#182 Abandoning med school to become a software engineer with Edidiong Asikpo
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
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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)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. |
| 0:05.8 | Today, we're talking with Adidioong, A seek po. |
| 0:09.7 | Didi is a software engineer. |
| 0:11.1 | She grew up in Lagos, the biggest city in Nigeria, and the biggest tech hub in Africa. |
| 0:17.1 | Didi got into medical school, but while she was waiting for her studies to start, she started |
| 0:21.6 | studying computer science at a local school, and she got really into it. |
| 0:25.6 | She graduated with the CS degree a few years later and has worked in tech for nearly a decade. |
| 0:31.4 | She now works at MongoDB, a cloud database company remotely from her home in London. |
| 0:54.3 | Edidion, Asikpo, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, and of course, your friends all call you Didi. Dedi codes is what you're known as on social media. So I will be calling you Diti throughout the interview. That's cool with you. That's fantastic. Yeah. |
| 0:54.5 | Absolutely. |
| 0:55.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:56.1 | So first of all, I know that you have gone through a lot of transitions as a developer |
| 1:01.0 | over the years. |
| 1:02.0 | You were an Android dev and then you switched to web dev. |
| 1:05.1 | And now you're doing more DevOps engineering type work. |
| 1:09.4 | What has been the single hardest thing for you to learn along the way in terms of like |
| 1:14.3 | specific skills or technologies? |
| 1:17.1 | That's an interesting question. |
| 1:19.1 | I think I would take Kubernetes to be honest. |
| 1:21.8 | Like it was, I think it was like a never-ending thing to learn. |
| 1:26.1 | Right. |
| 1:26.3 | I remember when I joined this company and then one of the things I really had to work on was like Kubernetes. I had to get up to speed as quick as possible. So today I'm like, oh my God, I know this thing about Kubernetes. I'm currently learning about pods and I'm so happy that I now understand how pods andets work. And just when you feel like you've |
... |
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