On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kelly Vaughn. She's a self-taught software engineer who ran her own developer agency. She was also the founding CTO at financial technology startup. Kelly runs the popular Ladybug Podcast focused on women in tech.
We talk about:
How to freelance and ultimately create a developer agency and get clients
Tips for navigating the current developer job market
How to move from freelance to working for someone else
Tips for recognizing burnout so you can know when to take break
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://www.donate.freecodecamp.org
Links we talk about during our conversation:
Kelly's website: https://kvlly.com
The Ladybug Podcast talks about tech, career, and code lead by women in tech: https://ladybug.dev
Kelly's engineering leadership newsletter: https://modernleader.is
Kelly's new burnout-focused newsletter: https://afterburnout.co
Contents
0:00 Platform Over-Reliance and Early Career Lessons
4:03 Learning New Languages Ruby on Rails to Python
6:46 From Neopets to My First Client
10:04 Scaling an Agency to 25 People
13:42 The Agency Rollercoaster and Retainer Wisdom
19:07 Navigating the Direct-to-Consumer Market
24:23 AI Distrust, Creativity, and Augmentation
31:54 The Burnout Revelation Losing Joy
40:02 The Dual Company Struggle and Debt
46:12 The Road to Recovery Paying Off Debt
50:42 Lessons from Running an Agency
56:03 From CEO to Engineering Manager
1:02:59 Understanding and Addressing Burnout
1:13:42 Advice for the Job Hunt
