Ten years of freeCodeCamp (Friends)
At the tail end of 2019, we got together with Quincy Larson to celebrate ten years of Changelog & five years of freeCodeCamp by recording back-to-back episodes on each other’s pods. Can you believe it’s now five years later and we’re all still here doing our thing?! Let’s learn what Quincy and the amazing community at freeCodeCamp have been up to!
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 7 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Speakeasy – Production-ready, enterprise-resilient, best-in-class SDKs crafted in minutes. Speakeasy takes care of the entire SDK workflow to save you significant time, delivering SDKs to your customers in minutes with just a few clicks! Create your first SDK for free!
AssemblyAI – Turn voice data into summaries with AssemblyAI’s leading Speech AI models. Built by AI experts, their Speech AI models include accurate speech-to-text for voice data (such as calls, virtual meetings, and podcasts), speaker detection, sentiment analysis, chapter detection, PII redaction, and more.
Wix Studio – Wix Sudio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE. Leverage zero set up dev, test and production environments. Ship faster with an AI code assistant. And work with Wix headless API’s on any tech stack.
Featuring:
Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Five years of freeCodeCamp (Changelog Interviews #369)
Ten years of Changelog (Backstage #9)
How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job [Full Book]
Learn to Code RPG – A Visual Novel Video Game Where you Learn Computer Science Concepts
podcast - freeCodeCamp.org
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
S26:E3 - Learning to Code with a Full-Time Job (Beau Carnes)
In this week’s episode, Saron chats with Beau Carnes, Director of Technology Education at freeCodeCamp. Beau shares insights into his career trajectory, which began in television and digital media production. After gaining initial experience in this industry, he transitioned to work in education as a teacher. Beau speaks on his experiences within both these professions and speaks on his decision to venture into technology, establishing himself as a proficient software developer. During this conversation, Beau shares his reasoning for getting three degrees, finding the motivation to learn to code while balancing the demands of a full-time job, and sending out cold emails for his first job in tech.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
FAANG
Beau's GitHub
Beau's Twitter
FreeCodeCamp
JavaScript
Beau Carnes
Beau is a software developer and teacher. He manages the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel and creates many resources to help people learn software development.
S19:E7 - How freeCodeCamp has evolved over time (Quincy Larson)
In this episode, we talk about the evolution of freeCodeCamp with the teacher who founded freeCodeCamp, Quincy Larson. Quincy talks about creating the online learning resource he wished he had when he transitioned mid-career into tech, how freeCodeCamp has grown over time in community and content, and what the future of freeCodeCamp holds.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
freeCodeCamp
Visual Basic
Head First Programming
Project Euler
JavaScript
Rust
Visual Studio Code
SQL
PostgreSQL
WordPress
Python
Django
Node.js
COBOL
HTML
CSS
Git
Linux
C
Learn to Code RPG – A Visual Novel Video Game Where you Learn Computer Science Concepts
Web3
Jupyter Notebook
The Coding Bootcamp Handbook: Immersive Engineering Programs Explained
Quincy Larson
Quincy Larson is a JavaScript developer and the teacher who founded Free Code Camp.
Extending the legacy of Admiral Grace Hopper
In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss.
Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL.
Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s.
Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?
We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
#199 – The Future of Teaching with Darrell Silver of Thinkful and Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp
One of the best ways to build a successful business as an indie hacker is to teach people a valuable skill. So in this episode, I sat down to talk to you two of the best educators that I know. Darrell Silver (@darrellsilver) is the founder of Thinkful (an online learning service that's helped thousands of students get high paying jobs in tech) and Quincy Larson (@ossia), the founder of freeCodeCamp.
We’ll get into some of the best ways for indie hackers to get started as educators and the economics behind an education business.
