[00:01] podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freecodecamp, and today I'm interviewing Jessica Rose. She's a developer and a teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla, and she is launching a free online boot camp
[00:14] this month called the bad website club. Before we hear from her, I just want to community. Freecodecamp just published a new Python course that will teach you how to program your own aerial drone. You don't actually need to own a drone
[00:27] because you're going to be using PySimbres for simulation, and you can practice autonomous flight with that. You'll learn the basics of drone components, 3D movement, and common computer vision tasks. Then you'll learn
[00:41] about navigation, image capture, hand gesture control, autonomous following, and more. This is a free 2-hour course on the freecodecamp YouTube channel. We also published a massive course that will teach you how to program Nvidia's
[00:55] H100 GPUs using CUDA. You'll learn about cutlass optimizations, multi-GPU scaling, and the primitives that developers use to train large language models. This is a 24-hour
[01:09] course, extremely comprehensive, and I wish I could also send each of you a free H100 to use, but freecodecamp just doesn't have the budget for that. If you are able to get a hold of one, you will be ready, and you'll certainly learn a
[01:23] lot from this course whether you have access to those expensive GPUs or not. If you've ever wanted to build a video editor or live streaming tool that runs worth bookmarking. You'll see how
[01:35] WebCodecs API can give you low-level hardware accelerated control over video processing. You'll learn key concepts like video frames, codecs, containers, and muxing. Check it out, link in the description. And Kubernetes doesn't have
[01:49] built-in user databases. Instead, it relies on a chain of authenticators. This course will teach you how X.509 client certificates work, what they're not ideal for human users in production,
[02:03] and how to instead deploy your own self-hosted browser-based Open AI OpenID Connect login. That's approximately a 30-minute read over on the freeCodeCamp publication. And this week's song of the
[02:17] week, 1983's Oblivious by Scottish new wave band Aztec Camera. I got a link to it in the description. I love this song's Django Reinhardt style flamenco guitars, the mischievous bassline, and the stereo
[02:30] percussion. Believe it or not, the frontman Roddy Frame old, sang it, and played its iconic guitar solo. 18 years old. Um you're going to love it. I think you'll really enjoy it.
[02:44] Support for this podcast comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our support our mission at donate.freecodecamp.org. freeCodeCamp shirt and rep the community with pride. Get the shirt for only $20
[02:58] shipped anywhere in the US. shop.freecodecamp.org. And now for my interview with Jessica Rose, we're going to talk about how the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it
[03:10] can make you a better thinker, the Bad Website Club, a free online boot camp where people learn front-end development together that starts this April, and why building silly little things is one of the best things you can do as a learner.
[03:23] Jessica Rose, welcome to the freeCodeCamp podcast. Oh gosh, thank you so much for having me. It's a delight. Yeah, uh you and I have known one don't know, like 10 years or something like that. Uh we've been working
[03:36] going, huh? Yeah, well, I wanted to start off by you know, you were building websites before CSS was even out, like literally just using the raw HTML, like uh
[03:51] what are some tools that have come out over the years that have really excited flowing? Oh gosh. Um mean I kind of bandy myself around as tool agnostic. So, yeah, everybody gets
[04:06] Um some of the things I've been really really delighted to see are sort of um really delighted to see are sort of um some innovations in um how we handle data on the web. So, WASM was really exciting to see. So, hey, we can do
[04:22] um programming languages on the web. Um but really I'm a little bit I've been doing web stuff for a long time. And it means that more than being
[04:35] excited about a lot of the tooling, I'm also just a little bit tired. Like also just a little bit tired. Like there's just been a lot of stuff. you were you went from being excited with each new like JavaScript framework
[04:51] started to get tired? >> JavaScript frameworks. >> JavaScript frameworks. Um so, actually um was working with uh learners. So, working with folks who were coming to
[05:04] learn web skills for the first time that really got me a little bit more a little bit cooler a little bit more suspicious about um yeah, about the amount of tooling that gets dumped on
[05:17] people. So, back in the day, I'm I'm guessing little bit older. Um if you wanted to build a website, you places that would just do all of the hosting and all of the unspooling your
[05:32] website into existence. And really all you needed was either a website builder, love it, or a little bit of HTML as you begin to learn and grow and expand. And and that's not true anymore.
[05:45] Partially because we have so much power. We can fully fledged um applications. We we can do so much more with the web. But as I talked to more and more learners, I get to hear, "Oh, do I need to learn
[05:58] And it gets to be really hard. There's so much. I hope this isn't unkind, but part of what makes me a little bit tired is the relentless and confident tone of all of the hype.
