#187 How to focus on building your skills when everything's so distracting with Ania Kubów

For this week's interview, I'm talking with Ania Kubów. She's a software engineer and prolific programming teacher on YouTube.

She shares tips for:
- Getting into game development and using JavaScript and browser games as an entry point
- How to keep your focus in an increasingly distracting world
- How AI tools are a jack hammer and you usually just need a regular hammer
- What she's learned from hanging out with Chinese developers
Growing up in Dubai and how the city has changed over the decades

Support for this podcast 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.

Support also comes from the 10,889 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

Links from our conversation:
- Ania's most recent freeCodeCamp course on building your own shopping agent: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/building-an-ai-powered-e-commerce-chat-assistant-with-mongodb/
- Ania's Code with Ania YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/aniakubow
- Ania on X/Twitter: https://x.com/ania_kubow
- Ania's Dubai-based coffee shop chain on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homebrew.ae/
- JS13k games - competition to build games in just 13 kilobytes of JavaScript: https://js13kgames.com/2025/

News items:

The freeCodeCamp community just published this Python Machine Learning course where you'll learn how to control a robotic arm using computer vision. You'll set up serial communication between Python and a cheap Arduino microcontroller board. Then you'll learn how to detect physical objects using the open source Python libraries MediaPipe and OpenCV. You'll also learn how to manipulate servo motors and LED displays. (3 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/use-arduinos-for-computer-vision/

freeCodeCamp also published a course that will help you prepare for the Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps exam under the sun, and he teaches this course. You'll learn about Infrastructure as Code, Serverless Architecture, networking, monitoring, logging, and more. (16 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/prepare-for-the-google-professional-cloud-architect-certification-exam-and-pass/

Three.js is a powerful 3D rendering tool that tons of artists use to build games and interactive experiences that can run right inside a browser. This new freeCodeCamp course will walk you through building 5 practical projects. You'll learn about foundational concepts before moving on to textures, dynamic particle effects, and interactive physics. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/create-3d-web-experiences-with-javascript-and-threejs/

The Bag of Words algorithm is an important method that machine learning engineers have used to turn text into numbers so they can train their models. This tutorial will teach you how Bag of Words works, using Python code examples. It also describes the limitations of Bag of Words, and how scientists have gone on to create Word2Vec, GloVe, and other algorithms for mapping the relationships between words. (10 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-bag-of-words-works/

This week's song of the week is a deep cut from 1981's by Italian Disco singer Ago off their For You album. I love the groove here and the way the bass sits in the mix. Link's in the description. Listen to it after the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9nUjNuYvfg

Interview with AWS CEO (quotes I highlighted come from here. Note that I misspoke and he is not a developer. His path to CEO was through product management): https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/aws-ceo-matt-garman-says-replacing-junior-developers-with-ai-the-dumbest-thing