The latest version of freeCodeCamp's learning platform is now live on freeCodeCamp.rocks.
We are testing it to try and discover new bugs before we publish all this new code on freeCodeCamp.org.
If you're curious, here's what the current freeCodeCamp.rocks infrastructure looks like:
And here's what it may soon look like:
Most of the improvements will be invisible - boosts of speed here and there, improved security and uptime.
We are working to get all these changes live now so we can pay down some technical debt.
Then we will continue to work on our 3 big initiatives for 2019. (They aren't live on freeCodeCamp.rocks yet, but I'm so pumped about them that I'll go ahead and share them with you):
Initiative #1: Internationalization
We’ve already translated freeCodeCamp’s curriculum and guide into five major world languages:
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
We plan to deploy parallel freeCodeCamp front ends for these language communities, all attached to the same shared databases. And to want to host separate forums for each of these languages.
Initiative #2: Classroom mode
There are already hundreds of teachers at high schools, universities, job training programs — and even prisons — who use freeCodeCamp as part of their curriculum.
But it’s still a somewhat tedious process for teachers. We're building classroom tools that allow teachers to assign parts of the freeCodeCamp curriculum and easily visualize their students’ progress.
Initiative #3: Better tools for study groups
The freeCodeCamp community has more than 2,000 local study groups in cities around the world. Many of these study groups meet weekly to code together. Some of them even host hackathons and conferences.
These study groups are run in a decentralized way - mostly through Facebook. Most of them have study group leaders who plan events and find local sponsors to provide venues. We plan to better-support these study group leaders, their members, and their sponsors.
So we’ve decided to build our own open source tool to organize these study groups and their events. This way study groups can have full control of their data, and we can gradually build up new functionality as they need it.
How you can help: by breaking things
We have been working on these improvements for months and our faces are so close to the new code that we have a trouble spotting the bugs. That's where you come in.
With your help, we can fix a lot of problems before people ever encounter them in production.
Go to freeCodeCamp.rocks and just start playing around. freeCodeCamp.rocks has its own sandbox databases, so don't worry about damaging any of your data. Nothing you do on freeCodeCamp.rocks will be saved beyond this testing period.
Create an account there. (Note: the GitHub/Google/Facebook sign-in doesn't work on freeCodeCamp.rocks so use the email-based sign-in). Then complete some challenges, read some Guide articles, do whatever you feel like doing.
Then - if you discover a bug - click the "report bugs" button in the banner up top to create a GitHub issue - preferably with a screenshot and as much detail as you can so we can try and reproduce the bug.
We thank you for reporting bugs that you encounter and help in making freeCodeCamp.org better. You rock!