Project Management: Fill & Download for Free

As of January 23, 2016, no one has completely finished Free Code Camp's curriculum - though many people have earned one or more of our certifications.After you complete the first 400 hours of Free Code Camp, you'll earn your Front End Development Certification. So far 622 campers have earned this.Then you can earn our Back End Development Certification (also 400 hours). So far 49 campers have earned this.We also have a brand-new Data Visualization Certification that covers React and D3.js (also 400 hours), which 3 people have earned so far.The last part of Free Code Camp involves building 4 full stack applications for nonprofits. This amounts 800 hours of real world work experience, working with an agile team (two developers, a professional Agile Project Manager, and a nonprofit stakeholder).Through these projects, our open source community has also provided about half a million dollars worth of pro bono coding work for nonprofits. 13 projects have been completed, and 4 more are currently active.No camper has completed more than 1 nonprofit project so far, because at that point, they are generally able to go get a software engineering job. We're hopeful that we can get more campers to come back and continue doing pro bono coding after they accept job offers.Free Code Camp's curriculum is now more challenging.Our early challenges teach scripting, algorithms and data structures.Our original curriculum was 200 hours of challenges + 600 hours of nonprofit projects. At the time, we relied heavily on other organizations' free courses, such as Stanford's database and computer science courses.We wanted to lengthen our curriculum and make it more rigorous, but this meant building our own challenges. So our community set to work on building algorithm challenges, front end project challenges, back end project challenges, and now data visualization project challenges.Our certifications are new, and most campers haven't had time to earn them yet.Free Code Camp's Halfway Club - where campers who've completed the initial three certifications hang out and get ready for nonprofit projects.We have dozens of nonprofits lined up and waiting, but we require a campers complete the first three certifications (1,200 hours) before they can participate in these.We've told these nonprofits to just wait patiently - campers are making their way through our curriculum, but our curriculum is challenging and takes time.Free Code Camp's curriculum isn't easy, but it works. Campers are getting software engineering jobs and succeeding in them, whether they complete all 2,080 hours or not.

freeCodeCamp is for anyone who’s serious about improving their software development skills.About 1 in 4 people who use freeCodeCamp.com are already working full-time as developers.Based on a statistically relevant sample of our LinkedIn alumni group, our data science team estimates that at least 5,500 of these people have managed to get an even better developer job as a result of learning additional skills using freeCodeCamp.Even though our 1,200-hour coding curriculum is designed for beginners, almost all of our coding challenges can be skipped by more seasoned developers, and they can immediately move on to the more challenging projects at the end of each section.Our community also publishes new articles and videos every day on advanced topics. This is where a lot of experienced developers find value, and why so many experienced developers are familiar with our community, even if they first learned to code 20 years ago.

This will be a long answer, so in short: I don’t make much money. But I don’t need much money.I haven’t taken a single paycheck in the past 4 years. But I have had small, intermittent income to keep me afloat.Here’s my real secret:I saved as much as I could.I worked as a teacher and school director for about a decade. During that time, my wife and I lived modestly. We:rented small apartments in inexpensive suburban areasdrove used carscooked at home instead of eating outhad hobbies that don’t cost money like running and reading books from the libraryWe managed to save about half of the money we earned, invested it in index funds, and maxed out our IRAs every year.A teacher’s salary may not sound like it could add up to much, but keep in mind: if you can save half of your money, that means every year you work is one future year where you can potentially not work.By the time I made my career change to software engineering, I already had several years of “runway” saved up.During my last year as a school director, I discovered the power of coding.I taught myself some basic scripting and used it to automate our teachers’ and administrators’ routine back-office tasks. This freed them from their desks, so they could spend more time with students.The students were much happier. They convinced their friends and relatives to transfer over to our school. As a result, we won an award for being the fastest-growing school in our system.All this made me realize how much more efficient - and better - schools could become if they made better use of technology.So I retired from being a school director at age 31 so I could focus on learning to code full-time. It didn’t cost anything - I was just reading books, working through free online courses, and hanging out in hackerspaces.I snapped this selfie the Saturday morning after my last day as a school director. I got up early and dressed in a suit to reinforce the seriousness of the task at hand: I was going to learn to code! I wrote on Facebook: “My new office — the kitchen table! I clock in here every morning at 8 and until 6, I only get up for “bio-breaks”.”I worked for a year as a software engineer at a mid-sized startup, and basically got paid to learn. Again, most of that money went directly into my savings.The entrepreneur’s instinct is to preserve as much capital as humanly possible.Finally, I felt ready to live the dream and move to The Mecca - San Francisco.I caught a bus to San Francisco, slept on friends’ couches, and worked out of public libraries. I did small freelance gigs to get more experience coding. I ate many of my meals for free at evening coding events and hackathons.I spent the next 18 months building an online course recommendation engine that nobody wanted to use.By this time, my wife and I had rented an 800-square-foot (74-square-meter) apartment in a suburb of San Francisco. I converted a small closet into my office. I bought a $10 table and a $10 plastic chair from Ikea, and a $100 monitor off Craigslist. Then I spent 12 hours every day in my closet coding.The Fortress of Solitude.Then freeCodeCamp started getting popular.I started an open source project called freeCodeCamp, and a community sprung up around it.My goal was to help build the resource that I wished had existed when I first started learning to code.I believed deeply in universal access to education, and publicly committed that freeCodeCamp would always be 100% free. Not “freemium.” Free.But this only left me with a few choices for what to do next:Get another software engineer job so I’d have money to self-fund the project, then contribute to it on nights and weekendsRaise venture capital and try to turn it the project into a high-growth startup (like Codecademy and TeamTreehouse did)Or… turn down the job offers, turn down the interested investors, and instead turn freeCodeCamp into a nonprofit - then proceed to pour all my time and savings into it.I chose option #3, and I think this has made all the difference. I’ve been able to put all my time into leading our community. Our codebase is open source, our assets are creative-commons, our datasets are open, and our organization is literally owned by the public.As a result, we aren’t accountable to investors or advertisers. We’re accountable to campers.To give you an idea of the scale of our community, as of April 2017 we have:about 1 million total registered campers400,000 of whom use freeCodeCamp.com’s coding curriculum each month1,800 study groups across every major city on Earththe largest technical publication on Medium.comone of the largest programming channels on YouTube600 open source contributors to our projectmore than 5,000 alumni who are now working at their first-ever developer job, and thousands more who’ve used freeCodeCamp to get even better developer jobs.Even though I still work about 12 hours a day, every day, on freeCodeCamp - and haven’t taken a vacation day since I launched it - I’ve never paid myself anything from it.In fact, I’ve spent more than $150,000 of my own savings on servers and other costs, including wages for our full-time team members.A freeCodeCamp Santa Clara event. (That’s me in the middle in the black t-shirt.)Up until recently, my wife continued to work as an accountant. That provided us with some income, and importantly, health insurance (which is really expensive here in the US).We now have a daughter, Jocelyn, and hope to have more kids soon.Despite this, we’re doing OK financially. We were able to afford a house in Oklahoma City (my home town - I recently moved back here so Jocelyn can be closer to her grandparents).We can pay the bills, pay for groceries, and I even have a YMCA membership (the weather here isn’t as perfect California’s, so I often have to run indoors).How my family has been survivingAlmost all of the money I’ve made recently has been through what are called “affiliate links” to Amazon.com. For example, in some of my Medium posts, I’ll link to relevant books that I’ve read and found helpful, like this one.If you click through one of these links and end up buying something on Amazon, Amazon will give me a small percentage of that transaction. This doesn’t increase the price you pay or anything - Amazon has already factored affiliate payments into its prices.Usually this is a few pennies per item. But if one of my articles gets really popular, it can result in a lot of people clicking on a link and buying a book. For example, billionaire Mark Cuban made international news when he tweeted a link to one of my articles about automation.Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it. https://t.co/YEp5txG9aP— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) February 20, 2017A whole lot of newspapers ended up linking to my article as well. So within just a few days, I earned about $2,000 from Amazon.$2,000 is about how much my family spends on non-freeCodeCamp related costs each month, so this was a big windfall for us.So if you’re going to be linking to books in your blog posts anyway, it might be worth setting up an affiliate account with Amazon.But of course I can’t live like this forever.I’m burning through my teacher savings pretty quickly. But the good news is that I’m a software engineer, so I could get a good job almost immediately if I needed to.But of course, I’d rather focus 100% of my time and energy continuing to improve freeCodeCamp and supporting our community. If I can manage to just keep doing this, I will die one happy grandpa.Our nonprofit recently started accepting donations. Who knows - we might even be able to afford to finally upgrade our aging laptops :)Of course, our longer-term goal is to sponsor more of our open source contributors so they can focus on contributing to freeCodeCamp full-time. This way we can more rapidly expand freeCodeCamp’s platform, content, and the open source tools we’re building for other nonprofits.Khan Academy, Code.org, and other technology education nonprofits have multi-million dollar annual budgets. These organizations are focused on helping kids learn to code.We’re focused instead on helping adults learn to code, and adults have far fewer options for good, free education. There are so many people out there who would be a great fit for the hundreds of thousands of open developer jobs around the world. Our community is already helping these people learn to code so they can get these jobs. A budget the size of Khan Academy’s would enable our community make a massive impact on the world economy.Remember: Money is just a tool for buying time.Thanks for reading this super-long Quora answer. I didn’t want to just answer “I’m a penny-pincher.” I wanted to give you some context into my views on money, and role they’ve played in freeCodeCamp’s rise as an independent, distributed community.If you want to support our nonprofit, I encourage you to set up a small monthly donation that you can afford.Happy coding!