Quincy Larson: Chingu Guest AMA No. 2
To borrow the words of Peter Martinson (@peterjmartinson in cohorts — the one who took the initiative to invite Mr. Larson), “if you’re reading this, you know who Quincy Larson is.”
On June 9 2017–18:30 UTC-5, only Chingu Cohorts’ second AMA session (see my previous article for brief historical context), and we had the extraordinary privilege of hosting it with none other than freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson.
For the purposes of a brief intro’, I again recycle Peter Martinson’s words:
Quincy is, himself, a programmer, but his background is in education. He has worked as a teacher, tutor, and school director in both the United States and China. During that time, he taught himself how to code, and used that knowledge to automate school workflows, so that teachers and administrators could have more time with their students. Since 2014, he has become a leading voice within the renaissance of code, and has aided thousands of people worldwide to achieve developer’s bliss.
It all started with this message to Chingus:
For the next hour, you can ask him anything! Please remember to be courteous to our guest, and mindful of the other participants.
And the opening of a portal:
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned since starting freeCodeCamp? (@peterjmartinson)
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that anyone can learn to code and get a coding job. I’ve seen all kinds of unlikely success stories that have confirmed this. To quote Ford: Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.
Are there any plans to branch out from just non-profit projects at the end of fCC tracks to for-profit companies? For example, doing pro bono projects for a company for the experience. (@sparta)
There are literally 1 million nonprofits just here in the US. There’s no shortage of work to be done to help these nonprofits fulfill their missions. For profit companies can use our open source tools as well, of course, but we’ll continue to focus on helping nonprofits for the foreseeable future.
A previous AMA guest was asked something similar to @peterjmartinson’s 1st question. Paraphrasing a part of his response: “learning to let go of a piece of code you have been working on for a long time.” Have you faced that with FCC? Like, the FCC you launched has taken on a direction of its own? If yes, how have you dealt with relaxing control? (Jay Schwane)
freeCodeCamp has always been chaotic with as little control as possible. One of the reasons our community has gotten traction is, aside from the code of conduct, we do almost nothing to try and control the conversation. We embrace the chaos in a way most organizations — who have shareholders or boards of stakeholders — cannot. So we haven’t relaxed control at all, really. There was never any control to begin with, beyond very basic common sense protections against malicious / buggy code, or toxic individuals.
Why do you think that the Chingu program has been so popular, and is there anything that’s happening here that you think you’d want to try implementing in fCC? (@reub)
I think Chingu has been popular because so many people clearly want a cohorted structure. This makes total sense because it’s how most traditional education programs function. Coursera and EdX, for example, both started out with the cohorted model before moving to completely self paced. There are clear advantages to both. Cohorted provides more motivation, and a more engaged peer group. Self-paced provides more flexability and accessibility to busy people (people with kids, school, jobs, etc.). The reason Chingu has taken off — aside form it being something so many people clearly want — is because it’s very well run. I’ve heard great things about some of the key people involved, and they seem to be very in tune with what the community wants.
What are the most common pitfalls that you find for people who fail to finish FCC or get a job as a coder? (@ermarie)
I think the most common pitfall is people getting discouraged when a company rejects their application or interview. The reality is companies are extremely risk averse and are much more afraid of hiring the wrong person than not hiring the right person. Thus, even really talented developers like Sean Smith (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-i-learned-to-code-and-earned-a-job-in-silicon-valley-changing-my-life-along-the-way-a3af854855fa5) still have to apply to hundreds of jobs before getting a good offer.
What does FCC look like in the year 2027? (@peterjmartinson)
Wikipedia is about 16 years old, and in 2027, we’ll be about 13 years old, so we’d like to be about 13/16 = 80% as far along as Wikipedia is in completing its mission. Our goal of course is to help as many people learn to code and get developer jobs as possible. Right now there are about 20 million developers on earth and I think we’ll have at least 10 million more developer jobs in the next 10 years, so we have plenty of room to grow and help more people… But in short, right now we’re helping thousands of people get their first developer job each year and in 10 years, I hope we’ll be helping 100,000’s of people get their first developer job each year.
Does that mean you think the stack taught in FCC will remain the same? i.e. JavaScript, etc.? (@peterjmartinson)
We’ll keep the core certificates full stack JavaScript (I think everyone should learn JavaScript first: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/what-programming-language-should-i-learn-first-%CA%87d%C4%B1%C9%B9%C9%94s%C9%90%CA%8C%C9%90%C9%BE-%C9%B9%C7%9D%CA%8Dsu%C9%90-19a33b0a467d) but we’re adding lots of supplementary challenges and tool guides as well. Once you learn JS thoroughly you can go learn other tools.
Quincy, what is the most important thing that makes a successful coder? (@veredrec)
The most important trait in a successful coder is persistence. Hands down.
Is FCC, as it stands now, how you envisioned it to be when you first started the project? Were there any ways in particular you were able to get quick feedback to know if you were on the right track when first starting? (@matthew-burfield)
I envisioned fCC as a supportive community with lots of resources for people who were learning to code, and in that sense, I think my prediction was pretty accurate. There are lots of small things I was wrong about initially, like the importance of Facebook groups in getting people to meet in-person, but in general I’ve been very lucky with my assumptions. I validated (and continue to validate) my assumptions every day by looking at data and listening to feedback and ideas from campers. I am doing that right now here with the Chingu community.
First of all, thanks, FCC was what really made me interested in web development and pursue the dream of a career on this field. If I get a job I will owe you big time. Now to the question: If a genie come out of a lamp and he tell you you can add a feature or a change to FCC instantaneously, what would you ask for? (@ramipop)
I would instantly add the ability to run different languages client-side. For example, Python, Kotlin. Right now we’re using REPL.it for this for our upcoming challenges, and it’s a great tool. VC-backed companies like REPL.it and Codecademy can afford the servers to do this, but it would get expensive to do this for the ~500 people who are using fCC at any given moment.
Does FCC employ a particular methodology to determine which technologies or libraries need to be added to the instructional program? Conversely, have you ever dropped or de-emphasized a technology or library? How did you evaluate these decisions? (Jim Medlock)
Yes — we constantly talk with hiring managers and use a lot of data from job markets. For example, I’m confident Kotlin will be one of the next big things (though JavaScript is still the biggest thing and probably will be for at least a few more years). As for dropping technologies, we saw the writing on the wall with Angular. I still think it has promise, but React is much more promising at this point.
How do you like the celebrity status you’re developing? Do you get free lattes at Starbucks yet? (@reub)
If this is a serious question, I get a few more emails than I used to, but that’s about it. I’m happy being just some random face in a crowd in real life, and I hope things stay that way.
What was your best learning experience so far ? When and how did it happen? (Periklis Panagiotis Arnaoutis)
It’s hard to top New Year’s Eve 2014 when I was pair programming with Terakilobyte. I’d worked as a developer and gone to a lot of hackathons, but I’d never met anyone quite as high-energy as him. He was in Seoul and I was in SF, and we pair programmed right through the New Year and I looked up and it was like 3 a.m. and we’d shipped some serious code!
I’m thinking operating servers and bandwidth for FCC must be quite expensive. How is all of that funded? (@the-thief)
I self-funded freeCodeCamp for the first 2.5 years (I wrote about this here: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Quincy-Larson-make-money/answer/Quincy-Larson). We started accepting donations a few months ago, and that has gone a long way toward covering our costs. If you have $3 or $10 you can donate each month, our nonprofit will definitely put it to good use. freeCodeCamp will always be 100% free, but the more resources we have, the faster we can improve our platform, content, and support study groups, other nonprofits, and other ambitious initiatives within our community.
The Chingu community and all the localised facebook meetups around the world have all spawned from within the FCC community. Do you know of any other communities that have also spawned from FCC? (@matthew-burfield)
Yes — freecodecamp.cn is a China-based version of freecodecamp that isn’t affiliated with us but I talk with their organizers all the time. They have maybe 50,000 campers over in China. China is very restrictive to outside internet organizations (hence Google and Uber pulling out completely) and our small nonprofit doesn’t have the resources to participate in the China due to the costs of compliance and dedicated servers. So freecodecamp.cn is providing a valuable service helping the Chinese people learn to code for free.
