From freeCodeCamp to NASA with Data Engineer Joe Hill [Podcast #178]

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On this week’s episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Hill. He’s a software engineer who works on a data platform for NASA.

Joe taught himself programming for 4 years while working as a janitor. As the single father of two Autistic boys, he first used his programming skills to build an iPad app to help them learn how to talk.

We talk about:
– Data Engineering and wrangling Department of Defense data into a central platform
– The role of soft skills in getting things done in big organizations
– The need for patience and practice in self-teaching
– How to stop jumping from one tool to another and to instead go deep
– Tips for parents raising kids with Autism

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.

Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity’s mission by going to https://donate.freecodecamp.org

Links we talk about during our conversation:
– The trailer of the 1992 classic hacking heist movie Sneakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEhgUxQ322A
– Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-hill-4a138123/

Contents
00:00 – Intro: Quincy Larson introduces Joe Hill
00:57 – The Tools of a Data Engineer
02:04 – What is PySpark?
02:44 – What are data frames?
04:04 – SQL, Schema, and Data Analysis
05:08 – The importance of asking questions
08:00 – Working with the US federal government
09:40 – Cybersecurity and password managers
11:54 – From janitor to data engineer
14:07 – Joe’s time in the US Army
16:07 – Living with a knee injury
17:01 – Weight training and getting older
19:05 – Raising two sons with autism
20:10 – How Joe got interested in computers
22:15 – Building an iPad app to help his son learn to speak
26:48 – Becoming a janitor while learning to code
28:50 – How Joe’s two sons are doing today
32:34 – Why it’s so important to learn a trade
37:01 – Getting your first developer job may not be at a big tech company
38:27 – How to contribute to open source when you’re a beginner
41:34 – How solving your own problems can be a great way to learn
44:19 – Explaining your work to non-coders
48:26 – How to get buy-in from stakeholders
49:24 – Be more than just a ticket completer
51:12 – Geeking out over the problem, not the tools
52:50 – Working as a government contractor
54:49 – Semper Gumby: always be flexible
57:26 – Using being self-taught to your advantage
58:45 – Will AI take our jobs?
01:02:18 – Learning is the real skill
01:04:47 – How to approach technical interviews as a self-taught developer
01:06:24 – Building community and helping others learn
01:10:10 – What if you fall off the wagon and stop coding for a while?
01:12:30 – A lesson about ego from the TV show Scrubs
01:16:19 – Helping others learn software development
01:20:02 – You can still get a developer job if it takes you years to learn
01:26:24 – What advice would you send back to your younger self?
01:30:11 – Outro Read More freeCodeCamp.org