Ep. 70: How one young developer, masters student, and YouTuber does it all

07/01/19 • 61 min

In this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with Greek developer and designer Eleftheria Batsou about her passion for creating content and how she balances work, school, travel, and personal time.

Eleftheria moved around a lot when she was young, but settled in Thessaloniki in northern Greece as a teenager. When she had to decide which track to take in school, she picked technology, science, and math. It turned out to be a good decision!

After bouncing around a bit and completing some internships, Eleftheria found a place that suited her. She learned to code by supplementing her education with free online resources (like freeCodeCamp!), leveled up her skills by completing numerous challenges like #100DaysofCode, and realized she had a passion for design as well as front-end development.

Today, she works as a developer, she's getting her Master's degree in design, she attends numerous conferences throughout Europe - and speaks at many of them - and she has a growing YouTube channel. She also has a blog where she shares all kinds of tips, tutorials, and bits of knowledge for beginning developers.

When she's not busy juggling her many tasks, she likes to workout to clear her head and hang out with her friends.

Find Eleftheria on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BatsouElef

Visit her website here: eleftheriabatsou.com

When she's not busy juggling her many tasks, she likes to workout to clear her head and hang out with her friends.

Find Eleftheria on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BatsouElef

Visit her website here: eleftheriabatsou.com

Previous Episode

Ep. 69: from successful plumber to full-time developer

On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Abbey chats with self-taught developer Rick West who lives and works in the UK. Rick shares how he went from owning his own successful HVAC business to stumbling upon coding and slowly falling in love with tech.

Even though Rick's plumbing business was booming, he told himself that, by the time he was 30, he wanted to start another career. And he ended up doing just that. After meeting a couple developers through various contracts, he became fascinated with coding. When he had a break between jobs, he started teaching himself the basics.

Not long thereafter, Rick emailed some tech companies and found one that would take a chance on a very junior, very inexperienced developer - and the rest is history. He has just started a new job - as well as a Software Engineering degree - and he's a self-professed constant learner.

When he's not studying or coding, Rick enjoys hanging out with his family and leading a relatively quiet life. In this episode, you'll hear all about how Rick made the big career transition and why. We discuss how his life is different now, what it's like to be enrolled in a degree program while working full time, and how he prioritizes his time - among many other things.

Find Rick on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/rick_west8

Next Episode

Ep. 71: Harvard CS50's David Malan and Colton Ogden on Computer Science

CS50 is the most popular course at Harvard, and hundreds of thousands of people have taken the free online version of the course as well.

We recently posted the lectures for the course on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel - including the CS50 game development course - all free and commercial-free.

During this interview, David Malan and Colton Ogden talk about how they got into technology. They share tips for how to effectively learn computer science, and some advice for teachers and community leaders as well.

Colton shares one of his favorite game development hacks, and David tell us the story behind the CS50 catchphrase: "this is CS50"

Follow CS50 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cs50

Subscribe to the CS50 podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cs50-podcast/id1459708246

Test out CS50's Integrated Development Environment: https://ide.cs50.io/

And CS50's Sandbox: https://sandbox.cs50.io/

The article Colton mentions about Resident Evil 2 on N64 (PDF): https://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GD_Mag_Archives/GDM_September_2000.pdf

The Steve Ballmer CS50 guest lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lhlKF6MECs

And Steve Ballmer's sales pitch of CS50 itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El2mr5aS8y0

Fun fact: Brian Kernighan, whom David mentions as the CS50 teacher who preceded him, is also the co-creator of the C programming language. He's even has his own card in freeCodeCamp Programmer Playing Cards: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/introducing-programmer-playing-cards-d3eeeffe9a11/