Nick Schneeberger is the developer behind Freepublicapis.com, which is no small accomplishment given that he’s also teaching at a university and studying for a data science masters degree at the same time. We’re thrilled to have Nick on the podcast, to give us some insights into how programming is being both taught and learned in the current age.

Nick teaches programming basics, and it was his own students that prompted him to found Freepublicapis.com. Every semester, Nick would have to go through the API list he provided to his students and individually check that those APIs were still up and running. Now he provides this service on a much wider scale, helping not just his students, but anyone looking to use an API, and be confident it actually works.

We speak to Nick about what it’s like to teach coding to beginners. He tells us that it's not so much natural ability, as it is interest that can help people excel. A key skill to develop is being able to find the flaw in your code without losing your cool. It's a tricky thing to teach something that mostly comes with time and experience.

Nick is very open to his students using LLMs to aid in their work. From his perspective, it’s more helpful to teach them how to use it in an effective way. Despite this, he still believes the old school ways are going to stick around too. Start with the whiteboard - then move on to the new technology.

After all, why stick to one way of doing things when you can take something useful from everything?

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Reach out to Nick here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-schneeberger-814645154/

Check out Freepublicapis: https://www.freepublicapis.com/about

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

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