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.
 
  
        
        ![How to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life [Podcast #172]](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1747360508340/f07040cd-3eeb-443c-b4fb-370f6a4a14da.png)