• Learn to code on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/
• Follow Quincy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ossia
• Check out Thinkful: https://www.thinkful.com/
• Follow Darrell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/darrellsilver
Leading a non-profit unicorn (Interview)
This week we’re talking about the future of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson and what it’s taken to build it into the non-profit unicorn that it is. They’re expanding their Python section into a full-blown data science curriculum and they’ve launched a $150,000 fundraiser to make it happen with 100% dollar-for-dollar matching up to the first $150,000 thanks to Darrell Silver.
As you may know, we’re big fans of Quincy and the work being done at freeCodeCamp, so if you want to back their efforts as well, learn more and donate.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit.
LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits.
Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is our dashboard of choice – Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.
Featuring:
Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
We’re Building a Data Science Curriculum with Advanced Mathematics and Machine Learning
Why I’m donating $150k to freeCodeCamp to help fund their advanced math & machine learning curriculum
freeCodeCamp in 2020 (and other year-end facts)
The Changelog #369: Five years of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson
The Best Tech Podcasts for Software Developers in 2021
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Quincy Larson, Founder of freeCodeCamp - Part Two
Quincy Larson might be responsible for at least one very important part of your career: the beginning. That's because Quincy is the founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit teaching millions of people to code.
In this and the last episode we talk all about what it means to be a beginner.
✨ Sponsor: Square
Square's Terminal API makes payments easy, whether in person, in-app, or both. Process payments on every platform imaginable. Get started today at https://developertea.com/square
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com/contact.
If you would like to join the new experimental DIscord group, reach out at developertea.com/contact, developertea@gmail.com, or @developertea on Twitter.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
Quincy Larson, Founder of freeCodeCamp - Part One
Quincy Larson might be responsible for at least one very important part of your career: the beginning. That's because Quincy is the founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit teaching millions of people to code.
In this and the next episode we talk all about what it means to be a beginner.
✨ Sponsor: Square
Square's Terminal API makes payments easy, whether in person, in-app, or both. Process payments on every platform imaginable. Get started today at https://developertea.com/square
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com/contact.
If you would like to join the new experimental DIscord group, reach out at developertea.com/contact, developertea@gmail.com, or @developertea on Twitter.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
AMA 1: freeCodeCamp’s Quincy Larson answers founder and developer questions
freeCodeCamp Founder Quincy Larson answers questions from his exclusive AMA only on This Week in Startups' Slack!
If you’d like to participate in exclusive AMAs, jam sessions, and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 20,000+ founders, join us at: https://launchevents.typeform.com/to/kLq5Bi
Watch Quincy on E1049: https://youtu.be/OgxTDl2Z9II
Follow Quincy: https://twitter.com/ossia
Check out freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/
Thanks to Klaviyo, Fiverr and Mint Mobile for keeping this AMA ad free!
Questions:
0:33 Emin asks: What is the best tactic to build an award-winning dev team? Hire junior developers and incubate them or hire more senior people?
4:29 Rob asks: What does FCC moving to a project-based curriculum look like for someone with a moderate programming background, and where should they start approaching the freeCodeCamp curriculum?
5:41 Ilya asks: What are your thoughts on remote work for developers post COVID. What are the biggest challenges companies are facing? And how can candidates stand out in a remote job interview?
7:55 Swyx asks: What are your thoughts on SEO/building a media empire out of FCC? What about keeping FCC.org nonprofit, but making FreeCodeCamp’s YouTube and Content presence for profit?
11:06 Farjad asks: What is your advice on contributing to open-source projects like FCC and when it is appropriate/how to begin? Do I have to become an expert first? How can a beginner contribute?
13:27 James asks: Many online courses and MOOCS have high drop off rates and struggle to retain users. Have you found this with freeCodeCamp and, if so, what measures have you found work best to keep people learning?
16:40 Brady asks: What are the plans for future courses? Will there be other languages or frameworks included?
20:40 Cpulido asks: I am new to coding. I have a vision of what I want to build but I am wondering if I am being too ambitious. How do I effectively learn and build at the same time?
