Aug 8, 2025
On this week's episode of the
podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Edidiong
Asikpo. Didi is a software engineer. She grew up in Lagos, the
biggest city in Nigeria and the biggest tech hub in Africa.
Didi got into medical school. But while waiting for her studies to
start, she started studying computer science and got really into
it. She graduated with a CS degree and has worked in tech for
nearly a decade. She now works at MongoDB, a cloud database
company, remotely from her home in London.
We talk about:
- Nigeria's tech scene
- How to break into tech when you live outside the Sillicon Valley
ecosystem
- How to transition from one programming language to another (Didi
moved from mobile apps -> DevOps)
- How writing programming tutorials can help you become a better
developer
Support for this podcast 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.
Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support
freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill
human beings and help our charity's mission by going to
https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Didi's website: https://edidiongasikpo.com/
- Didi's freeCodeCamp tutorial with career advice:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-kickstart-a-career-in-tech/
- Open Data Kit - the first open source project Didi contributed
to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODK_(software)