Jun 27, 2025
On this week's episode of the
podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tai Groot.
He's a back end software engineer and maintains an open source
project used by companies like Google.
For the first half of the interview we talk about back end
programming languages. Then he shares tips for running learning
back end development and running your own developer
consultancy.
We talk about:
- The Performance VS Developer Experience trade-offs of Rust, Go,
and TypeScript
- How to run a free open source project profitably
- How to mentor junior devs and ramp them up to work at your
consultancy
- Why he recommends devs learn Arch Linux
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:
- Tai's website: https://taigrr.com/
- Why Tai doesn't use Salt Stack anymore and how it inspired grlk:
https://taigrr.github.io/blog/so-long-salt-project/
- The promise-breaking app: https://bridgetime.net/
- freeCodeCamp's Arch Linux handbook:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-install-arch-linux/
- The Arch wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page