freeCodeCamp is a non-profit educational organization that consists of an interactive learning web platform, an online community forum, chat rooms, online publications and local organizations that intend to make learning software development accessible to anyone.
Beginning with tutorials that introduce students to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, students progress to project assignments that they complete either alone or in pairs.
Before founding freeCodeCamp, Quincy Larson was a school director for six years before he started to learn to code so that he could create tools for making schools more efficient.[5] His own journey into learning to code was long and winding[6] and he recognized the need for a single-track curriculum for new developers. Upon analyzing data on coding boot camps in the US and realizing how inaccessible coding education was,[7] he set out to create a fully-online inclusive free platform for peer-driven learning of coding — the result of which is freeCodeCamp. He currently lives in Texas with his family and spends his time working on freeCodeCamp, writing and interviewing authors for the freeCodeCamp publication, co-ordinating open source projects such as Chapter (a free and open-source Meetup alternative),[8] advocating for a free and open internet[9] and playing with his two young kids.
freeCodeCamp was launched in October 2014 and incorporated as Free Code Camp, Inc. The founder, Quincy Larson, is a software developer who took up programming after graduate school and created freeCodeCamp as a way to streamline a student's progress from beginner to being job-ready. In a 2015 podcast interview, he summarized his motivation for creating freeCodeCamp as follows: freeCodeCamp is my effort to correct the extremely inefficient and circuitous way I learned to code. I'm committing my career and the rest of my life towards making this process as efficient and painless as possible. [...] All those things that made learning to code a nightmare to me are things that we are trying to fix with freeCodeCamp.[10] The original curriculum focused on MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js and was estimated to take 800 hours to complete.[11] Many of the lessons were links to free material on other platforms, such as Codecademy, Stanford, or Code School. The course was broken up into “Waypoints” (quick, interactive tutorials), “Bonfires” (algorithm challenges), “Ziplines” (front-end projects), and “Basejumps” (full-stack projects). Completing the front-end and full-stack projects awarded the student with respective certificates.
In this article, we'll explore:
