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

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

Support for freeCodeCamp comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support our charity through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and aid us in our mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org

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

You can watch the interview on YouTube:

Or you can listen to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow the freeCodeCamp Podcast there so you'll get new episodes each Friday.