[06:13] Everyone's And talking to learners who say, "Oh, do this? Do I need to learn this?" And bringing this incredible list of things that I hope no individual person building on
[06:26] actually need. But we keep getting told you need more, you need more, you need more. And it's a bit relentless. Yeah. And you're very much a back-to-basics type person, which we're going to get
[06:39] Hardcore Website Club. But like, has there been a tool that's come out where it's been kind of like the monkey paw where like, "I wish I could do XYZ." And then one of the the fingers on the monkey paw curls, and next thing you
[06:52] unleashed?" Like, a good example of that would be React completely kind of redid like, of course we get we to completely rethink how you write
[07:05] things like that. And you have to put all these kind of ugly HTML, you know, components into JavaScript functions and things like that. Monkey paw is a really interesting way to say it because I I described this as
[07:19] a monkey paw to a peer just the other week where I was kind of thinking back to website And these were they're not beautiful,
[07:31] drag-and-drop, tick tick tick tick tick. Um similar with some like sort of CRMs like WordPress where you don't need to have these coding skills to build these.
[07:45] Um but I was bemoaning, oh gosh, I really wish these existed again, like really wish these existed again, like these kinds of hey, you're building a semantic HTML website and here's just a quick way to help you do it.
[07:57] and instead we've got sort of the LLM driven Um I I often call um LLM or machine generated text and it feels very much like spicy autocomplete where it's just a very opinionated, it'll do it for you.
[08:12] And that's not quite what I was hoping for, but it does indeed make it easier to do something. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll we'll definitely talk about AI, but I
[08:27] people that is a little bit reluctant to just hand all human thought over to machines. And uh that said, you have been trying to work on projects that help improve AI uh such as uh your crowdsourced open data sets uh that are
[08:43] used by AI tool makers. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so I'm I'm not a pure Luddite. I'm um a Uh but for the last 3 years or so I was working over at the Mozilla Foundation
[08:57] on Oh gosh, sorry, we've got cats bounding about the table. Foundation on Common Voice which is a set of multilingual data sets that folks
[09:09] use to build models. Yeah, may I models. Uh to make speech technologies work better for speakers of a range of different languages. different languages. Um so I'm not oh no, no, no, no AI ever.
[09:22] Um but for me these big models and these big tools tend to have widely scraped the web and often in in confirmed and lawsuit driven ways just stolen. Um so consent in where this data comes
[09:37] from is a really big thing for me. Um, but at the same time, if I want to make something engaging my critical thinking, like, "Hey, why am I doing this? How does this work?"
[09:52] Building to understand things. Yeah, kind of seems like a lot of the >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if if you just sat in math class and just use your calculator every time your teacher tried to teach Oh,
[10:05] look, I got the answer right here. Uh, yeah, okay, cool. Whatever. Teach. learn a lot, would you? >> Like, if you had the um, the um, Google, I'm probably dating myself, but do they still exist? If you
[10:17] Hill textbook and it had all the answers Cool. You're not doing that sort of um, uh, free recall to Who, uh, what year did Mary Todd Lincoln die?
[10:31] need to know. Yeah, it's probably something you can look up. But, with like a mathematical procedure, for example, like, I help my extent that I can with my limited recall of high school math. Um, and uh,
[10:45] they are always having to stress over it and there's like the hair pulling and there's the gnashing of teeth and then finally the breakthrough that comes with actually grappling with things. And you seem to be a big advocate of grappling
[10:58] jumping straight to the answer, not just flipping to the or or I guess with the version of the book, you don't even need to flip to the back to look at the answers. They're just like in line. There's the answer, you know?
[11:11] So, I I'm really lucky. These days I get to just work on projects I like, like That Website Club. Um, and don't have to do too much I don't like, which is very spoiled. I understand how how lucky I am.
[11:25] Um, and this gives me enough space to say, "Hey, why am I doing this? Am I doing this action because I just need it done? Am I doing this action because I because I want to be proud of what I finished?
[11:39] Yeah. Like having a human thumb on the scale. It feels like something I want to do for almost all of my writing and coding. I'm much more ferocious about it for around art and music as well.
[11:52] Yeah, well, you're as you said, you're in a really good that are very exciting to you. But I want I want to quote something interview. You said, "I was supposed to work
[12:05] multiple minimum wage jobs around the clock until I died." Taking you back to your your teenage years. Grow up in the Like what was your what can you walk us through like that
[12:18] context in which that major life decision happened where you kind of became you or you set out on the journey to become you as opposed to I'm me who Yeah, so I I didn't grow up in a great
[12:35] great family situation. I was the only one of my siblings to to make it to 40. it wasn't a really great situation. And for me, I a large part of this was I I got cuz it was easier back then. It was
[12:51] got cuz it was easier back then. It was a little bit cheaper but still hard. I a big deal. And that meant that I qualified for a program to work overseas and and could qualify for a visa.
