Inspiration
I had a rough time learning to code, which you can read in Business Insider, or on Free Code Camp's blog
How it works
Working professionals learn to code by completing about 100 hours of courses, then building a portfolio of several projects at the direction of nonprofit stakeholders.
Challenges I ran into
We're less than 4 months in, and the nonprofit project coordination is definitely more work than any of the technical or pedagogical challenges so far. Getting a bunch of busy people without professional coding backgrounds from all over the world to come together, plan sprints and remote pair program is challenging, to say the least!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We've had 2,500 "campers" complete our first three challenges, and more than 40 complete all our challenges. We have a team of 20 volunteer Camp Counselors who write code, coordinate nonprofit projects and moderate our forums.
What I learned
No surprises here - get things in front of users as early as possible! I coded the first and second iterations of Free Code Camp in less than a week, and got a ton of feedback from my ~50 daily active users, so I could build to suit their feedback.
What's next for Free Code Camp
We're focusing on helping our nonprofit projects succeed so our campers can have strong portfolios to land coding jobs. We're pursuing other initiatives like our Twitch.tv channel and our own JavaScript algorithm challenges, but the nonprofit projects are our top priority.
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