The first Saturday of every month, our open source community hosts an interactive live stream on our YouTube called a “Summit.”
Summit
/ˈsəmət/
Noun
1. the highest point of a hill or mountain.
2. a conference of high-level officials
Each summit, different members of our open source community’s core team hop onto a call together. We demo new features and new coding challenges. Campers (our students) join us to showcase projects they’ve built pro-bono for nonprofits.
Each month is essentially an agile sprint, with each summit serving as its “demo day.” Hundreds of campers tune in so they can comment on our progress and ask questions.
If you haven’t attended a summit before and are curious what they’re like, we’ve archived previous ones on YouTube.
Hills we’ve climbed
In December 2015, dozens of volunteers pulled together to help us expand Free Code Camp’s challenges into a full 2,080-hour, four-certificate curriculum.
Next, we started off 2016 with a redesign of our website.
Then in February, we optimized some queries to relieve our overloaded servers.
We’ve fixed a few major bottle-necks in infrastructure, and improved our website’s usability and aesthetics. Now we can return to “camper-driven development” — building the challenges and features that are most-requested within our community.
And this time, we’re trying something we’ve never done before: setting concrete goals more than one summit in advance.
Leaving the safety of our basecamp
Judging by the the steady influx of tweets, emails, and GitHub issues from our community, it’s clear that:
- we need to expand our wiki articles and 2-minute video challenges to cover a broader array of technology topics.
- campers want to build our complicated front end and data visualization projects right there on our website. Collaboratively. And in real time.
With all this in mind, we drafted our goals for our next four summits.
March 2016 Summit
- 600 wiki articles are live
- Spanish-language challenges and challenge map are live
- First Spanish-language wiki article is live
- Free Code Camp’s challenge engine is a single-page app (using React/Redux)
April 2016 Summit
- 800 wiki articles are live
- 60 video challenges are live
- Global hotkeys and code editor hotkeys are live, and can be toggled on and off.
- Night Mode tool is live
- Multi-tab code editor with React, Redux, Sass, and D3 support is live
May 2016 Summit
- 1,200 wiki articles are live
- 100 video challenges are live
- Audit of NodeSchool.io modules is complete (and we have stable forks)
- Data Visualization challenges for React, Redux, Sass, and D3 are live. (These are optional, and currently most campers just use each tool’s official documentation to build our data visualization projects.)
- GitHub Portfolio Export tool is live. (This will make it easier to export your challenge solutions to a GitHub repository.)
- Live collaborative in-browser coding, with built-in VOIP support
June 2016 Summit
- 2,000 wiki articles are live
- 150 video challenges are live
- Expanded unit testing challenges
- Expanded Object Oriented Programming challenges
- Expanded JSON API challenges
- Academic Honesty auditing tool is live
- Teacher Mode tool is live
- Offline Mode tool is live
- Easy pair-programming with a real-time matching system
If this all seems laughably ambitious, keep this in mind: we are a volunteer-driven community that is building a tool that helps you learn to code at your own pace, from anywhere, for free. Everything we’ve accomplished so far has been laughably ambitious.
We can do this. In our open source community’s 16-month history, we’ve risen to plenty of other challenges. And we will rise to these challenges.
But we’ll need help — and not just from experience JavaScript developers. You can aid us in our mission in a number of ways.
Take this 2-minute quiz. It will guide you in deciding how you can best help our team of 400+ contributors meet these audacious goals. And it will refer you to a goal-specific chat room, where you can meet with other contributors.
Thanks for joining us on this epic climb. Hope to see you there at these upcoming summits!
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