[13:06] And just getting out of the situation I was. So, being far from home, having the opportunity to go for professional jobs meant that later on where I said, "Hey, I used to build websites for fun when I was a weird geeky little kid. Maybe I do
[13:21] some of these skills and do this professionally." It seemed more possible and it had this sort of stable base that I could do that sort of stable base that I could do that from.
[13:37] and uh my understanding is you were able to teach in Japan. walk us through like that period of your life and like how that kind of just very quickly like transitioned into more and more technical roles and maybe
[13:52] leadership roles and things like that? So, um yeah, I got really really lucky. Wound up um there's a government program to teach in Japan and headed out there which um I'm a big fan of Birmingham, the the
[14:06] and I always say Osaka's sort of the Birmingham of Japan. Just great great Um, but wound up picking up a little bit of extra work after I finished the technical writing. Um, and as part of that I was like, "Oh,
[14:21] cool. Programmers over here seem to get paid Yeah, y'all get paid double what I do? Oh, that's nice. What do you do? You It's it's just different words, huh? Y'all are just building stuff with
[14:33] It seemed difficult, but maybe not impossible. And having that space and being further from a difficult situation meant that I had that space and time to worked out pretty I I feel pretty lucky with the way it
[14:48] turned out. Yeah, absolutely. Well, uh like so you opportunities, you know, technical writing and then uh you've been working with Mozilla on some of their open data sets and then ultimately a few years ago
[15:03] uh you you had a podcast which was excellent uh the pursuit >> Oh gosh. Yeah, and Uh it was me being selfish. I just wanted to chat more Yeah. Well, uh you had me on there. You had a lot of
[15:16] episodes. Don Walsh Shaw, of course, Class Central creator of past free code camp podcast guest um and uh at some point you just decided like hey I actually want to help more people learn programming. Can you walk
[15:31] us through that decision and uh how we ultimately arrived at you know line. >> even tell you which iteration it is. Um so I'm going to ask everybody to come back with me to 2020.
[15:45] Oof, it was a lot, right? So there were lockdowns. Everybody was afraid of out of work or furloughed in different areas. So temporary out of work. Um but there was weirdly a big tech
[15:58] And for a couple years before 2020 there had been sort of a boot camp boom as well. And some of these were Actually I I think that there had been some uh legal cases that let me just say
[16:12] a lot of these were just scams. So you would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for not amazing coursework. I was doing I've been doing these um sort of open one-to-one advice calls
[16:26] And during the lockdowns I was talking to more and more people who said hey what should I do? I've just done this so-and-so boot camp and I owe them 40 grand. Um and it's crushing me.
[16:40] And looking at the curriculum and talking to these folks I was infuriated. credit but actually it was a conversation with yourself and the Walsh Hall from Class Central. Where it's like look we've got the curriculum.
[16:53] look we've got the curriculum. Why don't we build a boot camp? So the extra delivery, the extra support structures around it. Um and really the success metrics I was looking for was every single time
[17:07] somebody didn't pay for a scammy boot camp it felt like stealing 10 or 20 or 30 grand away from sort of the worst possible people in tech. Um it was very spite-driven and it was the best thing I've ever done.
[17:23] Free Code Camp was one of the reasons it's called Free Code Camp is Code Camp was like a term used just for kind of like cohorted like learning and it predates the boot camp phenomenon. Um but uh
[17:38] coming together and learning together and building together um and part of that was a reaction to what I thought you know pro- promising uh over-promising,
[17:50] under-delivering on technical education. Uh You're kinder than I am. >> [laughter] >> But uh so you created this program. Uh Why is it called the Bad Website Club? Oh, so it wasn't at first. So um for
[18:06] 2020, 2021 and the thing is when we launched this um um Class Central hosted us for the first two cohorts uh first three and they were amazing. Just and they continue to be amazing. So much nice
[18:19] And we were just the the Free Code Camp boot camp, I think. Um and later after we broke off and started doing our own thing um and Um what we started thinking about was what
[18:33] kind of tone we wanted to approach. So I don't know if you've been outside recently, but the whole world is hard. Like everything's stressful. Making rent boss is yelling at you all the time. Relationships are hard now.
[18:48] You have to take care of all kinds of personal data on on the web that you everything in the world feels like it's getting harder and harder. And these technical skills that we're asking people learn with us, they're hard, too.
[19:01] So we wanted to say the Bad Website Club not because we're teaching you incorrect but because we just want to take this time when we're learning together and not worry about perfection. Let's make a bad website. Let's make 10 bad websites.