23:24 Jean asks: In an age of low-code and no-code, what are your thoughts on total beginners exploring a new career path today?
28:01 Luke asks: Which other founders/leaders and companies in the free code/online learning space do you think are also doing great work for the community?
30:14 Charles asks: Is there a place for those that are passionate but don't think they could ever be a great coder? Are the skills learned at FCC transferable or useful for gaining employment in another part of the tech/startup industry?
31:55 Jacqui asks: I'm curious about your experience teaching in China. What ages and subjects did you teach, and what are some differences you've seen between the education systems in the US and China and how do those differences play out into careers?
36:47 Heidi asks: As a nonprofit (public charity), what do you find is the most difficult part of soliciting donations? Is it easier to get corporations to buy into what you’re building/doing or 1:1/community to give donations?
E1049: freeCodeCamp Founder Quincy Larson shares insights on democratizing developer skills, which programs to learn to land a coding job, if anyone can learn to code, maximizing earning potential & more!
0:50 Jason thanks the front-line workers & intros freeCodeCamp's Quincy Larson
7:45 Why & how did Quincy start freeCodeCamp? What is freeCodeCamp?
12:16 Jason & Quincy discuss starting & running large online communities, benefits of Discord & Slack
15:36 Can you jump right in on freeCodeCamp.org? What types of certifications do they offer?
17:38 COVID-19's impact on user growth & why Quincy is emulating Red Cross, YMCA & other non-profits
21:19 Do they track outcomes at freeCodeCamp, how do they compare to Lambda School?
26:05 Can anyone become a web developer? How many hours would it take for an average high school graduate to be able to build a 1.0 version of Twitter or Shopify?
35:09 Quincy shares some freeCodeCamp success stories
41:21 What's the quickest way to get a job through coding? What program should an aspirational developer start learning first?
45:57 Should new developers prioritize mobile development to maximize earning potential?
48:24 What % of freeCodeCamp users are non-US? Which country has shown the most potential?
50:44 What does the post-COVID world look like for developers?
53:21 freeCodeCamp's developer cards project
We got confs on lockdown
Emma, Divya, and Suz are joined by Quincy Larson from freeCodeCamp where they chat about virtual conferences. Are they better than in-person conferences? What are the differences? Let’s find out!
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Gatsby Cloud – Incremental builds are here! Enjoy build times for your Gastby site up to 1000x times faster than ever before. This is the feature you’ve been waiting for. It’s totally free for personal projects and single purpose sites. Read all about it and get started at gatsbyjs.com/changelog
Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
Featuring:
Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, X
Suz Hinton – GitHub, Mastodon, X
Emma Bostian – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Divya – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
Free Code Camp
Lockdown Conf
NG-Conf
Perf Matters
Live Coders Conf
Concatenate Conf
Hashnode
Base Rebels
Monster Cat
The Big Mac Index
Egghead.io
JS Party I Do, We Do, You Do with Jason Lengsdorf
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Five years of freeCodeCamp (Interview)
Today we have a very special show for you – we’re talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But, on today’s episode we catch up with Quincy on all things freeCodeCamp.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (Amsterdam 2020) – Get an additional 10% off registration with the code KCEUGOTIME. Learn more and register.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Square – The Square developer team just launched their new developer YouTube channel. Head to youtube.com/squaredev or search for “Square Developer” on YouTube to learn more and subscribe.
Featuring:
Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Go back and listen to The Changelog #195, Quincy’s first appearance here on The Changelog
The Future of freeCodeCamp.org - Lessons From 5 Years of Teaching the World to Code
The Future of the freeCodeCamp Forum
WeWork is Desperately Squeezing Cash Out of Meetup.com by Taxing 225,000 Communities
Every donation you’ve ever made to freeCodeCamp is now tax deductible
Check out the freeCodeCamp podcast
freeCodeCamp Chapter - a self-hosted event management tool for nonprofits
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
#056 – Following Your Passion to Build an Impactful Business with Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp
Quincy Larson (@ossia) explains how he's built freeCodeCamp into a community that helps millions of people learn to code every month by engaging in storytelling, encouraging open-source contributions, and focusing on accessibility to people across every income bracket worldwide.
Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/056-quincy-larson-of-freecodecamp
Ep. 146 - Codeland - Mentorship, Technical Blogging, and Open Source Talks from Katrina Owen, Quincy Larson, and Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Katrina Owen, Quincy Larson, Nell Shamrell-Harrington)
In our final episode of our Codeland mini-series, Katrina Owen shares what it really takes to get that mentor you've always wanted, Quincy Larson gives us his best practices for writing technical blog posts people will actually read, and Nell Shamrell-Harrington explores what it really takes for an open source project to be successful and what you should know as a future contributor.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Sample Testing Guide
How to read Medium articles people will actually read
CodeNewbie YouTube channel
Continuous Integration (CI)
Open Source Governance
Sample Code of Conduct
Travis CI
Sample Contribution Guide
Be Lucky—it’s an easy skill to learn by Richard Wiseman
Codeland, CodeNewbie's conference - April 21 and 22 in NYC
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Katrina Owen
Katrina is an open source advocate at GitHub. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for leveling up your programming skills.
Quincy Larson
Quincy is a teacher at freeCodeCamp.com. Editor of Medium's largest technical publication.
Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a theatre student turned Sr. Software Engineer by way of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Chef, regular expressions, and DevOps technologies. She has governed multiple open source projects, which have taken the collaboration skills she learned in the theatre to new heights. She is also the scholarship chair of and a mentor with Operation Code - a non-profit which teaches coding skills to active duty military personnel, their dependents, and veterans transitioning into civilian life.
freeCodeCamp (Interview)
Quincy Larson is the creator of an open source community called freeCodeCamp. We talked with Quincy about “the secret to getting good at coding”, their curriculum that spans a solid year (totaling 2,080 hours) of deliberate coding practice, plans for financial sustainability of the project, and the people behind it on the leading/teaching side and the camper side.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Codeship's Docker Platform – Join this free webinar from Codeship — Co-founders Florian Motlik and Manuel Weiss will discuss their new Continuous Integration and Delivery Platform with Native Docker support
DigitalOcean Block Storage – Use the code CHANGELOG to get a $10 hosting credit when you create a new DigitalOcean account
Opbeat for Node.js – Build faster Node.js apps. Instantly pinpoint performance issues, and optimize your code. Install in minutes.
Pulse – Realtime cloud and infrastructure monitoring with visualization and alerting so you can monitor your blind spots.
Featuring:
Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Subscribe to Changelog Nightly
Subscribe to Changelog Weekly
Quincy Larson on Medium
freeCodeCamp
Santa Barbara Hackerspace
GitHub’s All Time Top Repositories
Why Software Is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen
Sebastian Thrun on Wikipedia
Daphne Koller on Wikipedia
Andrew Ng on Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia
Agency (sociology) on Wikipedia
LoopBack
MEAN.IO - MongoDB, Express, Angularjs Node.js powered fullstack web framework
Free Code Camp’s First Month - Medium
Learn to Code by Coding - Medium
lichess.org • Free Online Chess
Opportunity cost
#165: Everyone’s Welcome Here (Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast)
5 Coding Podcasts to Enlighten your Commute - Medium
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Ep. 63 - Free Code Camp (Quincy Larson)
He’s only been coding for four years. But thirteen months ago, Quincy Larson launched one of the most beloved learn-to-code resources in the CodeNewbie community, Free Code Camp. We deep dive into his own learning journey, what he’s learned from helping hundreds of thousands of campers learn to code, and why Free Code Camp will forever be free.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
MOOC
Project Euler
Node
NPM
Odin Project
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Quincy Larson
Quincy Larson is a JavaScript developer and the teacher who founded Free Code Camp.