Earlier this month, the freeCodeCamp community turned 3 years old. And in this short time, we’ve grown from a small website to a global learning community.
So far in 2017, millions of people have used freeCodeCamp.org, and thousands of those people have now landed their first jobs as developers.
Here’s some fun stuff the community is doing right now.
Hacktoberfest and a flood of open source contributions
Thousands of campers are participating in the annual Hacktoberfest event. This is an opportunity to contribute code to open source projects, and get a free shirt and stickers in the process.
So far, Hacktoberfest participants have made 180,000 code contributions to open source projects by opening GitHub pull requests. And more than 4,000 of those have been to freeCodeCamp’s new Guide project.
Those numbers come from the official Hacktoberfest statistics website.
There’s still time to join the Hacktoberfest fun. I’ve written this 5-minute guide to how you can participate, contribute to open source, and earn your shirt.
freeCodeCamp is now on Instagram
If you have Instagram on your phone, follow the freeCodeCamp community there.
We post photos from:
- freeCodeCamp study groups around the world
- hackathons
- hackerspaces
- screenshots of impressive projects built by campers
- and fancy workstations
Richard Middleton from freeCodeCamp Leeds is running the community Instagram account. He’s a passionate developer with an eye for photography.
If you or your friends take a cool photo, be sure to:
- post it on Instagram
- mention @freeCodeCamp in your photo’s description
- and use the #freecodecamp hashtag.
We might even repost it to the whole community, crediting you as the photographer.
The new freeCodeCamp Community Dropdown Menu
We added a Community dropdown to freeCodeCamp.org’s navigation menu. Now you can quickly access the Forum, Guide, YouTube, and other parts of the community from anywhere inside the platform.
A camper’s successful Product Hunt launch
freeCodeCamp contributor Michael Deng wanted a better way to browse top Medium articles, so he built global Medium leaderboard. It was a big hit on Product Hunt, which is a popular website for launching new projects.
You can read the discussion around his Top Medium Stories web app, and try it out here.
How to write technical blog posts that people will actually read
Earlier this year, I gave a talk at the Codeland conference in New York City. They just published that talk on YouTube a few hours ago. In it, I give advice on how you can write technical blog posts that people will actually read (16 minute watch)
Three other links worth your time:
- How to get hired as a junior web developer — it’s hard but you can do it! (8 minute read)
- How open source licenses work and how to add them to your projects (4 minute read)
- Want to know how Deep Learning works? Here’s a quick guide for everyone (7 minute read)
Happy coding!
– Quincy Larson, teacher at freeCodeCamp
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