From injured athlete to software engineer with Kaleb Garner [Podcast #193]

Kaleb Garner is a software engineer working at a medical technology app company. He got a scholarship to play baseball at a state university, but a serious knee injury ended his career and he dropped out. After moving back in with his parents and working at an optometry office, he decided to teach himself programming. He used freeCodeCamp and 100Devs to learn for free, and got his first front end developer job when he was only 19. He has since expanded his skills to work on large legacy Python and C# codebases. We talk about: - How his Major League Baseball goals and his dream of becoming a doctor ended in the same catastrophic semester - His grind to get his first developer role after only 20 carefully researched job applications - Getting laid off right before his wedding and losing all discipline in his frantic job search - Tips for making your skillset and your network layoff-resilient Links we discuss: - Recent NY Times article Quincy mentions about people struggling to find developer jobs ("They're doing it wrong") [paywalled]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html - 1999 movie Office Space trailer about a simpler time in corporate life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_fG_zLbBeU - Leon Noel's 100Devs program and community that Kaleb used alongside freeCodeCamp: https://100devs.org/ Links from the news section: 1. freeCodeCamp just published an in-depth Harvard course that will teach you SQL and relational databases. You'll learn key concepts like CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). You'll also learn how to normalize data, join tables, and index your databases for faster performance. You'll use real-world datasets and write your own queries in SQLite, before moving on to working with PostgreSQL and MySQL. (11 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-databases-and-sql-from-harvard-university 2. This advanced Python Machine Learning course will teach you the history of computer vision architectures. You'll learn about design philosophies like LeNet, AlexNet, Xception, and Vision Transformers. You'll see side-by-side comparisons, and learn how they've progressed over the past few decades. (5 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-history-of-deep-learning-vision-architectures 3. freeCodeCamp also published this handbook that will teach you all about JSON Web Tokens, which are key to modern authentication and security. You'll learn their history and how they work, through a series of helpful diagrams and code examples. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-json-web-token-handbook-learn-to-use-jwts-for-web-authentication/ 4. Learn how developers are using the Compound Components Design Pattern to clean up their messy React code. You can code along at home and refactor several components. This will help you solidify your understanding of this design pattern and tighten up the front end logic on your projects. (30 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/compound-components-pattern-in-react/ These are just some of the many open source learning resources that the freeCodeCamp community published this week. We have ridiculous momentum right now. We're teaching more and more programming topics, as well as world languages like Spanish and Chinese. If you're looking for a modern equivalent to the Library of Alexandria, well, we're building it. Start supporting our charity and our mission today: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Chapters - 00:00:00 Intro & Community News - 03:06:00 Fun Link: Linear Pac-Man - 03:40:48 Song of the Week: Larry Graham - 04:16:56 freeCodeCamp Merch - 05:25:75 Introducing Caleb Garner - 07:51:36 Childhood Aspirations: Pro Baseball & Medicine - 09:44:95 The Knee Injury That Ended a Dream - 11:28:07 Why He pivoted Away from a Medical Career - 14:20:07 Discovering Programming Through 100Devs - 18:55:44 The Daily Grind of Learning to Code for Free - 28:24:79 Overcoming the Challenge of Abstract Backend Concepts - 32:07:27 A Surgical Approach to the First Job Search - 38:44:07 First Dev Job & Tackling Unfamiliar Technologies - 46:26:56 Getting Laid Off 3 Months Before His Wedding - 52:05:44 How to Build a Layoff-Resilient Career - 53:54:88 Mentoring Others & Fighting Imposter Syndrome - 57:32:07 The Overlooked Value of Community College - 1:03:40:31 Why Health Tech is Software Development on Hard Mode - 1:11:20:08 Caleb's Final Advice to His Younger Self - 1:12:57:12 Outro