#215 How to learn programming and CS in the AI hype era – interview with dev and prof Mark Mahoney

Today Quincy Larson interviews Mark Mahoney. He worked as a dev before becoming a computer science professor. He's taught computer science for 23 years at Carthage College, a 180-year-old US university. He's also taught thousands of developers through his free programming courses built on top of his own open source course platform, Playback Press.

We talk about:

- Why learning programming the hard way is still the right way

- How to not deskill yourself when programming with LLM tools

- And why now is a great time to study computer science

Support for this podcast comes from the 10,113 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at https://donate.freecodecamp.org

Get a freeCodeCamp tshirt for $20 with free shipping anywhere in the US: https://shop.freecodecamp.org

Links from our discussion:

- Playback Press, Mark's free interactive courses: https://playbackpress.com/books

- Mark's personal website: https://markm208.github.io/

- One of the many vibe-coded projects Mark mentions: https://markm208.github.io/vibeCodingInClassTools/git-workflow-simulator.html

- Mark's tutorials on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/markm208/