Rishab grew up in India and moved to Canada for school. But he couldn't afford to finish. He resorted to delivering pizzas and working at a gas station. But he worked hard to teach himself how to code and how to build cloud infrastructure, and eventually got a job Google.

We talk about:

• How to teach yourself cloud engineering

• Getting repeatedly rejected from FAANG jobs but persisting

• Filling up the Infinity Gauntlet with cloud certifications

• How DevOps and Cloud Engineering are changing

Support for this podcast comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

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Links we talk about during our conversation:

• Rishab's Terraform course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-terraform-to-deploy-a-site-on-google-cloud-platform/

• Rishab's LangChain LLM deployment course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-langchain-for-llm-development/

• Learn to Cloud guide by Rishab and his friend at Microsoft, Gwyn: https://learntocloud.guide/

• Rishab's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@rishabincloud/videos

We talk about Andrew's early career fixing computers in the 90s, and his early freelance web development work. These ultimately lead to jobs and promotions that leveled him up to CTO.

Andrew also shares his advice to devs who want to learn DevOps and Cloud Engineering, and which certs to prioritize.

Andrew suffers from Muscle Tension Dysphonia, a disease that causes voice loss. He shares how he's using AI tools to get around this.

Andrew also talks about his love of Tetris Attack (also known as Panel de Pon or Pokémon Puzzle League). He built a frame-perfect port for competitive online play.

And of course, Andrew's favorite Star Trek episodes of all time.

Can you guess what bass line I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's the theme from a 90s cartoon.

You can watch the interview on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel:

Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. You can also listen to the podcast below, right in your browser:

Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.

Also, I want to thank the 8,427 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 the interview:

Just a few of Andrew's many freeCodeCamp cloud cert prep courses. (He has dozens more on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel).

His website, ExamPro.co

American Mall simulator browser game by Bloomberg

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