From freeCodeCamp to NASA with Data Engineer Joe Hill [Podcast #178]

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Hill. He's a software engineer who works on a data platform for NASA. Joe taught himself programming for 4 years while working as a janitor. As the single father of two Autistic boys, he first used his programming skills to build an iPad app to help them learn how to talk. We talk about: - Data Engineering and wrangling Department of Defense data into a central platform - The role of soft skills in getting things done in big organizations - The need for patience and practice in self-teaching - How to stop jumping from one tool to another and to instead go deep - Tips for parents raising kids with Autism 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. Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to https://donate.freecodecamp.org Links we talk about during our conversation: - The trailer of the 1992 classic hacking heist movie Sneakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEhgUxQ322A - Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-hill-4a138123/ Contents 00:00 - Intro: Quincy Larson introduces Joe Hill 00:57 - The Tools of a Data Engineer 02:04 - What is PySpark? 02:44 - What are data frames? 04:04 - SQL, Schema, and Data Analysis 05:08 - The importance of asking questions 08:00 - Working with the US federal government 09:40 - Cybersecurity and password managers 11:54 - From janitor to data engineer 14:07 - Joe’s time in the US Army 16:07 - Living with a knee injury 17:01 - Weight training and getting older 19:05 - Raising two sons with autism 20:10 - How Joe got interested in computers 22:15 - Building an iPad app to help his son learn to speak 26:48 - Becoming a janitor while learning to code 28:50 - How Joe’s two sons are doing today 32:34 - Why it’s so important to learn a trade 37:01 - Getting your first developer job may not be at a big tech company 38:27 - How to contribute to open source when you’re a beginner 41:34 - How solving your own problems can be a great way to learn 44:19 - Explaining your work to non-coders 48:26 - How to get buy-in from stakeholders 49:24 - Be more than just a ticket completer 51:12 - Geeking out over the problem, not the tools 52:50 - Working as a government contractor 54:49 - Semper Gumby: always be flexible 57:26 - Using being self-taught to your advantage 58:45 - Will AI take our jobs? 01:02:18 - Learning is the real skill 01:04:47 - How to approach technical interviews as a self-taught developer 01:06:24 - Building community and helping others learn 01:10:10 - What if you fall off the wagon and stop coding for a while? 01:12:30 - A lesson about ego from the TV show Scrubs 01:16:19 - Helping others learn software development 01:20:02 - You can still get a developer job if it takes you years to learn 01:26:24 - What advice would you send back to your younger self? 01:30:11 - Outro