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![From injured athlete to software engineer with Kaleb Garner [Podcast #193]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hM2T45qbIPI/sddefault.jpg)
Kaleb Garner is a software engineer working at a medical technology app company. He got a scholarship to play baseball at a state university, but a serious knee injury ended his career and he dropped out.
After moving back in with his parents and working at an optometry office, he decided to teach himself programming. He used freeCodeCamp and 100Devs to learn for free, and got his first front end developer job when he was only 19. He has since expanded his skills to work on large legacy Python and C# codebases.
We talk about:
- How his Major League Baseball goals and his dream of becoming a doctor ended in the same catastrophic semester
- His grind to get his first developer role after only 20 carefully researched job applications
- Getting laid off right before his wedding and losing all discipline in his frantic job search
- Tips for making your skillset and your network layoff-resilient
Links we discuss:
- Recent NY Times article Quincy mentions about people struggling to find developer jobs ("They're doing it wrong") [paywalled]:
- 1999 movie Office Space trailer about a simpler time in corporate life:
- Leon Noel's 100Devs program and community that Kaleb used alongside freeCodeCamp:
Links from the news section:
1. freeCodeCamp just published an in-depth Harvard course that will teach you SQL and relational databases. You'll learn key concepts like CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). You'll also learn how to normalize data, join tables, and index your
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2025/10/17
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