On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with front-end developer Joe Previte who lives and works in Arizona. Joe shares the story of how he made the tough decision to leave grad school, how he discovered coding, and how he stays motivated and continues to learn.
Joe had his life planned out: he'd get a PhD in linguistics, get a teaching job, and be part of the academic world. But as he worked his way through his Masters degree, he began to realize that the academic lifestyle didn't suit him as well as he'd thought. So he took a big chance, and left his program.
Once Joe started learning to code, he also started creating opportunities for himself. He got his first dev job, started creating content, and got more involved in his local tech community. Today, he co-runs a GraphQL meetup, creates courses for Egghead.io, writes articles and makes videos, and speaks at events and conferences regularly.
And in this episode, Joe shares with us exactly how he accomplished all these things not long after typing his first lines of code.
When he's not coding - which isn't very often - you'll find him reading, meditating, getting some exercise, or hanging out with his wife and friends.
This interview is about a 1 hour listen in your favorite podcast player app - just search for "freecodecamp" and you should find it.
If you have an Amazon Echo, you can just say "Alexa - play the freeCodeCamp podcast."
Or you can listen to it right here in your browser.
You can find Joe on Twitter here.
Here are links to the resources, projects, and articles Joe mentioned:
Resources for new startups in the Phoenix area
Joe's side projects, Timezoner and Mentored.dev
A few of Joe's helpful articles on #100DaysofCode, what to do if your internship doesn't lead to a job, how he tracked his #100DaysofCode tweets, and how he made his first open source contribution.
Some great meetups in the Phoenix area: Desert GraphQL and Phoenix ReactJS