Aug 22, 2025
On this week's episode of the
podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Emmett
Naughton. He worked as hospital janitor for years while teaching
himself programming using freeCodeCamp. He's founder of Coder Dads,
a chat community where dads encourage one another.
We talk about:
- Making ends meet while raising a family
- Recovering from getting laid off twice in the same year
- Emmet's journey into the PHP Laravel ecosystem as a full stack
JavaScript developer
- How to use social media effectively when you don't like using
social media
- Emmett's sleep apnea and how fixing his sleep dramatically
improved his thinking and coding
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
donate.freecodecamp.org
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Emmett's website with dozens of blog posts:
https://emmettnaughton.com/
- The Coder Dads community: https://coderdads.carrd.co/