#172 How to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2025
⏱️ 89 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the FreeCodeCamp podcast. |
| 0:02.9 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org. |
| 0:06.5 | And today I'm talking with software engineer and live coding streamer, code life, aka CL. |
| 0:13.4 | For those of you watching the video version of this interview, CL lives in Iraq, and she uses a 3D v-tuber avatar to protect her identity. |
| 0:23.6 | C.L., welcome to the podcast. |
| 0:25.4 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:28.0 | Yeah, and I want to dive straight into talking about machine learning because that is an area |
| 0:33.0 | that you've spent a lot of time working. |
| 0:35.0 | You were fine-tuning language models for low-resource languages |
| 0:38.9 | back in grad school back in 2018. What is a low-resource language and how has the |
| 0:45.8 | fine-tuning process changed since then? Right. So yes, there has been a lot of progress in working with languages and computers. |
| 0:59.2 | And back in 2017-18, the tools existing were different, especially for languages that are high |
| 1:09.5 | resource like the English language |
| 1:12.2 | and some other European languages and maybe even a language like Chinese that have a lot of |
| 1:18.6 | people on the internet creating content for it. |
| 1:22.6 | But low resource language is a language that even maybe there are many books, many non-digital content |
| 1:30.9 | available, but something like optical character recognition OCR has not been to a level |
| 1:40.9 | that is perfected for it to be used at a mass scale to digitize it. |
| 1:45.7 | There isn't something like thousands or tens of thousands of thousands of Wikipedia pages for it. |
| 1:52.2 | If you see the Wikipedia chart of a number of pages for languages, |
| 1:56.4 | you can see that languages like English are at the top and other, there's a like, you can see a long |
| 2:04.8 | tail of other languages on the chart. And most likely these are low resource languages |
... |
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