On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews software engineer and live coding streamer Code;Life.

For those of you watching the video version of this interview, she lives in Iraq and she uses a 3D avatar to protect her identity.

We talk about:

Training language models to work well with low-resource languages from Africa and the Middle East
Growing up in Iraq and her early experiences with computers and the internet
How streaming yourself coding can be a good way to practice your skills, update your knowledge, and motivate fellow devs
How to participate in coding competitions and hackathons even if you feel intimidated

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Support for also comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.

Correction: Quincy mentioned half of all articles on Wikipedia are English. While this is no longer true, as of 2025 half of all Wikipedia pageviews are still for English articles.

Links we talk about:

Quincy's interview with Eammon Cottrell who automated his coffee shop chain: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/self-taught-coding-automating-coffee-shop-chain-eamonn-cottrell-interview-151/
MNIST character dataset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database
Zepeto tool for creating your own V-tuber avatar: https://page.zepeto.me/en/u4EEl3wK89atkdyUiivGEck
Hugging Face AI Agent course (freeCodeCamp also has several courses on this on YouTube but this is the one CL mentioned): https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/en/unit0/introduction
A video of Code;Life doing a Kaggle data science competition: https://youtube.com/live/WGLqd_sGiVA?feature=share

#172 How to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life

The freeCodeCamp Podcast