.5% of people who use free code camp ultimately support it. So we have half a million people use free code camp every day, but we only have about 7,000 people who donate to free code camp every month. And, and that's another thing that I discovered, uh, from a purely business perspective is monthly recurring donations are a very powerful tool for being able to, you know, predict how much revenue you're going to have and less budget accordingly. Uh, and we've been able to very carefully, carefully build out our team and expand as we've gotten more and more monthly recurring donors. And it's very stable, even with the global recession and everything. We, we went down a little bit, but we were able to kind of slowly come back, uh, in terms of monthly recurring donors. So access is absolutely the key. It's the same reason we do everything self-paced, same reason everything works in a browser on free code camp. And we try to keep it as data light as possible for all the people that are, you know, um, on very finite data plans, uh, in Africa, South Asia, even here in, um, North America. Uh, there are some people who just have finite data and they don't want to download gigabytes worth of, uh, you know, video and stuff like that. So those are all considerations, but it's all kind of arrayed around this, this notion of access. Now on the note of, of the data science curriculum, that's we're calling it the data science curriculum, but it's actually just an extension of our core curriculum. We're just adding a whole bunch of math, machine learning and data science courses, uh, to the end of that line. So I talk about it being linear. You can start just knowing nothing about coding and you can gradually, you know, go through the different certifications of which they're currently 10 and soon there will be 18 or 19. Um, and you can just completely skip the lessons. Just take the certification projects where you build five different projects and you get all their tests to pass, and then you can claim the certification. but, uh, you can just jump wherever you want on that line. If you want to, if you're an experienced developer, you can jump right into the, uh, you know, the data science part where you're going to be learning a whole lot of, uh, you know, linear algebra, calculus, statistics, and you're going to be learning a whole lot of, uh, you know, supervised, unsupervised and, uh, you know, neural network type machine learning. So it's designed with that intention of being able to just jump in wherever you want, but knowing that you're potentially skipping important stuff that you may have to go back and review. Uh, but you know what has been covered and you can easily jump back and review that. The other thing I'll point out is that there are natural kind of jumping off points in the curriculum where like, after you finish all the full stack JavaScript, you know, no JS, SQL, stuff like that, you, you can potentially go ahead and get a full stack developer job, and then you can come back later in your career after you've gotten your bearing as a developer, then you can learn some even more advanced skills and eventually maybe become like a machine learning engineer or data scientist. Yeah. That's very exciting. Um, it's very exciting for a lot of reasons. One is certainly that the access, you know, it is something that we can trust here, uh, that you have invested for a long time in this idea of, of accessibility and that you'll continue to do that. And I'm really excited about the idea that I can, you know, kind of return back to the previous concept of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, Oh, these are like jumpstart, you know, a shot of adrenaline, early career. You know, that's what these are for. But this is kind of breaking that mold. And that's really exciting. I want to ask a couple of final questions here. The first one is, what do you wish more people would ask you about? I wish more people would ask me about the nature of like diminishing returns and learning. You mentioned coding boot camps just a second ago. And I think coding boot camps are good. And I have lots of friends who've gone through coding boot camps and been able to get good developer jobs afterward. I do think that the notion of trying to like jam it in, like the adrenaline shot, as you mentioned, is not as useful as if you just plan things out and if you take your time. And so a lot of this comes back to my general working model of education that if you learn a subject for even like 30 minutes a day, but if you learn it every single day for years, you're going to get very good at it. That same, you know, 12 weeks of intensive coding boot camp time, if you were to take that same number of hours, stretch it out over a year, it would probably be dramatically more impactful than that 12-week period. Now, there are people who might push back like, well, you know, that immersive kind of like all-out learning process helps jumpstart things. And maybe it does. But it also involves, you know, like foregoing work and in some cases sleep and other important things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In order to be able to have that learning experience. So one of the things that when I designed Free Code Camp was I designed it with the notion that it's going to take years to complete. And sure enough, I get people who come back like four years in. Like, hey, I started Free Code Camp four years ago and now I'm a developer. That's awesome. Right? That's what it was designed to do. It was designed to be self-paced. It's okay to start and stop. Life happens. Life gets in the way. And when you come back, maybe you'll need to review a little bit more, but you still get that nice linear road ahead of you of what you need to do. There's not the ambiguity. There's not the ambiguity of like, what should I learn next? Because we've already consulted with industry and with professors and figured out like what the kind of composite job market looks like. And designed our curriculum with that in mind so that people have marketable skills and also have core fundamental skills that they can build upon as those, you know, as the market shifts over time. So, yeah, I think if people think in terms of like, if you just learn 30 minutes a day and you pace yourself and you take it as a marathon and not a sprint. That's going to serve you very well. And if you can plan ahead a few years, it's hard to tell somebody who's completely unemployed right now, plan ahead. I can totally understand the hair on fire problem of needing to get income and provide for your family. But that might just be working, you know, a relatively menial job and then doing free code camp or another learning resource at night after your job and gradually ramping up your skills rather than going further into debt to go get a graduate degree or to the coding boot camp. We'll be right back with the rest of the interview with Quincy Larson. 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You can connect your app to the all-in-one payments device that merchants love with a simple REST API by heading over to developerT.com. That's developerT.com. Thanks again to Square for sponsoring today's episode of DeveloperT. Now let's get back to our interview with Quincy Larson. We either are being productive or not. And that being productive is a conscious activity. That it's a continuous, effortful activity. And so in this presumption, in this situation, if you were to believe this, well, you could just string it all back-to-back as much as possible, right? And go 16 hours a day. Or if you can find a way to keep yourself from sleeping, you could go 24 hours a day and get the same or more benefit because you're doing it in less time. But this is demonstrably wrong, right? And of course, it's probably not good to go to the extreme opposite where you're only doing it for two minutes a day. But there's something very important about downtime. There's something very important about allowing things to sink in. And giving. And giving your brain time to process it unconsciously. As difficult as it seems and as magical as it seems, it's not magical. It's science. And I think this is part of the reason why it's easily rejected. Is that we don't feel it. We don't see it. It seems like pseudoscience. When you tell somebody one of the best ways that you can help your brain think is to take a walk. That seems just too good to be true in some ways. In other ways, it seems fantastical. Or it seems... For whatever reason, it seems mushy. It doesn't seem like the right answer. But a lot of the time, that is the right answer. We give ourselves something to think about. We spend two hours or three hours or whatever going through some material. And then you spend two or three hours doing almost nothing. Like go exercise or play a video game or spend some time with your children if you have children. These are critical components of what it means to be a human. These are critical components of what it means to be a human. It means to be a thinking human being. And we often just kind of discount them as, we'll get to that when we have time. But what we should be doing instead is prioritizing it. And by doing what you're saying, Quincy, I think drawing this out and doing it over a period of time, you're giving yourself the freedom in some ways to absorb that stuff. To let it, I don't know, let it flourish in a way. Right? To let it grow in your brain so you can create new attachments to it. And there's a lot of research on this. This is not just my opinion. This is not like a new idea that's come. This is a pretty well-established, important part of learning. Yeah. And I hope that this can be applied over time to the university experience. Because it's incredibly expensive to take four years of your life and go live on campus somewhere. I mean, it's a formative experience. Sure. I was actually a commuter student and I don't really have that experience. I just kind of worked and lived in an apartment off campus and went in for my classes really early in the morning and then got done with it. But I do think that there's something to having that kind of academy style experience. But why is it four years long? Could it be a year long and then just have people come back in for a week at a time or something? Or maybe just have people check in like an hour a day and have the experience. Yeah. And then have the entire kind of academic calendar dragged out across 10 years instead of being four years of really dense kind of in-person experience. Those are things that I think could potentially not only help people learn more effectively, but could dramatically reduce the cost of higher education, which is out of control in the United States. I mean, it's absurd how much student debt we have. And if we just wipe out the student debt, it's just going to come right back because it's a systematic problem. I'm not saying I oppose wiping out the student debt. I think that forgiveness is very powerful. And it could be a good solution in this case. But we need to tackle the underlying problems of why education has become so expensive. And at the same time, its efficacy is questionable. You know, like the average wage. I mean, you can argue this is due to other kind of things going on within the employment market, the labor market system. But average wages are going down and costs are going up. Or average wages, like real average wages. They're probably going down, but they're definitely flat in nominal terms. And at the same time, you know, more and more jobs are saying, hey, you should have a master's degree for this. Or in the jobs that you didn't need to use to have a university degree to get. A lot of them now require a university degree. So it's become a big social mobility issue as well. And, you know, I think if we if we can step back and kind of rethink higher education from first principles and make it more about learning over time. And acknowledging that there's diminishing returns to, you know, stacking people in the classroom and having them cram for extended periods of time. That if it's just more relaxed, like you said, you know, taking a walk. And this goes back to work life balance as well. There are a lot of issues in the United States and definitely overseas. You know, in China, this is huge. People work like 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And