May 16, 2025
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
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