Earlier this month, we announced our intention to expand our 1,600-hour curriculum to 2,080 hours. That’s right — a whole working year of coding experience.

And now, a few days ahead of our New Year’s Day deadline, we’re ready to ship the new Data Visualization certification component of our curriculum.

This means that today, we’re launching 15 new coding projects. These will give you hundreds of hours of practice with important new technologies like D3.js, React and Sass.

By the time you finish our newly-expanded program, you will have built more than 30 projects, all from nothing more than a blank page, a list of agile user stories, and a fist full of libraries.

Here are the 15 new projects we’re adding to our curriculum.

React and Sass Projects

We’ve long planned to transition away from Angular and toward React. And since Sass is rapidly emerging as the go-to CSS preprocessor (it’s now included in Bootstrap), we decided to teach it as well.

Markdown Previewer

Many developers, when first experimenting with React, choose to build a Markdown previewer. This type of web app does a good job of showing off the power of React’s data binding, so we decided to include it as our first React challenge.

Herman Fassett, a developer from Washington, built this demo.

Camper Leaderboard

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Roel Verbunt from the Netherlands designed this Free Code Camp leaderboard demo, and implemented it in React.

Recipe Box

Herman Fassett built this minimalist React implementation of Geoff Storbeck and Juan Martínez’s Recipe Box app (which was originally built as a bonus holiday challenge). It involves building a create-read-update-delete (CRUD) app, but with a twist. Instead of using a database, you use the browser’s local storage.

Conway’s Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life lends itself well to React’s web-component-based approach.

Philip Michaels designed this challenge and built this demo.

Roguelike Dungeon Crawler Game

Washington-based developer Logan Tegman designed and implemented this challenge, which is based on a minimalist role playing game genre that’s popular with indie gamers.

Data Visualization with D3.js

More and more web developers are expected to know how to take data and visualize it in intuitive ways. The most popular library for doing this is D3.js. It helps you build eye-popping graphs using JavaScript and JSON — tools our campers already know and love.

US Gross Domestic Product Bar Chart

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Suzanne Atkinson and Bruce Young built this basic bar graph challenge that visualizes the growth of the US economy over the past 65 years.

Cycling and Doping Scatterplot Graph

Suzanne Atkinson, a physician and triathlon coach from Pittsburgh, created this doping-scandal-themed scatterplot visualization challenge.

Climate Change Heat Map

Bruce Young, a developer from Hudson, Florida, designed this challenge where you build a literal heat map of the increase in global temperature over the last 250 years.

Camper News Force-Directed Graph

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Bruce Young also designed this challenge, where you visualize the relationship between people posting on Camper News and the domains of the stories they post.

Meteorite Strike World Map

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For Columbus-based developer Geoff Storbeck’s challenge, you’ll plot meteorite strikes across a world map.

API/Microservice Projects

We’re also adding five new API/Microservice challenges to our Back End Developer Certification. These new challenges rely on returning JSON instead of HTML, and are stepping stone to our much harder Dynamic Web App challenges.

As with our new React and D3 challenges, these were designed by campers.

George Stepanek is a developer from Aukland. He designed a request header parser challenge, a file metadata checker challenge, and a Google image search abstraction layer challenge that features logging and pagination.

Herman Fassett designed both our new Unix Timestamp Microservice challenge and our URL Shortener Microservice challenge.

The campers who designed and built these new challenges did so on nights and weekends over the course the past few weeks, learning these technologies as they built.

Thus, we believe that our time estimates (400 hours for the React/Sass and D3 challenges, and 100 hours for the API/Microservice challenges) are reasonable for campers whose only prior web development experience is completing our Front End Development certification.

This said, we now have dozens of researchers and data scientists poring over our open data, and I’m confident that in the coming months they’ll confirm how realistic these estimates are.

Our philosophy at Free Code Camp has always been that learning to code is hard. And the best way to learn to code is to challenge yourself with a rigorous curriculum, knowing that — with the help of a supportive community — you will eventually succeed.

Come succeed at learning to code with our open source community.

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