Hey friends, March was a long month. April may be even longer.
I hope you and your family are staying safe during this pandemic.
I realize that in the coming months, many of us face the prospect of losing a loved one to this disease. And many of us will contract this disease ourselves, and will struggle to overcome it.
The doctors, nurses, scientists, and other front line folks are doing the urgent work of helping us get through the pandemic with as few deaths as possible.
We teachers at freeCodeCamp are doing much less urgent work. We are creating free online resources so you can expand your skills, improve your career options, and provide for your families.
So again – I want to acknowledge that this is a hard time. It is OK to just focus on your family, and your own well being.
But if you do want to learn some new technology skills, and get a firmer grasp on theory, we're here to help.
And toward that goal, I have 3 big announcements today to help you achieve this.
Announcement #1: #LockdownConf - A Free Online Developer Conference
freeCodeCamp is hosting a free online developer conference on our YouTube channel on April 14. That's right – it's only a few days away.
Here are the topics we'll cover during this 4-hour conference:
- How to learn new skills while social distancing
- How to work from home productively and stay sane
- How to find companies who are still hiring and apply for developer jobs
- How to land freelance work during the pandemic
My friend Fazle (co-founder of Hashnode.com) and I will MC the conference. We'll have panels of developers from all over the world sharing their insights and answering your questions.
You can learn more about the conference, and add it to your calendar here.
Announcement #2: Our New AWS Developer Associate Certification Course is Now Live
In January we announced our #AWSCertified challenge. Since then, tons of developers have committed to studying for and earning AWS cloud certifications.
And this week we launched our 3rd free course on AWS certification exams. This one is for arguably the hardest associate-level exam: The Developer Associate Certification.
This free 16-hour course covers:
- DynamoDB
- Elastic Beanstalk
- Serverless with AWS Lambda
- and a lot more topics.
You can learn more about the Developer Associate Certification course and take it here.
Announcement #3: The New freeCodeCamp Discord Chat Room Server is Live
freeCodeCamp's forum grew dramatically in March. We had to upgrade to an even bigger server. Twice.
The forum is great for asking and answering questions. This said, a lot of people have asked for a sort of "water cooler" type chat room where they can socialize while social distancing.
So we've created a Discord server where you can hang out during the day while you work and learn new skills.
This is a friendly, inclusive chat room for the developer community And we need positive energy now more than ever.
You can learn how to join freeCodeCamp's Discord chat room server here.
I hope all this brightens your April a bit.
We are making steady progress on our expanded curriculum, and publishing lots of other free courses – like this 2-hour course taught by developer Aina Kubow where you build 7 minimalistic JavaScript games, including Tetris.
We will keep these courses coming.
My personal goal in life is to make sure that you never run out of well-taught, timely, free learning resources.
As always, you can support our nonprofit's efforts (and help us pay for servers) by donating. Every little bit helps.
Here's wishing you and your families safe passage through this tumultuous time, and better days ahead when we all emerge from this.
– Quincy