Making Developer Friends Anywhere, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life [Podcast #172]

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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

Chapters

0:00:00 Introduction to Low Resource Languages and Machine Learning
0:05:04 The Importance of Data in Language Models
0:09:59 Fine-Tuning Language Models for Specific Tasks
0:15:01 Growing Up in Iraq and Learning English
0:19:58 The Impact of English on Opportunities
0:25:03 Navigating the Arabic Language Internet
0:26:21 Exploring the Education System
0:29:28 Journey into Computer Science
0:32:24 The Role of Free Code Camp
0:35:24 Career Progression and Development
0:38:25 Navigating Job Applications
0:41:19 Pursuing Graduate Education
0:44:22 Building a Developer Community
0:58:42 Building Community in Tech
1:01:10 The Power of Live Streaming for Learning
1:04:05 Creating a Learning Routine
1:08:51 Practical Tips for Aspiring Streamers
1:13:13 Curating Your Learning Resources
1:16:04 Language Learning Through Entertainment
1:18:53 Balancing Comfort and Challenge
1:24:26 Investing in Yourself for Future Security Read More freeCodeCamp.org