Saturday, February 22, 2025

How to go full-on Renaissance Man mode in 2025 with Vaughn Gene [Podcast #161]

Programming LanguageHow to go full-on Renaissance Man mode in 2025 with Vaughn Gene


On this week’s episode of the podcast, I interview Vaughn Gene. He’s a self-taught software engineer who works with lots of freelance clients. Vaughn lived in Japan for 10 years, and speaks Japanese, speaks Spanish, plays guitar, plays piano, and is skilled at MMA. He’s obsessed with learning new skills.

We talk about:

  • How Vaughn struggled with high school and joined the Navy

  • How he learned Japanese so he could work as a personal trainer in Japan

  • How he learned coding using freeCodeCamp as a way to make more time and more money

  • His pragmatic approach for teaching himself new skills for free

You can watch the interview on YouTube:

Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you’ll get new episodes each Friday.

Links we talk about during our conversation:

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