[19:16] Let's have a silly soft little time and experiment. And then, after we've made beautiful messy things and learned, we can go ahead and professionalize that become a good website developer or a good developer later on after we've sort
[19:32] of had an easy time together. Yeah, so essentially just like accepting that the initial process is going to be messy and not having any pretensions of like oh, I'm going to be making insanely great websites like right off the bat.
[19:45] But but just acknowledging that, you know, before you can be good, you have to be mediocre. And and that being mediocre kind of gets you a little bit of flexibility to actually learn. Um I love tech. I love
[19:59] love the web. But there's a lot of I'm going to teach developer in the world in 18 weeks or in 60 in 6 weeks. And you just need to
[20:11] follow my system and buy my ebook and no, no, no. Like we're not selling anything and we're going to have a messy time together and it's going to be fine. may not be aware of is this is a completely free program.
[20:25] you there's no credit card sign up. Uh you basically just join the cohort and you start learning. And can you walk through what people can >> Oh, yeah. So the other thing I'd also say is like
[20:39] there is an email list to get sort of weekly lessons. You can hang out with us on Discord. But there's also zero obligation to sign up for anything. You never have to sign up sign in. So what we do is we take, thank you very
[20:51] much Quincy, the free Code Camp um we're looking at this cohort. We're going to be learning on the responsive web design curriculum. together. And what we've done is we've added a
[21:04] shared schedule. So hey, here's a shared pace. We're going to keep each other A community of other learners going through the same thing at the same time. But, also live streamed lessons Monday to Friday. So, hey, during the week,
[21:18] everything. We're not going to do it for you. hey, here's an especially weird concept. Or, hey, let's talk through what a variable really means. And the thing I really wanted to make sure we
[21:31] thing I really wanted to make sure we had is question and answer. So, working on technical stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely. Same, same. And I always say to learners that the things you can do when you get
[21:44] um look it up, you can ask someone, or you can experiment and get weird. So, hey, does this work? Does this work? And just being able to unblock folks by letting them ask a question and work
[21:59] show them what we're working on is really one of my favorite things Yeah, and the experience of asking a human being is very different from just asking an LLM. Like, at freeCodeCamp early on we had read, search, ask was uh
[22:13] uh the rubric or here is the the sequence. The idea is it's much easier to like read the error, read the uh exception,
[22:26] documentation, then search around and try to find additional supplemental you to like Stack Overflow, freeCodeCamp forum, places like that. And then asking was like, if you do it in that sequence, you're being the most respectful of
[22:40] have to respect an LLM's time. In theory, you could just go right in and your question and get a quick and easy answer, right? Um but, like what is the merit in asking
[22:54] an actual human dev who's who actually understands things as opposed to you know, um an LLM that doesn't really understand anything in the sense that it has never actually, you know, sat in the room and like banged his head
[23:07] against the keyboard trying to get like something to work, right? It just has answers and can synthesize an answer from those. What's the merit in asking questions? Because you really emphasize there when
[23:19] club that the question and answers are a very important part of the experience. Yeah. So, in order to talk a little bit about why I enjoy working with um people instead of working with LLMs on learning,
[23:33] talking a little bit about how uh these LLMs work in a very abstracted way might be helpful. So, these LLMs are models and they get fed a data set of things they've seen. Usually for these big tools, it means mass
[23:46] scraping the web and getting people's copyrighted material that they didn't consent for. But, if I said, "Hey Quincy, I'm going to go and look at everything on the internet and I'm going to give you back sort of
[23:59] an amalgamation of things from this topic." Yeah. Um and not everything on the internet is reasonable. Right. There's a lot of 4chan mixed in and stuff like that. The fact that this is considered like
[24:13] the there's a lot of training data that I would not necessarily consider great training data that's mixed into these >> Um But, like that advice is hoovered up
[24:26] with the same confidence and regurgitated with the same confidence. But, it also means that like these these LLMs are so confident with it and they're not always right. And not only
[24:38] they're not always right, but the way they're delivering the the learning and the the learning the way they're delivering information isn't Yeah. We still have quite a lot of um information that's being
[24:52] uh research that's being done right now, but we're not seeing any of the promised gains in AI learning. So, there was just this Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon
[25:05] Um I'll try and find that and chunk it to you in in the show notes. >> For the study, there's the Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon one recently, I think. A people. Um and they found that the folks who
[25:19] were the more AI skeptical, who didn't turn to these tools as quickly, um were engaging in a critical thinking more. That not just having this given to Yeah. Well, I want to move on to another question I have about the Bad Website
[25:33] Club and your approach because I imagine you encounter a lot of people who are intimidated. Uh they don't necessarily want to like join a community of like skills and they're going to come up with a lot of excuses to preserve their own
[25:50] personal energy. Be uh maybe they uh identify as like introverted and they're taxing for me to put myself out there and talk with people. Like can't I just,
[26:02] be heads down on on my computer and do this myself and not have to talk to other people? Like what are some of the excuses that you think people might have essentially they'd use to talk themselves out of
[26:16] Website Club? Um so the big thing I'd add is this whole point behind me being free and there's no sign up is folks can come along and say, "Oh, is this for me? Hm.
