by freeCodeCamp

5 Ways We’re Improving Thanks to Your Feedback

This was originally published on our now-defunct blog on September 17, 2015.

Last week we sent out a short, 3-question survey to all of you who’ve listed Free Code Camp under your education background on LinkedIn. A big thanks to the 400 campers who’ve already responded with valuable feedback, including countless success stories.

The most important question we asked was, “What could we be doing better?” Here are the five most common suggestions we got:

1. “Free Code Camp should offer me hints in case I get stuck on a challenge.”

For many of our challenges, such as Bonfires, we have a hint system built into CamperBot in our chat rooms.

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Since these hints were so widely requested, we’ve started work on a new “Hint” button that will provide these hints right inside our challenges.

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There always many ways of solving a given coding challenge. We didn’t want to proscribe a specific approach. However, since this is a popular request, we’ve started work on a feature that will allow you to compare your solution to our solution.

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3.”Free Code Camp should teach me how to use my local development environment.”

For most new coders, configuring a local development environment takes up a lot of time that would be better spent coding. That’s why we’ve designed all of our challenges to be solvable right in your browser.

Although cloud-based code editors are powerful, you’ll eventually want to get tools like Node.js and MongoDB running on your local computer. So we’re working on a variety of wiki articles that will walk you through configuring your local development environment on various operating systems.

4. “Free Code Camp should work better on my phone.”

One thing that was clear from our feedback was that campers commute a lot, and want to work through our challenges on their phones and tablets.

We designed Free Code Camp to work this way, but recently a bug cropped up that prevented challenge submission. We dove in and isolated the cause of this bug, then fixed it.

You can once again complete our challenges on your phone or tablet. This said, we still recommend coding on a laptop or desktop when possible.

5. “Free Code Camp should work in China.”

Many campers reported that Free Code Camp had stopped working inside China. This was due to the Chinese government’s Great Firewall, which blocks not only Google, but also its CDNs and other useful resources like Google Fonts.

We’ve removed all of Google’s CDNs and are serving Google Fonts ourselves to ensure that Free Code Camp loads properly in China.

We also had some common requests that we don’t plan to address in the near future.

1. “Free Code Camp should offer mentorship.”

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, put it best:

“I meet a lot of young people who waste a lot of time worrying about finding a magical mentor who will help them to greatness. But greatness will only come from within you. Yes, you need to learn from others, but seek wisdom from many.”

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community of helpful friends to elevate a coder to greatness.

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Instead of seeking mentorship, We encourage you to take Jimmy Wales’ advice to heart and make the most of your local Campsites, hackerspaces, and coding meetups.

2. “Free Code Camp should have reviews of other resources, such as books or tools.”

We choose to spend our time making Free Code Camp better for you — not writing reviews of ways other resources could be better.

We do frequently recommend resources on Facebook and Twitter, when we are confident they’re worth your time.

For starters, here’s a list of 25 free resources for new developers put together by our community.

Many campers also pointed out issues that we’ve already solved, and apparently haven’t done a good job of announcing.

1. “Navigating to my next challenge using the challenge map was a pain. There must be a better way.”

We recently added a “Learn” button to our navigation bar. Now you can click “Learn” and immediately go to whichever challenge you were working on last.

2. “I should be able to skip challenges that cover technologies that I’m already familiar with.”

We want to take this opportunity to point out that you can actually skip our Waypoints entirely if you want.

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That’s right — neither our Front End Development Certificate, nor our Full Stack Development Certificate, require completion of our Waypoints. If you know what you’re doing, feel free to dive straight into our Bonfires, Ziplines and Basejumps. We think you’ll agree that these projects are where a majority of the learning takes place.

If you haven’t added Free Code Camp to your LinkedIn education background, it only takes 30 seconds.

Follow this link, then set your graduation date as next year. For “Degree”, type “Full Stack Web Development”. For “Field of study”, type “Computer Software Engineering”. Then click “Save Changes”.