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How John Washam crammed for 8 months, got a job at Amazon, then taught 1,000s of other devs to do the same [#134]

1 month ago

On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview John Washam, a software engineer at Amazon. John's also creator of one of the most popular open source projects of all time, Coding Interview University.

This is John's first-ever podcast interview, and the first time he's told his story. Interviewing him was an absolute honor.

We talk about:

  • How John delivered pizzas to save enough money to buy his first computer in the 90s. "I was tired of being a broke kid."

  • John's first career in the US military, where he worked as a translator in South Korea

  • How John crammed Computer Science for 8 months and taught himself enough theory and coding skills to get a job in big tech, then published Coding Interview University on GitHub

  • What it's like to work as a senior developer at a big tech company, and what you can expect the journey to be like

Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1986 rock song.

Also, I want to thank the 9,779 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

You can watch the interview on YouTube:

Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday.

Links we talk about during our conversation:

Source: freecodecamp.org

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