[26:29] lessons. Oh, I'm going to come along to just the guest sessions. just going to come along to some of the show and tell." So really the ability to show and tell." So really the ability to say, "Cool.
[26:42] offers is going to work for everybody. And if somebody says, "Oh, I'm not very um outgoing. I don't like to get into these discussions." Folks can want. Um
[26:55] term. Um some of the concerns some of the concerns I've heard folks say in the past are uh this is really
[27:07] hard. These technical skills are cuz a lot of the the folks in tech are like, "Rar, this is hardcore. We're we're the the smartest people in the room." So, really a lot of it is, "Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Can I keep
[27:20] Um and the things that I always kind of bring back is the the way we've paced this boot camp is we're going to start on April 24th with a little kickoff party. We'll have a uh lesson stream
[27:35] until July 3rd. But, all of the material you're working on is within freeCodeCamp. If you go ahead and join and you you you get sick or you hurt or you're tired and you need to stop, that progress doesn't go away.
[27:51] There's no pass or fail. I mean, the only way to fail is to stop and not come back. But, one thing I'm really really proud of is a lot of our learners from the first cohort came back and finished on the third. Like, the
[28:05] ability to say, "Cool, this is just a really really laid-back community." this this day, but we don't expect everybody to have everything finished on July 3rd. That's a lot of stuff to do.
[28:18] The big thing I try and say to anybody who's concerned that this might be too is websites are like the web is hard. There are a lot of really advanced technical skills you can get to
[28:32] in time, but all we're going to do in this boot camp is learn some of the really important foundational technology. We're going to learn some of And what I really like about the web is you're getting the opportunity to sort
[28:47] of paint with light and pixels. We're just going to make some silly Come and see if you like it. And if you don't, don't, not even a big deal.
[29:03] Um let's make some silly little things. Love it. So, you're a volunteer. your heart. I want that to be abundantly clear to everybody here. And you are not volunteers that work alongside you, right? You, I was just about to
[29:20] interrupt to big them up, and I really appreciate it. So, um since 2021 2022, she's going to get me. I've forgotten this. I've been working with Carmen on this. And she is a much
[29:33] does a ton of JavaScript stuff, a ton of um like Windows applications. She's been doing this for a little bit of time as well. So, she's just done all of it. And she's fantastic. She's much
[29:48] she's been teaching We've been teaching together this whole time. Um and we've got a brand new instructor joining us this year, um who's Edda. And Edda was actually a student in our very first cohort in
[30:00] 2020. Um so, she's favorite. I don't have favorites. She's a fantastic example of hey, we're going to just experiment with the basics first and give you a foundation to
[30:15] continue to learn. So, she's gone on and she does quite a bit of programming Rust these days, um which is possibly a bit beyond my own actually builds really interesting things, and she explains them in ways
[30:29] that that are very accessible. Um but she's just gone on to continue to do a ton of open source work, a ton of freelance work as a dev. And it's been see her come back and join us as an instructor.
[30:44] Yeah, that's so cool that uh the teacher becomes the student. Right, [laughter] right. And she's unnecessarily modest. I promised I wouldn't embarrass her, so I will I will save it for the streams. Yeah, and I meant to say student becomes
[30:56] I think that's like uh yeah, that way. Yeah, like all in the kung fu movies and kung fu movies, that's always like a recurring theme. Uh so there's a lot of hype right now around
[31:12] just uh basically having machines write a lot of code for you. How would you justify to somebody that is like it are these skills, these these basic kind of primitives of web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like
[31:27] get out of these? Like does any of this really matter? Cuz I'm sure a lot of people are hearing uh you know, the the AI hype people who often have, you know, multi-billion dollar vested interests in people uh just letting go and letting
[31:43] machines do all the work. Uh like like what would your pitch to someone who is really even need to learn this stuff anymore? Cuz they keep hearing, "Oh, you don't even need to bother learning computer science anymore." Uh I've got a
[31:57] direct quote from Jensen Huang, uh the founder of Nvidia that I'm going directly to that if you'd like. Doesn't that cool? All right. So, the quote
[32:11] So, the quote is um "Almost everyone says it's vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program, and in fact, it's almost exactly the opposite." That's a direct
[32:23] quote. So, I think it's a very interesting thing that a bunch of folks who work in these tool makers and a bunch of folks that work in that run tech companies um are saying, "No, no, no, don't worry
[32:37] Development jobs, which have traditionally been, um, we think of them as being especially high-paid, but really development jobs, when we look at, sort of, the, um, productivity growth, they haven't had
[32:51] that fall off in the '70s that a lot of other other jobs have had. So, they've sort of continued to grow salary-wise with what we would have wanted to see all jobs continue to grow with in in the US and Western Europe.