what's the benefit? Like their productivity is nosediving. They're working for probably 40 or 50 hours. And yet they're still at the office just because it's kind of like this toxic work culture. So I think if you kind of unpack this notion of like if programmers can only code effectively, productively for like three or four hours a day. Why do they need to work eight hours a day? You know, or for me personally, I don't take days off. I just work every day and I work about four to six hours a day. Maybe four to eight hours. I mean, some days if the servers are on fire, I'm going to keep working. But, you know, like generally, I just like to have that consistent rhythm through my day. And then we can question like, do we really need to have, you know, this five-day work week or could it be spread out? Or could a lot more work be remote? I'm really going off into the weeds on this answer to your question. But I think it has implications if we were to really think about the way that society is structured around this notion of like clocking time. And I think that's a great question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it is a profound issue. It's definitely one of those things that we kind of bought into, you know, 100, I guess 100 years ago, 200 years ago, this, you know, the eight hour day and treating your job as this containerized thing that is totally separated from your whatever else your life is, right? Um, and doing so, we went down a path that's very hard to come back from because we established things, you know, once you establish these kind of society-wide systemic, uh, patterns to undo them would require something at that same level. And it would also cost something. And it's, it's, it costs less to implement something new at that, that high social level. It costs less to implement it for the first time than it does to unimplement it, to remove it because the, the process of, of, you know, replacing this process of replacing this system of the eight hour workday, uh, you know, people believing that nine to five is somehow a sacred, uh, work hours, uh, culturally speaking, you know, this is going to take a draft, either a drastic shift in culture because evidence is not enough. Right. We, we can say it until we're blue in the face that this is a remnant of, um, you know, a time when machines or when people were treated like machines and we're still doing it, even though people are very much not machines. Um, and, and even in the most knowledge-based, uh, um, you know, professions, people are still working these eight hour days and the, the, it's a huge hurdle, right? Right. It's a huge hurdle because it's such a system. It's the same kind of large hurdle as trying to, you know, uproot, uh, a, a university system that has so much momentum, right? It has such a long history of momentum. How do you uproot that? Well, you can't do it by just presenting an argument, right? There has to be something else. And I'm saying all this and not leading up to any particular recommendation because I don't know. Uh, I don't know how we change it. I think we can do a little bit at a time, but I think some of this is going to be generally generational changes, uh, as you know, younger generations come into a position of power, uh, in companies and that kind of thing. They, they might start to change that tide, but for the most part, these are really hard problems to solve. And if you're running a company, these are the kinds of problems. You know, when you, when you take a moment to sit back and say, how can I make the world better? Actually, this is a pretty good way, right? These are the kinds of problems that you can solve. Um, the, the working culture problems that would, that could drastically change at least the people that you are responsible for, the people you're leading. Yeah. And, um, I would say that, you know, university, I would never tell people like drop out of university and just study free code camp or, um, you know. Anything like that, because I do think university education, especially if you're getting a computer science degree, which is the degree I would recommend everybody get, um, if you are considering going to university or if you're in university and you have the luxury of being able to change without having to spend a whole lot of extra time in university, uh, computer science degrees are definitely the best degree to get in terms of like expected, uh, income and job opportunity and flexibility. I mean, it's, it really is like the liberal arts degree of the 21st century in many respects. It's, it's the ultimate kind of Swiss army knife. Uh, degree. Um, yeah, I mean, there, there are entrenched interests in, in higher education that, uh, but I think a lot of people realize that this would be more optimal and this pandemic has been a great opportunity to experiment with some of these modalities. I was extremely disappointed that so many universities chose to reopen during a pandemic. I think it was reckless. Uh, but a lot of universities didn't. And a lot of universities really did try to bring more of their courseware online. And yeah, so, so there's a lot of reason for optimism as well. I will say that free code camp, we're going to continue to ensure that everybody on earth that has an internet connection, uh, can learn these things. And we're, we launched Chinese and Spanish edition just yesterday. Like we spent years like translating all these things and building up communities of contributors and translators and, and that's live now. And we're going to be rolling out other world languages. So the world language, like what language you speak won't be an impediment either. You won't have to. Uh, you know, fluent in English to be able to learn to code and adding math and things like that. It, you know, if you're, if you grew up in India or if you grew up in China, you probably don't need to do the calculus section or the linear algebra section. You probably covered that in high school, um, and maybe in university, but like us Americans, we, we definitely need to, you know, go over a lot of that stuff. Cause most people, I certainly didn't learn that stuff really exhaustively in