For this week's interview, I'm talking with Ankur Tyagi. He's a software engineer who's worked at multinational companies like Volvo, Barclays, and Accenture. He grew up in Pune, India and now lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. Ankur is a prolific contributor to freeCodeCamp's open source learning resources. He also runs DevTools Academy, where he blogs about emerging developer tools. He shares tips for: - How he uses AI tools to get more done as a dev but... - He thinks leveraging AI is a skill any dev can learn, and we shouldn't worry about fewer dev jobs. - How to run you own developer consultancy - How writing programming tutorials can help you become a better engineer 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 News items: → freeCodeCamp just published our first-ever chess course, taught by a software engineer on our team who has an international ELO rating of 2285, putting him among top competitive players. Ihechikara Abba will teach you how to think strategically and checkmate your opponents. This beginner-level course starts off with algebraic chess notation and identifying the squares. Then you'll learn several endgame patterns. We published both a handbook and an accompanying YouTube course for you to reference and share with your friends. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/checkmate-patterns-in-chess-for-beginners → freeCodeCamp also published this comprehensive course on how to build your own AI shopping agent. Software Engineer Ania Kubów will teach you how to use Node, TypeScript, LangChain's LangGraph, Gemini, MongoDB, and other popular tools to build your agent. By the end of this course, your agent will be able to autonomously perceive, plan, act, and respond to your users. It will also be able to decide when it has enough information to respond, and when it needs to first reach out for external information by searching product databases. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/building-an-ai-powered-e-commerce-chat-assistant-with-mongodb/ → Last month Alibaba dropped the latest version of their Qwen LLM and already the freeCodeCamp community has a comprehensive course on how to train it from scratch. You'll learn about its architecture, Training Hyperparameters, Muon Optimization, RoPE Positional Embeddings, inference, text generation, and more. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-and-train-qwen3-from-scratch/ → freeCodeCamp also published this guide to the field of System Design, written by a who applies the principles both to software development and to his day-to-day life. You'll learn about scalability issues, the CAP Theorem, Caching & CDNs, Rate Limiting, and other key concepts. (50 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-key-system-design-principles-behind-high-traffic-platforms-like-gaming-and-job-discovery/ → This week YouTube channel Gamer's Nexus posted a 3 hour documentary about China and the Graphics chips they've been using to train their AI models. The video has been copyright claimed multiple times by Bloomberg and taken down, but people keep re-uploading it. It's pretty awesome. The channel host travels to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Shenzhen, and Singapore to interview people along the process who are obtaining this hardware both legally and illegally. Note that this link I'm sharing may already been taken down by the time you click it, but you can search "gamers nexus GPU" and you should be able to find it. 3.5 hour watch: https://www.youtube.