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So the curriculum is going to be -- right now the curriculum is actually ten certifications. We're expanding it to be 19 certifications, and we're taking some of the existing certifications and drilling in and really... Like, instead of having a single machine learning certification, we're gonna have the three big bran... |
**Jerod Santo:** So are you a big math guy? |
**Quincy Larson:** I am not a huge math guy, but I have a huge appreciation for the role of math... And we have already brought on a math teacher who's got 20 years of experience teaching math at the collegiate and at the high school level, and I'm very much looking forward to learning from his exercises, going through... |
When I was in grad school, it was basically like "Hey, here's some magical calculus. Plug this into your calculator and then keep going." And I didn't actually understand the foundations \[unintelligible 00:07:21.16\] It's kind of like if all you do is high-level scripting languages, then you're not gonna necessarily a... |
So I am looking forward to coming to appreciate math much more, instead of taking it for granted and just saying "Oh, this just works." Thinking more like a computer scientist, rather than just thinking like an engineer. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If someone were not very familiar, which - I think people know of freeCodeCamp, but maybe even many have used freeCodeCamp to learn... But if they're not familiar with the organization itself, when you say "bring on", you mentioned "bring on this math teacher..." Help us understand the layout of the... |
**Quincy Larson:** \[08:18\] Yeah. So what we generally do is freeCodeCamp is a very small organization. We have an outsized influence, and half a million people use freeCodeCamp every day... But it's actually only like 12 people that work full-time on freeCodeCamp, and then we have a core of hardcore volunteers who co... |
So the actual full-time team is mostly teachers. Most of us have a teaching background, or some sort of academic background... And then some of us also have an engineering background. A good example would be Oliver, who recently joined us. He was like a particle physicist working at the -- I think he was working at the... |
Pretty much everybody on the team wears multiple hats. Some of us can speak foreign languages, so for example Mia Lu, she runs the Chinese community... And then we have Rafael Hernandez, and he runs the Spanish-speaking community in Latin America, and here in the U.S. there are 41 million Spanish speakers... So we all ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Get a good lay of the land. Do you see it's a lot of promotion from within, like "I've learned from freeCodeCamp, so I graduate into..."? You mentioned a lot of the full-timers are teachers, but you'd mentioned Oliver, who has a Ph.D. and learned to code -- did he learn to code through freeCod... |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did I understand that correctly? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. Every single person we've brought on, to my knowledge, has extensive contributor experience. Abbey, for example, who runs the publication - and she also runs our Twitter account and our Instagram account - she was a volunteer contributor, writing articles and editing hundreds of articles before... |
And we're very conservative with how we bring people on, and very responsible, because we just don't wanna get into a situation where we ever have to lay anybody off... And so far it's never been an issue; I've never missed a payroll or anything like that, because we try to grow very deliberately. |
One of the things that we've been doing with this update to the curriculum is we're doing a big fundraiser to try to raise $300,000 that we can use to potentially bring on some additional instructional staff, to help design probably what's going to be hundreds of mathematics-related projects, hundreds of Jupyter Notebo... |
\[12:03\] This isn't like a video game industry or a Hollywood studio system where there's the expectation that "Hey, we finished the job. Now we have to go find other jobs." We really do wanna ramp people up and give them the skills and the familiarity with the systems, and also just the trust. When you're trusting so... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally. One of the things I've always appreciated about you, Quincy, in the way you run freeCodeCamp, is how transparent everything is, and how you openly share budget numbers, and everything... It is entirely donation-based, right? There's no non-free aspect of freeCodeCamp... Or is there? |
**Quincy Larson:** Everything is freely accessible. That's a founding principle of freeCodeCamp. I even chose the name freeCodeCamp so I wouldn't be able to change that later. |
**Jerod Santo:** You can't back out of that one, can you...? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good way to bake that moral in, is make it part of your name. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. "freeCodeCamp. Let us show you our freemium model..." Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Let me show you the non-freeCodeCamp." \[laughter\] |
**Quincy Larson:** At the end of the day it's our defining feature. It's the fact that it doesn't matter what your socio-economic background is, it doesn't matter whether you can get access to a credit card, which most people in the world are unbanked, they live off of $10/day or less, and they don't have the ability t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What do you think it is that differentiates then, if the differentiator seems to be based on that, simply the price? Is the quality different, is the production level different? I mean, I know Treehouse has done a great job over the years with video production, and great with staff, and whatno... |
**Quincy Larson:** Well, at freeCodeCamp we really wanna focus on just a really core curriculum. This is something that if people get a chance to read the article or watch the 28-minute video where I talk about the philosophy of this big curriculum expansion - one of the other founding principles of freeCodeCamp is tha... |
And then if you wanna come back, then you can learn even more math and even more Python, and you can get a full-on machine learning engineer type role. So we wanna keep a very clear, linear, simple progression... And a lot of this is rooted in my belief that the old ways are sometimes the best ways; if you look at the ... |
**Jerod Santo:** You're like, "How do these count...? |
**Quincy Larson:** \[16:05\] ...they were studying Shakespeare, they were studying Chaucer, and stuff like that, getting really hard into the middle English, and even the old English, and I was just taking this kind of like -- you know, what you would consider trash, if it was like a pop quiz... You know, these topics ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. A guilty pleasure kind of stuff... |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, yeah. And to some extent, I wish I'd taken Chaucer, I wish I'd taken Shakespeare. I'm probably not gonna have a lot of time to learn those things now, because I'm running freeCodeCamp... And that was the time when I had -- I mean, I'm probably lying; I could probably sit down and power through ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] But how's your anime knowledge? Do you know a lot about anime? |
**Quincy Larson:** I do. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there you go. |
**Quincy Larson:** Probably more than the people who studied Chaucer. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So it wasn't all for nothing. You came out with something. |
**Quincy Larson:** But my point is -- I do think that if all the academics in the world settled on "Okay, we want people to be literate, we want people to be numerate." Maybe if they worked with the industry and figured out "Okay, SQL seems to be a pretty good skill. Pretty much everybody should learn SQL. Pretty much ... |
I think if we had a clear, simple, best-fit line as far as what skills people actually need, then it would be simpler. So freeCodeCamp is kind of an answer to that. It's a callback to the old universities hundreds of years ago that didn't have a bunch of electives. There are a lot of great sites, like Codecademy, or --... |
I feel like it's easy to get stuck in what people call "tutorial purgatory" or "tutorial hell", because you're kind of jumping around between different beginner resources, instead of actually taking intermediate resources and building upon what you previously learn. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Quincy Larson:** So that's a big part of freeCodeCamp's design - we don't want people to get stuck in the desert of despair, whether \[unintelligible 00:18:23.06\] intermediate or upper-intermediate resources. And by having a single linear curriculum that everybody goes along - it's like the Appalachian trail, you ca... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that a thing? |
**Quincy Larson:** I mean, the Appalachian trail - people would pass knowledge back and forth, because everybody was kind of taking the same trail, so they knew what to expect. "Watch out, there are bears in this area!" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's true. |
**Quincy Larson:** Or people going backward, going back East because the West was too harsh - they could say, "Oh, look out, up ahead there are bandits!" I don't know. |
**Jerod Santo:** I never took the Appalachian trail. I was always on the Oregon Trail. I don't know if that's the same trail, but... I just died of dysentery. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the Appalachian trail goes to the Appalachian Mountains. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, yeah. That's on the East Side. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Isn't that true? I hope it's true... |
**Jerod Santo:** You've gotta get there first... If you're headed West, you've gotta start with the Appalachians, right? |
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