university. So we're going to continue to present as robust an alternative to how. Uh, higher education as we can. And more specifically to going back to school, if you're, you know, mid-career, you don't want to have to enroll in, in night school and go get a graduate degree. Like that's a huge, uh, that's a huge ask for people that have kids and mortgages and full-time jobs and, you know, potentially like elderly parents they're caring for. Right. Uh, people shouldn't have to go back to school to be able to continue to advance in the workforce. So we're going to continue to hopefully be this engine of social mobility. Um, one thing people can do if they're interested in learning about free code camp and learning about like our mission is, uh, I recently shared a link to our data science curriculum and what we're hoping to build. Uh, we're planning to bring on lots of university professors, uh, probably like, you know, part-time in between their, their studies, they can help us build out the math and computer science and machine learning curriculum. Uh, one of the things we're doing is we're trying to raise some money to be able to do that because. Uh, we're a very lean donor supported nonprofit. We only are total annual budget, despite the fact that we delivered like 1.3 billion minutes of learning last year, which is the equivalent of 2,500 years of learning, uh, on free camp, which is, you know, it means like right now, as you and I speak, Jonathan, they're probably about 2,500 people using free cocaine. Uh, it's incredible. Yeah. Our total budget was half a million dollars. It was like $498. $498,000. We, so it's hard to run a nonprofit, especially during a global recession and everything. Uh, but if anybody is interested in contributing to that, we're going to use that money, uh, to hire some, some professors to experience teachers. That's, that's what we're looking for is people who have years and years of experience teaching math and computer science to help us design these curricula. And, uh, Daryl Silver, who, uh, who was the founder of Thinkful. Um, and some other, uh, education, uh, startups before he, he's matching all donations, 100% up to $1,000. So, uh, I just, I feel obligated since we are doing the fundraising. I'm terrible at like raising awareness of this, but I hope you don't mind me plugging that on the podcast. No, absolutely. Please. Um, this is, this is incredibly helpful to people, uh, and to the industry. Uh, it's not just, uh, just to people who are looking to code is this is an industry level, um, important, important effort. So I, I appreciate what you do, Quincy. And I'm so thankful that you decided to, to join me on the show today and to move forward with this project that has become such a popular way for people, uh, kind of an open front door to the industry. So thank you for what you do. I have one last question for you. Uh, if you could give me a little bit of time, I'd love to hear from you. Uh, if you could give me a little bit of time, I'd love to hear from you. Uh, if you could give me a little bit of time, I'd love to hear from you. If you could give me 30 seconds of advice to developers of all backgrounds and experience levels, what would you tell them? I have to think about this for a second. Probably going to think more than 30 seconds about what my 30 seconds would be. Uh, my, again, I would just reiterate, like anybody who really wants to learn to code, it's, it's not about how smart you are or anything like that. We all are descendant from the same. You know, African tribes on the Savannah, like they didn't have computers back then. Right. Uh, there, there, there was no real aptitude to be selected for, uh, if, if you want to learn programming and if you're serious about advancing your skills and opening up lots of opportunities, you can absolutely do it. It's just, just know it's, it's a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of time, uh, but you'll get there and there are the community. The developer community is extremely supportive and we don't see this as a zero sum game. This is a rapidly growing field. Everybody's pushing things through the software layer. Developer jobs are going to become more and more bountiful in as time progresses. Uh, so this is absolutely the right field for you if you're interested. Yeah. Quincy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. And, uh, I wish you the best in your quest to find experienced professors, uh, who, who can help teach us all data science and, uh, thank you so much for what you do with me. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. See you soon, Quincy. When you create an account, I have like an email list that I send to like 4 million people each week. And you can just opt into that when you create your account. And then I'll be in your inbox every week with like, you know, I send free books, free courses, all kinds of stuff that is free and publicly available on the web to help you learn. Excellent. Thank you so much again. I'll talk to you soon, Quincy. Cheers. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea and the last episode of Developer Tea. Both of these were my interview with Quincy Larson. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes like this one, more interviews as well as the monologue type episodes. And perhaps many of you are listening only for the Friday refills. And I encourage you to subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using. Once again, that Friday refill is coming up in just two days. So go ahead and subscribe. We do three episodes a week now of this show. So if you don't subscribe, you end up likely missing out. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you want to be a part of the Developer Tea Discord community, reach out to me on Twitter at Developer Tea. Or you can email me at developertea at gmail.com. Thank you again to Square for sponsoring today's episode. If you want to get started with the Terminal API today for both in-person and in-app payment experiences. For virtually every platform and every payment type. Head over to developertea.com slash square to get started. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.