Keeping skills sharp by building side projects

Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prolific streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a "snowboard bum" doing odd jobs at ski resorts to facilitate him spending as much time on the mountain as possible.

At age 28 he taught himself PHP programming and started building websites for friends. In 2018 he started streaming himself programming on Twitch, which blew up during the pandemic and has lead to more opportunities as a dev and developer advocate.

We talk about: - How he learned programming at age 28 and built projects for friends before going pro - How learning Go made him a better Rust Developer and why you should be a polyglot programmer - How Chris uses LLM tools but still builds most codebases manually - Tips for building projects in public for anyone interested in also stream coding

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Links from our discussion: - Chris's Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/cmgriffing - Chris's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@cmgriffing

Community news section:

1. freeCodeCamp just published a comprehensive course that will walk you through using the popular AI-assisted development tool Claude Code. You'll learn about Code Harnesses, Agentic Loops, Sandboxing, and other key concepts. By the end of the course you'll be able to spin up an entire fleet of agents to help you fix bugs and build out new features. (12 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/claude-code-essentials-exampro/

2. We also published a course on the Hugging Face tool ecosystem. You'll learn how to connect your models, datasets, and deployment tools into a single unified build pipeline. (7 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/deploying-ai-models-with-hugging-face/

3. Learn how to secure your Kubernetes Cluster. This in-depth tutorial starts by exploring real-world security breaches at big companies like Tesla, Shopify, and Capital One. Then it walks you through how to prevent each of these types of attacks by hardening your setup. (1 hour read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-secure-a-kubernetes-cluster-handbook/

4. Tell your Spanish-speaking friends: freeCodeCamp just published a new Spanish-language course on SQL and relational databases. It covers tables, foreign keys, queries, data manipulation, and more. (4 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-sql-course-for-beginners-in-spanish/

5. Today's song of the week is the 1988 song by Genesis sideproject Mike + the Mechanics: "Nobody's Perfect". If you like synths and guitar solos, you'll love this song. Paul Young has an incredible voice. And I love the edifying message behind the song. The video is as 80s as they get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7mQ26YCsho