- A freeCodeCamp alum who founded his own successful Web3 company has donated $1M to freeCodeCamp
- He asked that we use some of these funds to develop a carbon-neutral Web3 curriculum
- We are building an interactive Web3 curriculum where you can learn by building more than a dozen projects. This free curriculum will teach the fundamentals of smart contracts and distributed application development.
- This will be a stand-alone curriculum that you can choose to tackle whenever you feel ready. The prerequisites will involve learning full stack web development through the first 7 freeCodeCamp certifications. (Though as with all aspects of freeCodeCamp, you're welcome to skip around.)
- Our goal is to help people learn these skills so they can get one of the thousands of open jobs that require these technologies, or start entrepreneurial projects of their own.
Nathan's Story
Nathan Flickinger was a college dropout. After a period of homelessness, he vowed to get his life together. It started with using his CompTIA certification he had earned in high school to get a minimum wage job in tech support.
From there, Nathan decided to teach himself to code. After several months of study on freeCodeCamp, he was able to land his first software engineering job.
He became obsessed with Web3 development, and eventually took the plunge and created his own startup. He helped write smart contract code for several Web3 projects. Most notably, KaijuKingz, a monster-inspired collection of cute lizards, each with quirky features. Instead of coffee, they drink radioactive sludge.
People from the KaijuKingz community buy and trade these artistic works through a system called Non-fungible Tokens – essentially, deeds of ownership.
Instead of being stored in a centralized database, these deeds are backed up in computers around the world through a distributed database.
Early on, Nathan decided that if his project was successful, he wanted to donate a large amount of money to freeCodeCamp to help other people to learn how to harness technology to realize their career potential.
And today, he and KaijuKingz have done that. They have donated a million dollars to our nonprofit, for us to use toward our mission of creating free learning resources for people around the world.
I am extremely grateful for Nathan and his colleagues at KaijuKingz, and their willingness to support free, open source education. You can read more about Nathan and his coding journey here.
The Web3 Curriculum
This free curriculum will teach the fundamentals of smart contracts and distributed application development.
It will be a stand-alone curriculum that you can choose to tackle whenever you feel ready. The prerequisites will involve learning full stack web development through the first 7 freeCodeCamp certifications.
We will build this curriculum using the same tools we used to build freeCodeCamp's Relational Database Curriculum. It will teach you Web3 development through building more than a dozen projects.
Frequently Asked Questions
How will this be carbon neutral?
Since all of the development will take place on your own computer and use local blockchains, there will be no carbon emissions. All of freeCodeCamp's cloud servers are already carbon-neutral.
Will all of this be free? Including the blockchain transactions?
Yes. Again, this curriculum will use local blockchains. You will never have to buy any coins or tokens.
Will this curriculum discuss aspects of speculation?
No. This curriculum will be 100% focused on software engineering.
When will this curriculum go live?
We hope to have parts of this curriculum live as early as Summer 2022. In the meantime, we recommend learning web development using the existing freeCodeCamp curriculum.
One way to think about Web3 development is that it's mostly traditional web development with a lot of additional tools for using distributed networks. So everything you learn for traditional web development will also be applicable here.
What about the Data Science curriculum?
The Data Science curriculum is coming along great, and we hope to publish parts of it in the next few months. The Web3 curriculum shouldn't affect the development of the Data Science curriculum – they are being built by separate teams of teachers and developers.