Monday, May 19, 2025

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

Programming LanguageHow to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life


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:

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.

Check out our other content

Check out other tags:

Most Popular Articles