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

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: