Over the past 24 months Ramón Huidobro and I have been running free programming bootcamps teaching web development and JavaScript skills.

We've been stunned by the demand for these courses, which averaged 8,000 learners per cohort and let us reach 35,000 unique learners in total.

We've also gotten some great feedback from our learners about what they wish we had taught them in addition to the bootcamp topics, so we're launching something new.

Announcing The Bad Website Club

We'll be launching The Bad Website Club on March 6th. You might reasonably wonder why we want to teach people to make bad websites. While we want our learners to go on to make beautiful, well-planned websites from best practices, we found that many of our learners got bogged down with wanting their early work to be perfect.

To try and combat perfectionism, we wanted to experiment with a format that encourages learners to try new things without being too worried about doing them the right way. We wanted to teach folks just enough of a new skill to let them make fun, imperfect, but still practical websites right away!

To this end, The Bad Website Club will stream twice weekly. On (most*) Mondays, we'll be featuring a guest expert to show us a new tool or technology, grouped by themed seasons. On Tuesdays, we'll try to use the tool we just learned about the day before to make some kind of (usually bad) website with the new tech.

After our launch party on March 6th, we'll be starting a season looking at low and no code website builders, to unblock learners who want to make a website without learning web development skills first.

But what about the bootcamps?

If you just want the bootcamps, don't worry! We'll still be running free part time bootcamps around the freeCodeCamp Web Development and JavaScript tracks, between seasons of the Bad Website Club. This new project is designed to supplement the bootcamps we love to run.

Come along to the launch party

We'll be launching on March 6th at 16:00 UTC (other time zones: https://everytimezone.com/s/36eb3b59) with some short talks and panels on learning from some really stunning guests. freeCodeCamp's Quincy Larson, Spotify's Jo Franchetti, Class Central's Dhawal Shaw and more will be joining us for the launch.

After our remote launch party, we'll jump right into a season that teaches how to use low and no code website builders from Monday March 13th.

How to learn with us

How can you get involved? There's no signup needed. You can watch the launch event on YouTube on March 6th or keep up with what's going on at our (bad) website.

*we'll still take breaks and vacations as needed – we want to set a good example!