[33:05] I I try never to take advice from my So, here we've got folks who are saying, "Do you know what?
[33:18] For a long time, I've had to pay these stuck-up developers quite a bit of this tooling is magical, and this will replace those those those very, very replace those those those very, very finicky, very expensive developers."
[33:31] But, it doesn't seem supported with the code I'm seeing turned out by a lot of the tooling. Yeah. But, also, these tools are fantastic and and props at building small, stand-alone prototypes. You want
[33:45] to build a complex system? You're going to need software engineers, systems thinking. Folks were telling you, building expertise."
[33:57] What a deeply suspect, uh, piece of advice. Yeah, I mean, it it it does seem like, okay, there the you uh, "Be prepared."
[34:10] You know, like, why not learn how things work, you know? Life is long is what I like to tell people. Like, people, if you're if you're listening to this, like, it may not feel like life is that long, but
[34:24] fourth of the way through your natural life, assuming that you're lucky, right? Um, you're going to have plenty of time to actually learn these skills and I will say like anecdotally I do a lot of development with AI assistance and like
[34:38] the whole freeCodeCamp team we use AI assistants for building things and it is only because we are software engineers that know what we're doing that we can steer these kind of dumb models to like actually do productive things for us and
[34:52] actually do productive things for us and that we can QA it and uh I I do think that people who don't understand how or why of things uh are going to struggle with these tools. So I mean that would be my
[35:06] you said and you've also said something that I'm going to quote directly. Uh any new novel creative code will still need to be written by people. Why is that? Oh, so the way these these work the sort of um
[35:21] collecting a data set, building a model, using a tokenizer to spit out the output. Um so data set, build the model on the data, build the model on the data set. Um and then you ask the model a query
[35:34] fancy sort of tokenizer or a weird parser to give you the answer based on parser to give you the answer based on what it's seen in its data set.
[35:52] So or SlimFast, they're the same thing. Yeah. basically like liquid diet type stuff that in theory need um and maybe even has some drugs in it to make you feel full but it you're
[36:08] just drinking it like a shake. So this is the the output of these models are just sort of a a mixed up very bland slurry of what it's seen in its data set. The ability to make something new, the
[36:22] seen, the ability to make something creative like if you've got a And And admittedly, these models are very like complex. bits of text. But, what they're doing is they're
[36:36] spitting out copies of what they've seen. Yeah. Yeah, so by virtue of them just They're
[36:48] existing knowledge into something that's truly novel and interesting. Would be What there's not the opportunity to combine
[37:00] Like, you can't blend a bunch of different types of food and wind up with a brand new beautiful creation of a recipe. You're just going to wind up with a different kind of slurry. And it
[37:13] But, I think the question here is, if you have a boss where they just want this done, and the LLM model does this, Yeah. It might be it want to be what you do.
[37:28] If you want to build something beautiful or meaningful or silly or technically complex or weird, Yeah, I don't well. Yeah. Another question that a lot of
[37:44] question that I answer a lot, um but I want to hear your answer to it. Why should I use any textbooks or any courses or anything like that when the LLM has read all these things, in theory it's it's represented in the training
[37:57] data. Why don't I just ask a bunch of questions to the LLM? Isn't that faster? questions to the LLM? Isn't that faster? Wow. So, um I I just I gave a talk in February? That sounds about right. Um actually with Eda, I was I was quite
[38:12] proud, talking about um AI as forgetting machines. So, how to continue to learn of just spitting out the answer. And that's there um So, I really recommend um Barbara
[38:28] Oakley is a neuroscientist who works in sort of the the space of how we learn. She's got some books and courses, just fantastic. Uh usually comes to as a guest speaker to our boot camp as well. Um
[38:42] and she talks a lot about the sort of diffuse and focused thinking patterns that you need to sort of build um learning and and like journey through interesting. But also talks a bit about the friction we need. So, if you were
[38:58] and especially getting the answers all the time from a model that is very confidently and very like they praise a lot, right? Like
[39:10] the time. And they're very incorrect in a very confident way, and they'll tell lying to you. So, Quincy, here's the incorrect answer.
