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What inspired you to found Free Code Camp?

Before I became a software developer, I was a school director. My teaching staff spent lots of time at their desks doing paperwork when they would have rather been helping students. So I picked up some basic programming, and eventually automated some of our teachers' routine tasks. This freed them up to spend more time with students.

After my initial success with automating tedious tasks, I decided to dive deeper into programming. I quickly realized that there were a lot of good beginner resources, but not very many resources that could help a beginner become someone who could actually build and maintain applications.

Learning to code was a lot harder than it had to be. It was also a pretty lonely process. So I decided to create a community where people could learn to code together and help keep each other motivated. 



What has the response been like from the public? 

In the 18 months since we launched, more than 300,000 people have signed up. Many of these students have jobs and kids, and are trying to change careers. Already, hundreds of our students have already learned enough to go out and get software developer jobs.

Everyone has been extremely supportive - university professors, companies that are hiring our students, and the nonprofits we're helping.



What are some of your favorite projects you've worked on/seen finished?

Our students built a full logistics system for a Toronto-based food bank. The application handles signing up new families to receive groceries, manifests for individual delivery trucks, and all the scheduling and inventory management in between. Instead of spending a lot of time and money administering these these things, the food bank can now focus their resources on their core mission.

Another project our students built was for a nonpofit that helps rural Indoneisan women become entrepreneurs. The nonprofit distributes water filters and solar-powered flashlights, which these women resell within their community. We created an app that replaced all their paper form workflows. Whenever the women have a good internet connection, our app uploads all their records to the nonprofit's database.

So far, our community has completed lots of projects for nonprofits, and we're starting new ones every week.



How do students get in touch with organizations needing help?

First, students complete about 1,200 hours of coursework, which includes building 30 different projects. Then we team two of them up with a volunteer project manager and a representative from the nonprofit - often its director. Over the next three months, they build the project together. We practice agile software development, which means that they all meet each week to demonstrate features, get feedback, and make sure they're building exactly what the nonprofit needs.

We do everything in a very careful, systematic way, much like awarding a grant. Nonprofits apply to us through our website. Most nonprofits don't need a custom-built solution. 90% of the time, we're able to point them to an off-the-shelf solution. But when it makes sense for us to write custom software for a nonprofit, we form a team and get to work.


What are the different programs/certifications offered through Free Code Camp?

We have a single, focused curriculum that all of our students work through together. Along the way, you earn certifications in front end develoment, back end development, and data visualization. Each of these certifications involves building 10 projects, and takes about 400 hours. 

After you complete the first 1,200 hours of Free Code Camp, you build a series of projects for nonprofits. In total, it takes about 2,000 hours to complete everything.


Where do the resources come from to keep Free Code Camp up and running?

Free Code Camp is mostly run by volunteers, who improve our open source codebase and answer questions in our help chatrooms. We cover our costs by selling t-shirts and other merchandise.

Free Code Camp will always be free for our students, and for the nonprofits we help. 



Where do you hope to go from here? What are your future plans?

A lot of our students are in the developing world, and have intermittent access to electricity and internet. We're working on an offline mode so that people can download all of Free Code Camp and work through it on low-power computers and mobile phones.

A lot of teachers are using Free Code Camp in their classrooms, and have asked for us to build a teacher mode to better manage their programming classes, so we're building that.

Finally, we have more than 1,000 local Free Code Camp chapters, such as Salt Lake City's (https://www.facebook.com/groups/free.code.camp.salt.lake.city/) We're working to help them meet to code together in person as often as possible, so they can keep each other motivated and moving forward with their goals.