Journey from University to Startup: Web Design and Developer Experience

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Colby Fayock. He's a Software Engineer and prolific teacher who has created 68 tutorials for freeCodeCamp, and more than 100 videos on his YouTube – all freely available.

We talk about: - Colby's early days doing design work for local bands - How Colby went to art school, then pivoted that into a software development - His early career at ThinkGeek where he not only did web dev but also worked as a male model for their products. - Colby's day-to-day work as a developer experience engineer, building demo applications and SDKs - How Colby uses AI tools in his day-to-day work, and what he thinks its current limits are.

Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1995 punk song.

Also, I want to thank the 9,771 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

Links we talk about during our conversation:

• Colby's freeCodeCamp course on building a clone of Google Photos using AI tools and Next.js: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/create-a-google-photos-clone-with-nextjs-and-cloudinary/
• Colby's Trailer and web design work: https://photowall-colbyfayock.vercel.app/wall/design
• Colby's ThinkGeek Modeling. He's legit a male model: https://photowall-colbyfayock.vercel.app/wall/thinkgeek
• Colby's music from his band years: https://soundcloud.com/colby-fayock/sets/day-late-hero
• The XKCD comic I mention about how the scope of developer work can be non-intuitive: https://xkcd.com/1425/