[39:23] That was such a good question. Good job. Um isn't always the best way to learn. whole world is hard, things are getting harder, and yet you're telling people,
[39:35] "Hey, do even harder things. Like do things the hard way. Like even as the world's getting harder around them. Why not save your energy and just like kind of like hunker down and if
[39:47] you know, to survive this storm? And like for a bunch of folks, if you do not have the energy to learn a big new thing, that is completely fine. Like if through the day, absolutely respect that.
[40:01] But for some of the same reasons people like woodworking or pottery, I've just started getting into bookbinding, started getting into bookbinding, and it is it is a real hard way to wind
[40:14] It is much, much easier to go to the shop and get a book off the shelf, blank notebook. But the idea of, "Hey, here's a new set of skills." Yes, these are skills that when you bring them up into higher
[40:28] levels of expertise, they're still really valuable. But the opportunity to slow down, learn something, going to yell at you, you're not going to get in trouble.
[40:45] something. There was this um sort of software craftsmanship movement And it sounded um at the time to me a bit a bit sort of um
[40:57] at the time to me a bit a bit sort of um Hmm. going to consider this a craft. And in my ceaselessly advancing age,
[41:12] hey, let's slow down, let's understand this, let's learn it together, let's have a low-key silly little time. Yeah. Even if it's just me learning with me, I'm going to have a really nice time.
[41:25] something, I intentionally slow down and like I to but let's let's slow down and let's like learn more, and it's hard because you have that
[41:39] extrinsic pressure like, oh, you know, like time is money, like the rent's due um you know, people are waiting on me or like I could be doing anything in the world right now and I'm sitting here reading this book in the library. Like,
[41:52] what am I doing, you know? Like like there there are all these voices that have to like quiet down if you want to slow down and and really focus and be in the moment. Um is that your experience and like how do
[42:07] you cope with like the competing priorities and doubt that you feel? >> So, one thing one sort of big constant in my life is I'm lightly but persistently annoyed when we take
[42:21] systemic problems and put them on an individual. Say, "Oh, it's your fault." Um it's your fault you're broke. It's your fault you're um having a hard time getting to work in a city with bad transport. It's
[42:39] I think it's not a coincidence that the way we live right now, we're beset by time pressures, notifications. We've got people teaching about writing about how to make applications more addictive, how to make
[42:52] platforms stickier, which is sort of the the tech term for more addictive. Yeah, I mean, one of the books that was really seminal back in like 20 12, 2013 when I was like you know, building free code camp uh and
[43:07] and kind of thinking about it was called Hooked. And it was literally about like kind of like Skinner box type uh reward like hijacking people's reward center that's how you get your multi-billion dollar exit.
[43:19] >> Yeah. So, with you saying I could be doing the library reading this book. Um I often think of this as an incredible type of luxury. You could be doing
[43:32] But for a lot of us a lot of the time that that and I include myself, that be worrying, that might be doomscrolling. doomscrolling. Um I can't tell other folks how to
[43:46] live. But one thing that I've started slowly introducing into my life is less phone. And please see me find find me on social media, see me after class. I've got like very concrete structures
[44:00] around this because they're addictive. They're intentionally addictive. But less screen time, less phone when you can and when you can afford it, you can and when you can afford it, and more time in this glorious luxury of
[44:14] I'm interested in. And it might not be web development, it might be Right now, I'm really into reading about the sociology of um conspiracy theories and how the the underlying factors with which
[44:28] people form groups and start to believe in things. But that's such a luxury to say, "I'm going to go read some academic papers instead of
[44:40] doing another email." If folks have the time, and if something they might want to learn is building websites for and not just for work. I pictures of my cat. I want to show build a website for my sister's salon. I want
[44:55] to build a website for recipes. I want to build a website for art. If you Yeah, if there's folks out there who might want to spend their very, very precious time learning with us, gosh, what an what an
[45:09] honor, what a joy. Yeah. And one of the things you're hitting on there is like building websites is a form of expression. Uh not every website has to be some
[45:21] not every website has to be some utilitarian like, let's convert this widget into this widget or let's uh convey this very specific piece of information or let's get people to whip out their credit card and pay for this
[45:34] thing that they didn't know they needed. You know, um there there's a lot of exciting weirdness on the web. Uh and a lot of beauty. And lot of them, unfortunately, have been kind of like centralized, but there was
[45:48] geospaces >> Yeah, yeah, GeoCities, woo. Uh GeoCities What was There There were like Neopets where you could like customize your You used to be able to customize your MySpace page. Uh you could do a lot of
[46:03] can look for that sort of stuff coming to freeCodeCamp soon, by the way. >> I love how, like as you were saying these things, different generations of "Yeah, yeah." at different points. One of the reasons that I have about Bad
[46:17] Website Club is people are going to get in there and they're going to learn a lot and it's going to be like a creative, kind of low-pressure environment where they can express themselves and they'll learn the tools
[46:29] and the techniques to further express themselves. And one of the things that like I would observe about these core, you know, primordial tools that you're you know, primordial tools that you're using, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like these
[46:42] They've been around since the very early days of the web, basically. Like you learned HTML before CSS was out, but CSS has been around for, I don't know, like 30 35 years at this point. I don't know. Like a long time, 30 years probably. I
[46:55] [snorts] don't know CSS first release, but um they're not going anywhere. Almost everything that you see when you go to a website now is just using those under the hood, even if there's a lot of
[47:07] of it. So, it sounds like this is something where people are going to and apply and they're also going to learn strategies and ways of thinking about things that are going to be relevant for a long time coming.
