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**Adam Stacoviak:** Side quest is a different way, you know? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. We don't wanna release anything that's not done, that's not right... And because we're such a small team, we really have to focus. And that's the hardest thing, deciding which projects to -- not kill, but put on ice. We know where the future is; the future is making learning the code feel like ... |
\[40:25\] That's one of the things -- people are often like "Oh, I can build freeCodeCamp in a weekend. It's really simple. It's just like this editor in the browser, and..." And I'm like, "Yes, there are certain aspects of freeCodeCamp that are relatively simple to implement, but this is just like part of the vision. ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So is that what the grand vision is? You said that you have this big vision for it, and it's this school for adult learners that is like a video game, or that's as compelling as a video game? Is that what your vision is? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, as compelling, where people want to go there and they get excited. They wake up with it, like "I can't wait to finish work so I can jump on freeCodeCamp." And for some people that is the case, but not everybody gets that excited about learning to code. A lot of people would rather go and play v... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Quincy Larson:** We'll know that freeCodeCamp is compelling when people who are hardcore gamers stop playing games completely and are just like "I don't need games anymore, I've got freeCodeCamp." |
**Jerod Santo:** That's really fascinating... Have you found that a lot of people get started and don't finish, or do you track that, how far people get? Is the rate of attrition pretty high? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. I think a lot of organizations -- this was a question that Coursera and EdX and a lot of these organizations were criticized, because they would have low graduation numbers. Like, it's free. Coursera was free. EdX was free. It was not fair for these media pundits to say "Yeah, but only 5% of pe... |
And it's fine, coding is not for everybody. I firmly believe any sufficiently motivated person can learn to code, but not everybody is sufficiently motivated, and that's okay. And also, life gets in the way. People have, especially during a global pandemic that's causing unprecedented levels of unemployment, people hav... |
So far, according to my most recent check of LinkedIn, maybe a year ago, more than 40,000 people in our alumni network who've listed freeCodeCamp certifications on their LinkedIn account have gotten a job. After they listed that certification, they were able to go out and get a developer job. That's how we define alumn... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you pretty rigorous with checking that and confirming that? What's the motivation for them, for you... What kind of processes do you have to confirm that? Not so much that it's true, but to keep it up to date and actually allow them as alumni - what's the process there? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. Well, the alumni association -- technically, anybody can join the alumni association by putting a certification on their LinkedIn, and I assume they wouldn't lie about it, because you have to link to the actual certification on freeCodeCamp. And we actually have a button... When you earn a cert... |
\[44:06\] When you earn this certification, there's a button you can press and it'll pull up a pre-populated LinkedIn wizard where you can add that certification to your account. And we have a lot of people -- the network is I think more than 40,000 people, or something like that... I'm not sure how many actually have ... |
But that number is utterly dwarfed by the sheer volume of people who have at one point tried freeCodeCamp. And what I often tell people is like "It's okay if you stop using freeCodeCamp and you go focus on something else for a while. If life happens and you stop." And a lot of people will come back 3, 4, 5, 10 times th... |
I think a lot of people get so concerned about "Oh, I've gotta get a job as soon as possible out of school." They lose track of the fact that life is long. The average American lives about 80 years, and they could probably - and depending on the field, but definitely as a software engineer - they could probably have th... |
I think a lot of people create these artificial goals that maybe cause them to have too much pressure, and they buckle under the pressure. But if you're just kind of casually strolling through "Oh, I'll finish when I finish", and you haven't made any major lifestyle changes that become this forcing function, then it's ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it seems like you're optimizing for access; not so much that completion doesn't matter (obviously it does), but just by nature - we talked about this before - of the name, "free". You're optimizing for access, and I think that's what's important. It's less about "Oh, this many of this many hav... |
**Quincy Larson:** Yes. And I wanna give a shout-out to the many people who have been helping translate freeCodeCamp. One of the reasons it's taking so long to get the translations live is because we just wanna have a repeatable process. We wanna have freeCodeCamp in French, we wanna have freeCodeCamp in Brazilian, Por... |
So we're gonna be able to very rapidly cover a lot of the major world languages, and even some of the more niche languages that just happen to have a particularly active contributor base. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So when you add new curriculum, like this new data science stuff, are you adding it in all the languages that are currently supported on the other areas of freeCodeCamp, or did you start with a couple and then build out from there? What's the gameplan? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, so we're gonna roll out -- first, this is a question a lot of people have... We never actually get rid of certifications, we just make them legacy certifications, and they're kind of deprecated in that sense. So people who are going through freeCodeCamp's curriculum - don't stop; keep going. Yo... |
