Backend Banter

In this episode, we sit down with Quincy Larson, founder of Free Code Camp, to explore his incredible path from high school dropout to influential tech educator. Quincy shares his unconventional journey — from living in his car and working fast food jobs to building one of the most impactful coding education platforms in the world.

We discuss the power of self-learning, the evolution of coding education, and the philosophy behin...

Today we welcome Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty, a new terminal emulator built in Zig. In this episode, Mitchell shares the story behind Ghostty, how his curiosity about terminals evolved into a full-fledged project, and why Zig became his language of choice.

We also dive into Ghostty’s unique features, the role of libghostty, and why Mitchell believes native-feeling apps are essential for dev...

Today we welcome Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, to discuss the evolution of frontend development and the role of AI in shaping modern engineering workflows.

Malte dives into V0, Vercel's innovative tool for generating frontend code using AI, and explains how it empowers developers—especially backend engineers—to build full-stack applications.

We also explore the concept of verticalization in engineering roles, the challenges of balancin...

Today we welcome Madison Kana—a self-taught dev who defied the traditional path. From dropping out and navigating a world of homeschooling to launching the Code Book Club, Madison transformed her unconventional journey into a thriving community of coders. In this episode, she shares how bypassing the typical education route fueled her passion, the real challenges of learning on your own, and the power of mentorship in building a dy...

This time Elliot from  @dreamsofcode  joins us to talk about building his own course platform we dive into why he chose to go custom, the tech stack behind his platform, and the philosophy of building vs. buying in software.

We also discuss the challenges of teaching programming, the role of AI in development, and what it really takes to create a great online course. If you're into coding, education, or the intersection of both, th...

Today we bring Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi, a free code-based music creation and performance tool that lets you use simple code to turn your computer into a fully networked live coding music studio! It is also used to engage students in computer science and programming through music creation!

In this episode, we explore the origins of Sonic Pi, its deep connection with Raspberry Pi, and how it enables live coding for music cr...

Today, we bring a very special guest, one whose face you might recognise, one that appears on your homepages with a sporadic video and seemingly disappears. His name is Benjamin Burke, or simply Ben, he’s the co-creator of KRAZAM, a channel that consists of sketches that combine grotesque and absurdist humor with technological anxiety, satirizing the tech industry and the modern alienation of the corporate life in general.

In this e...

Lane chats with Chris Ferdinandi—creator of Go Make Things and ADHD for the Win—a frontend dev, educator, and all-around expert in making JavaScript (and learning) simpler. Chris has built a career helping devs cut through the noise, level up their skills, and embrace ADHD-friendly ways to stay focused and productive.

We dive into his journey from discovering his own ADHD to reshaping how people learn to code. We talk about why so...

We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.

With a passion to help others learn and find jobs, Danny shares his stories and insights that he gained throughout his extensive and fascinating career! From working as a cashier to now giv...

This week on Backend Banter, we’re joined by Ryan Fleury, a talented game developer currently working with Epic Games on their Rad Debugger project. Ryan shares his journey from building games to creating powerful developer tools, offering insights into arenas, memory management, and the fascinating world of programming from the ground up.

In this episode, we dive deep into memory management, exploring the differences between stac...

We're back for Backend Banter Season 2, and we bring a very special guest, José Valim, the creator of the Elixir Programming Language, one of the most popular and loved functional programming languages of today. (Fun fact: it's used in production at Discord).

We cover the nitty-gritty of the language, ranging from simple topics such as the decision behind not making Elixir be statically typed, into the more complex cross-machine c...

Today, we bring you the final episode of the first season of Backend Banter! It’s a wrap up for now. With 69 episodes behind us, we want to tell you the story of Boot Dev and how far we’ve come from our beginnings, and for that, we bring Allan Lires, the first official employee and the second person to work on our platform!

We’re going to cover our entire timeline, achievements, hardships, how Lane and Allan were able to go a...

Today we welcome Chuck Carpenter aka Charles The 3rd, co-host at Whiskey Web and Whatnot.

As two content creators in the tech scene, we discuss if and how celebrity developers and tech influencers are a good thing for the community, how we should be careful when choosing technologies based on influencers’ opinions, why so many people nowadays want to speedrun their whole career and how that could be self-sabotage, and a lot mo...

In today’s episode, we bring back Aaron Francis. If you haven’t watched our previous episode with him, he is a software developer, fellow content creator and co-founder of Try Hard Studios. In the past he’s been an accountant at a Big 4 but now he focuses on Laravel, web development and all things business and video.

This episode will step away from the usual tech focused content and we’ll talk a bit more about the business si...

In today’s episode, we bring Adam Argyle, a CSS Dev Rel at Google, content creator, co-host at CSS Podcast, Bad At CSS Podcast and host of GUI Challenges. He’s also the creator of a bunch of tools and utilities for the front-end.

We’re going to touch on a lot of hot topics, regarding the difficulty and power of CSS, how programmers most of the time underestimate and dismiss it as something trivial when in reality it’s one of t...

In today’s episode, we welcome Matt Pocock, an educator, content creator and engineer who used to be a voice coach. Now, he teaches Typescript on his YouTube channel and is building Total Typescript, the most comprehensive TypeScript course available out there.

We talk about his transition from a completely unrelated field into tech, the importance of great communication, TypeScript’s future, AI tooling and job hunts! A lot mo...

In today’s episode, we welcome Lawrence Lockhart, a former hospitality manager turned full stack software developer. Apart from his tech job, he’s also a developer advocate, a teaching assistant at a coding bootcamp and a tech meetup leader, so you know he spends a lot of his time helping others build and transfer their existing skills into tech, being a powerful voice in the tech space for upcoming developers.

Today we talk b...

In today’s episode, we bring Spiro Floropoulos, a senior developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. This episode is an unusual one, as Spiro recently got laid off due to a bizarre chain of events that involved HTMX, overworking, and technical debt.

But we’ll learn from this story, as we want to shed some light on how situations that Spiro described could be avoided, namely how the tech industry is obsessing over...

In today’s episode, we go to war with Sam Selikoff, co-host of the Frontend First podcast, and specialist on everything Frontend related.

We have an amazing conversation where we discuss Sam’s journey, as he also did some backend work in the past, we talk about abstractions, what JavaScript is doing differently from other languages and frameworks, why the frontend should be driving the backend and not the other way around, an...