[47:21] Yeah. And I'm always really, really cautious. So, we do focus a lot on, "Hey, a lot of people want these um a lot a lot of people want these different job, for doing better at their job."
[47:34] Um and it's difficult because secretly, in my little goblin heart, I want to push, "Hey, this doesn't always have to be about making money, about being more financially secure." But in the same way that I wouldn't be
[47:47] But in the same way that I wouldn't be teaching this if I was still working two part-time, minimum wage jobs forever. Yeah. One thing I'm really conscious of when the boot camp is I'd love to say, like you said,
[47:59] "Hey, building for the web is it's art, it's making silly things, it's making beautiful things, it's expression." But, a lot of time in the bootcamp we focus on people want to build these skills in
[48:11] order to get a better job, in order to do better at work. A lot of the incentives are financial. And there's a temptation to say, "Oh, no, we're doing expression." But,
[48:25] being able to pay your bills and being able to eat is a pretty big, like in that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, getting clothed, housed, fed, and safe
[48:37] has to happen before we've got space to build silly things. Um, I would not be able to build the bootcamp and work on it every year if I was still working
[48:49] yeah, two full-time minimum wage jobs until I died. Um, it would seem really churlish for me to say, "Oh, now that I'm housed, fed, okay, stable, I demand other people meet me at a level
[49:05] meet." So, these skills are creative, but people can use them for whatever they need them for.
[49:18] that is the practical reality is that we all have bills and we do have to address that. Um, you said earlier, uh, again, to go back to your quote, "I wage jobs around the clock until I died." Like, if we could
[49:33] say some some encouraging words or some practical advice back to that young Jessica, uh, before you'd gone abroad, before to to break out and and found a path out of
[49:45] that life. What would you say to yourself that might make your life a little bit easier, um, or just just save you time and trashing. Yeah. Oh, gosh, trashing such a good way to say it.
[49:57] Um, I I think that's kind of cheating as I I think that's kind of cheating as well because I I left in the 2000s and I was I was younger in the '90s. Um, and things were easier then. Like
[50:10] stuff was still expensive, stuff was still hard, but social mobility was felt a lot easier. Um, what I'd say to me is uh, probably nothing. I haven't always taken the most direct route,
[50:23] but I wouldn't want any spoilers. Um, and you know what? For folks who might be in a similar position today, I do not have the
[50:36] misplaced confidence to offer any kind of advice. People are coming from a whole bunch of different situations. Everything's hard. I'm not going to say, "Oh, you just need to." Um,
[50:49] Um, but for me, a big part of why I run the boot camp every year is I I guess spite. I got really lucky. I had a whole bunch of people help me.
[51:03] of people help me. And other people deserve this other people deserve help. Other people deserve support. Everyone. We can't means test access to happiness. We can't means test
[51:18] Yeah, giving people skills that might improve things for them. I wouldn't give myself any hints. I would probably just keep bumbling along with my weird, spiteful little desire to make sure that as many people as
[51:34] make sure that as many people as possible get as many breaks as I did. >> It's my delight. >> work you've been been the community, just helping more people get into tech, get these skills. It's
[51:50] super helpful. Uh I want to encourage everybody to consider joining Bad Website Club. Uh the opening date is Uh actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to come along to Oh
[52:04] ask you on the air. If you wanted to come along and welcome people at the kickoff party, which is going to be on the 24th of April. So, just a a couple 24th of April. Uh I'm going to be there and uh there are going to be a lot of
[52:19] other really cool chill human beings there uh coming build creative stuff to help other people learn how to build creative stuff. And uh yeah, that'll be fantastic. I'm hyped about it.
[52:32] I'll look forward to them. And then maybe some of you lovely people watching along, I'd be so delighted to learn with you as well. Awesome. Well, everybody, thanks for tuning in. Until next week, happy
[52:45] coding. Oh, have the easiest time possible.