We always roll out the certification projects first. So there are two types of projects - there's the practice projects, which are what you use to actually learn how to use the tool, whether that's D3.js, or whether that's NumPy, or whatever... You're gonna build a project using that tool to learn how to use that tool,... |
\[48:41\] Each section has five certification projects, and if you build those five certification projects it doesn't matter what else you've done. You don't actually have to do the practice projects; they're just to prepare you for those. If you've done those, then you can claim the certification. So what we tradition... |
So we'll ship those first, and we always ship them in English (to answer your question) first, and then the community steps in and helps translate that into other major world languages. In terms of the distribution of speakers, Chinese and Spanish are by far the biggest languages on Earth, in addition to English... And... |
And when you're learning in another language, even if it's a language you've spoken a lot, it is a lot harder... And I say that as a non-native English speaker; or, I'm sorry, I am a native English speaker, but I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and I spent several years learning in China, in Chinese, and it's very hard... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's gotta be difficult whenever you create videos too, right? I suppose, do you make several versions of the video when you translate it, or you just simply subtitle it? |
**Quincy Larson:** We get somebody who's a native speaker from that community to create the video, and we just published a 4-hour Python video yesterday by a woman named Estefania, who is in Venezuela... And she's a prolific teacher, and she happens to be bilingual, English and Spanish, and she wanted to create a Spani... |
We have a separate YouTube channel that's just focused on Spanish, and we have a separate YouTube channel that's just focused on Mandarin Chinese. And because China has the Great Firewall, we also have the videos on a separate website called Bilibili, which is kind of like an anime-themed website, but it became the mos... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, interesting. So \[unintelligible 00:51:12.15\] but I'm just curious - when they create these alternate versions in different languages, do they take the original and simply just translate it, or do they sort of re-teach it with new motivation and emotion? How does one video, when translated, c... |
**Quincy Larson:** Well, language and culture are intertwined... And learning paradigms, some countries have very different -- a Swiss education system is very different from the Norwegian education system. So there are different conventions that a teacher might bring with them when they teach. So I just tell them -- m... |
\[52:16\] I think over time these different language communities are going to start to not look like one another very much. For example, maybe it's possible that in China there are a whole lot of Vue.js videos and courses around Vue, because Vue is much more popular in China. It's possible that right to left based lang... |
One of the things I gave up a long time ago is this sense of trying to have a central... |
**Jerod Santo:** Control... |
**Quincy Larson:** ...theme, or feel... Yeah, I gave up control. And one of the things that I did that was I think very wise, accidentally - I'm not saying that I'm like a sage or anything, but... It was just impractical for us to have control over all the different study groups. This Cambrian of explosion of -- um, th... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Quincy Larson:** ...that's a good word. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good one, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] A Cambrian groundswell. |
**Quincy Larson:** ...this groundswell of different study groups on Facebook. We had like 2000 of them, in every little city in the United States, and in a whole lot of cities abroad... And it was a fool's errand to try to control those... And I just said "Hey, here are some recommended standards. You're in control. Yo... |
So that was a big thing that we did, and it was a huge success. And of course, unfortunately the pandemic has wiped out a lot of that, but we're gonna rebuild once there's a critical mass of people who are vaccinated and we can start having in-person events again. |
There are some study groups that are still going and have just made the jump to online in the meantime... But if I've been like a command and control type open source project leader, I would have probably ended up with like ten study groups, and they would all be following this very regimented list of rules. |
I think the fewer rules you have -- you wanna have basic safeguards in place, but you really should let your contributors express themselves and give them agency and give them benefit of the doubt. |
**Break:** \[54:33\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So you've been bringing on help to put together this curriculum, because you're a math fan, but you're not a math instructor... And even when it comes to coding and programming, you have working knowledge of these things, but you're not doing much of the curriculum, right Quincy? You are involved in cr... |
**Quincy Larson:** Absolutely. And I think one of the big skills I've built up over the past six years of running freeCodeCamp - it's year seven of running it, as Adam pointed out... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's awesome. |
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