The earth has rotated 100 times since we started work on the humble Node.js app that would become Free Code Camp.
In that time, our community of coders has exploded, thanks mostly to word of mouth. We haven't advertised or paid anyone anything. The only things that have exchanged hands are knowledge and enthusiasm.
Here's the community of Campers' current progress through our challenges:
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| Our key performance indicator is not how many campers we have, but how many are sticking with coding. |
And our analytics comparing the past 30 days with the 30 days before that:
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| Our analytics all seem to be heading in the right direction. The two months of data displayed here constitute more than half of Free Code Camp's life so far. |
A lot has happened since Halloween. We've:
- launched Gitter.im chatrooms that have grown to represent about 4% of all Gitter accounts
- created a Discourse-powered forum
- refined our curriculum of free, interactive, browser-based JavaScript courses.
- open-sourced our codebase and received a ton of contributions from our Campers and well-meaning non-campers alike
The Next 100 Days
Here are our priorities for the next 100 days:
Helping Campers Complete NonProfit Projects
We've started our inaugural Nonprofit Project intake and will match more Campers with Nonprofit Stakeholders in a couple weeks. We're optimistic that our Nonprofit Projects will result in an engine of developer education and social good that increases the wellbeing of all involved.Further Improving the Accessibilty of Free Code Camp
Some of our Campers are deaf or blind. They've been helpful in identifying our accessibility shortcomings. As a community, we're collaborating to make Free Code Camp a place where everyone can learn to code.Kindling Bonfire
We're building Bonfire: our own in-browser JavaScript challenges. These challenges allow you to edit code in the browser and safely run it. This tool will grow to allow for easy creation of Codecademy-style interactive coding lessons.Expanding our Live Code content on Twitch.tv
The audience for our weekly Live JavaScript Pair Programming sessions grown each week. We'd like to expand our Twitch.tv programming to include all kinds of coding, such as:- contributing to open source libraries
- pair programming on coding challenges
- reviewing new libraries
- building browser-based games
A Big Thanks to all our Campers!
Even though many of our campers have finished the first 100 hours of coursework, there is still a lot of work ahead in preparing for their first coding jobs. We're looking forward to documenting all the challenges we encounter and sharing them with our community and with other schools, right here on our blog.
In the meantime, keep making new friends, and keep coding!