Today Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Rose. She's a dev and teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla and lots of open source projects.

We talk about:
- How the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better thinker
- The Bad Website club, a free online bootcamp where people learn front end development together that starts this April
- Why building "silly little things" is one of the best things you can do as a learner

Links from our discussion:
- Bad Website Club announcement: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/bad-website-club-bootcamp-based-on-freecodecamp-rwd-cert/
- Study Jess mentions about AI and worker productivity: https://www.raconteur.net/technology/ai-meaningful-work 

Community news section:

1. freeCodeCamp just published a new Python course that will teach you how to program your own aerial drone. You don't need to own a drone. You'll use the PySimverse simulator to practice autonomous flight. First you'll learn the basics of drone components, 3D movement, and common computer vision tasks. Then you'll learn about navigation, image capture, hand gesture control, autonomous following, and more. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/master-ai-drone-programming/

2. freeCodeCamp also published a massive course that will teach you how to program NVIDIA's H100 GPUs using CUDA. You'll learn about CUTLASS optimizations, multi-GPU scaling, and the primitives developers use to train large models. (24 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cuda-programming-for-nvidia-h100s

3. If you've ever wanted to build a video editor or live streaming tool that runs entirely in a browser, this handbook is worth bookmarking. You'll see how the WebCodecs API can give you low-level, hardware-accelerated control over video processing. You'll learn key concepts like video frames, codecs, containers, and muxing. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-webcodecs-handbook-native-video-processing-in-the-browser/

4. Kubernetes doesn't have a built-in user database. Instead it relies on a chain of authenticators. This course will teach you how x509 client certificates work, why they're not ideal for human users in production, and how to instead deploy your own self-hosted browser-based OpenID Connect login. (29 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-authenticate-users-in-kubernetes-x509-certificates-oidc-and-cloud-identity/

5. The song of the week is 1983's "Oblivious" by Scottish New Wave band Aztec Camera. I love the song's Django Reinhart-style Flamenco guitars, mischevous bass line, and stereo percussion. Believe it or not, front man Roddy Frame was only 18 years old when he wrote the song, sang it, and played it's iconic guitar solo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdVb4Iuq0e8

freeCodeCamp is a nonprofit organization offering free online coding courses and programming tutorials, covering topics such as web development, data science, and machine learning. Learners can gain practical coding skills, build real-world projects, and earn certifications to advance their careers in tech.

freeCodeCamp

Jessica Rose, developer and educator, discusses the Bad Website Club — a free, no-signup online boot camp launching in April that teaches front-end web development using freeCodeCamp's responsive web design curriculum. The conversation covers the value of embracing difficulty and friction in learning, skepticism toward AI tools replacing genuine understanding, the hype and overload of JavaScript frameworks, and why foundational HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills remain relevant. Jessica shares her personal journey from a difficult background to tech, and explains why she runs the boot camp out of spite against predatory paid boot camps — to give others the same breaks she received.

How to friction-max your learning with software engineer Jessica Rose [Podcast #216]