It's been a while since the freeCodeCamp community has held a big Summit live stream. Now with the coronavirus pandemic, we need social interaction more than ever.
Our community has been hard at work on a number of major improvements to the freeCodeCamp curriculum. We've been publishing a ton of free courses on YouTube. And we have other new tools we're excited to demo, too.
The stream will start at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Friday, May 1 on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.
You can watch the live stream on YouTube here.
Here's what we'll cover during this one-hour stream.
The 4 new Python-focused certifications
In late 2019, we started work on 4 new Python certifications. These are all part of freeCodeCamp's core curriculum, and will immediately follow our existing 6 web development certifications (which will initially remain unchanged).
Beau will demo these new certifications and explain how we're rolling them out.
We will also give a big update on how we're rolling out Version 7.0 of the freeCodeCamp curriculum. As I said in December, we are moving to 100% project-oriented learning. These new practice projects will be 100% optional, and none of this will affect people who are already going through freeCodeCamp's curriculum and earning certifications.
You can read the full announcement article here.
We are excited to demo these new certifications, which we'll open to beta testers in May.
Big improvements to the YouTube channel
As you may have heard, the freeCodeCamp community's YouTube channel is growing.
The freeCodeCamp community hit a new milestone today.
— Quincy Larson ? Stay Home and Save Lives (@ossia) April 25, 2020
1 million hours of watch time on YouTube in just the past 28 days.
That's 114 years.
Congratulations to all the teachers and developers who've helped create these courses. You are helping so many people. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/1SmgwGTdJw
I'll talk about our commitment to keeping the channel ad-free. I'll also show how we're focusing on YouTube membership as a way to sustain our nonprofit. And some new freeCodeCamp swag you can buy to support the community: shirts, caps, even mugs.
And good news: we're going to be live-streaming a lot more.
Demoing the new Contributor Site
We have a new area of freeCodeCamp dedicated to helping contributors get started with code contributions, adding subtitles to videos, answering questions from the community, and more.
Mrugesh will demo the site and a lot of its key functionality.
Mrugesh will also talk about some of the exciting things he's doing to keep freeCodeCamp running fast under the growing server death-hug of people around the world learning to code.
29 days ago, freeCodeCamp hit 5 million unique monthly visitors.
— Quincy Larson ? Stay Home and Save Lives (@ossia) March 25, 2020
And today we just doubled that.
10 million people have used freeCodeCamp to learn new skills in the past month.
Our nonprofit will help as many people as we can.
If you're new start here: https://t.co/GYykCx62K6 pic.twitter.com/HujFstBfy8
We are moving the freeCodeCamp Guide over to our publication
Abbey will talk about the process of transitioning all of the articles from the freeCodeCamp Guide over to our publication.
This means all of our guide articles will have better accessibility, with large text and a clean single-column layout.
We will also have JSON Schema, AMP versions of articles, and a lot of other features to make it fast and accessible.
Abbey will also give us an update on the state of freeCodeCamp's publication – which is now getting more readership than many major newspapers.
Finally, she'll demo our navigation search bar tool, which now averages nearly 1 million searches per week.
Updates on the community forum and chat rooms
I will talk about freeCodeCamp's online community – spread across our forum, chat rooms, the r/freeCodeCamp subreddit and the freeCodeCamp Earth Facebook group.
These online communities have become increasingly important in an age of national lockdowns and social distancing measures.
Nothing beats hanging out with other developers in person. But since this isn't possible currently, we are making sure everyone has access to the next-best thing – online developer communities.
Then we will answer any questions you all may have.
We will live stream the entire conference for free. And we'll have a member chatroom where anyone who's supporting freeCodeCamp on YouTube can chat and ask questions.
If you aren't supporting our nonprofit on YouTube yet, you can click the "join" button. This way we can still cover the cost of the conference while keeping it free for people who can't afford to support us. This will also make YouTube's chat a bit easier to moderate.
Here's the full agenda
- 10:00 Quincy talks about YouTube: merchandise, YouTube membership, superchat, and more frequent streams
- 10:05 Quincy talks about growth of community: the forum, chat rooms, subreddit, and more
- 10:10 Mrugesh demos the Contributor site
- 10:15 Mrugesh talks about efforts to improve performance at scale
- 10:20 Abbey talks about the Guide-to-News transition
- 10:25 Abbey shares a few big recent articles, and talks about our editorial philosophy
- 10:30 Beau demos the new Python certifications and talks about the instructional design work we're doing
- 10:45 Questions & Answers