Our open source community has been hard at work throughout September on some major improvements. We're going to keep up this tempo, and do a special live stream for our first birthday (October 15, 2015). Here are the improvements we just pushed to production:
Certification
- New challenges have appeared called "Claim your Front End Developer Certificate" and "Claim your Full Stack Developer Certificate".
- We've built acceptance of our Academic Honesty Policy into these certificate challenges.
- Certificates are issued programmatically once you meet their requirements.
- Certificates are available right from your Code Portfolio, and publicly viewable to all as long as you haven't hidden your solutions.
- Each certificate has a unique verifiable URL that employers can check. This makes it is impossible to forge our certificates without access to our production servers.
Code Portfolios
- All challenges and their solutions now show up on your code portfolio, including Challenges.
- You can hide your solutions from other people.
Unauthenticated Campers
- You can complete all of our challenges without being hassled to log in.
- Once you complete a challenge, you will be redirected to the next logical challenge, even if you aren't logged in.
Improved challenges
- @berkeleytrue figured out a way to make all challenge solutions 100% sharable. You can copy a URL directly from your browser and share it with others, and they will be able to run your code against the challenge's tests. URLs update automatically when you run a challenge's tests.
- We completely rewrote all Algorithm tests to be as transparent as possible. By popular request, we no longer show the Chai tests themselves - just a message clearly explaining what each test is testing.
- By popular request, we added gif-style challenges, and are replacing our video-style challenges with these. All of our old videos will remain available on our YouTube channel.
Wiki improvements
- @rafase282 has nearly finished creating notes for every single challenge in Free Code Camp's curriculum, including hints and solutions.
- @codenonprofit has started creating "portal" style wiki articles that serve as better entry points into our tangle of 400+ articles.
Resolved experiments
- Plug.dj shut down, and our plug.dj room with it. Some of our campers are working on building an open source music app to replace it.
- We delisted several low-traffic casual Gitter rooms from our wiki and created a catch-all Casual chat room for non-coding-related chat.
- We now recommend campers use their Campsite’s Facebook group for chatting instead of their campsite’s Gitter chatroom. Only a few of our Campsite Gitter chatroooms had active synchronous discussions, and about 1/3rd of all conversations consisted of someone saying “hello” and not getting a response. We’ve delisted all our Campsite Gitter rooms from our Campsite directory. Still, we will keep them open for archival purposes, and you can keep using it if you’d like. Here’s a short blog post about how our Campsites are evolving and growing.
Other exciting developments
- We just launched our first-ever t-shirt campaign and added a second campaign for EU fulfillment.
- We just launched Commit. Rather than going into detail on it here, read @codenonprofit's blog post.
- We launched Free Code Camp Labs to showcase some unique projects our campers are building.
- We started gathering Stories from campers and putting them all in one place. These are just a fraction of the campers who've advanced their careers and gotten coding jobs after learning with Free Code Camp, but it's a pretty representative sample.
Improvements coming in the next few weeks:
- A clickable hint button on each challenge that cycles through a series of increasingly helpful hints.
- Recommended solutions that you can compare your solution with once you complete each challenge.
- We'll re-record some of our dated-looking gifs.
- We'll finish the Get Set for Back End Projects with Clementine.js (gif-style challenge)
- We'll finish the new Get Set for Front End Projects (gif-style challenge)
- We'll move all Front End Project and Back End Project challenges to gif-style.
- We'll add a back button to our gif-style challenges.
- We'll launch our job board.
- We'll publish several new JSON API and AJAX-related challenges
- We'll finish a leaderboard creation mechanic designed for teachers to track students and campers to track their friends.
- We'll finish the Hikes interface (Hikes are Briana Swift's computer science theory challenges)
- We'll close the ~30 pull requests that have piled up (thanks, contributors!)
And longer term goals we still haven't forgotten:
- Support for major world languages (translation is still underway)
- Turning Free Code Camp into a single-page isomorphic app
- Creating a browser-based replacement for Screen Hero / Team Viewer that is well suited to pairing on Free Code Camp.
- React.js curriculum
- D3.js curriculum and data visualization Front End Projects