I met you over at the Codeland Conference in New York and it was an amazing event. Has there been any thought to FCC doing some events to bring everyone together and perhaps meet some industry people? (@joey_codes)
We have limited resources. Doing things in-person is quite challenging and resource intensive. Saron (who runs CodeNewbie and orchestrated Codeland) is exceptionally good at what she does. Few people could pull off what she’s done with Codeland, and I’m certainly not one of them. I’m going to stick with what I’m good at, which is writing and coding and helping find amazing campers and give them expanded responsibilities within our community. If we were to have Wikipedia-like donations ($100m/y) then yes — we could probably hire a team to handle this for us. But it’s not a priority for us right now. We need to help 1 million plus campers learn to code and get a coding job, and I think there are lots of recruiters and companies specialized in job placement who can help campers get jobs. We want to prepare them to code well, then apply successfully and interview successfully. We are less able to help individual campers network with employers.
How do you manage your time? I read this article https://noteworthy.medium.com/quincy-larson-958f4903f9b72. Has your routine changed now that you no longer live in SF or is the same? (Alecia)
Nothing has really changed moving back to SF, except now I’m in a house instead of an 800 square foot apartment, so I can be a bit louder at night without waking the baby. I still work asynchronously for the most part and have a simple routine that doesn’t ever change — even on weekends (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/live-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea2)
Do you see any market demand for vanilla JS (or vanilla + a library or two)? Or does the employer/recruiter data you see suggest framework(s) are a requirement? (Jay Schwane)
Our beta curriculum emphasizes fundamentals much more strongly, and we will continue to move in that direction. Specific tools are less important than coding ability and the ability to build stuff that works and is secure and reliable. All our new projects are implementation agnostic — you can use whatever tools you want to build them.
“Lacking a clear core and jumping around too much” pretty much describes me too. And led me to Angular (I didn’t see the writing on the wall). Thank you for your answers — I’m happy to hear the beta curriculum incorporates more fundamentals. (Jay Schwane)
Which resources, if any, do you recommend to supplement fCC and perhaps round out a person’s knowledge base? I’ve used p1xt’s guide and some udemy stuff, but am curious on your thoughts here. (@geist)
I recommend using every resource at your disposal. Whatever seems helpful, use it. But I also recommend beginners stick with a solid core curriculum, then branch out from there. I made lots of mistakes when I was first learning to code, and most of them had to do with lacking a clear core and jumping around too much (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/a-cautionary-tale-of-learning-to-code-my-own-eddb24d9d5a73)
What important truth do very few people agree with you on? (Chance Taken)
That virtually every aspect of work will be automated in the coming decades, and the only job that is automation resistant is the task of automating things itself: coding. (https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-still-code/answer/Quincy-Larson)
How important is it to you that FCC was open source and what was the main reason for that? Do you receive many pull requests from campers? (@matthew-burfield)
Open source is at the core of our community. Everything we do — on GitHub, on the forum, in the chat rooms, on Facebook — it’s all open and public record. I believe strongly in privacy, but I believe people should make as much public as they can, and we have an opportunity to lead in doing that. I also believe (I guess pretty much everyone does at this point) that open source produces much better, more secure software. And that open source evolves much faster than closed source. There are plenty of situations where you’d want code to be closed source but for freeCodeCamp — an education nonprofit — I can’t think of any reason we’d keep anything closed source.
Have you ever thought about moving on to work on anothet project? Also, is FCC able to continue if you are no longer involved? (@the-thief)
If I have it my way I’ll work on freeCodeCamp for the rest of my working life. (https://www.quora.com/What-is-Quincy-Larsons-next-big-project/answer/Quincy-Larson) Michael D. Johnson, Berkeley Martinez, and our entire core team are extremely capable and could certainly carry on without me. This said — and this may sound immodest — I am putting in 100 hours a week and aside from my family, freeCodeCamp literally is my life. So I like to think I’m a net positive for the organization and helping propel us forward faster toward Wikipedia-like ubiquity and utility.
Apart from supporting FCC with donations, are you open to other ways that campers can assist with funding? E.g. building tech, spreading the word, volunteering for the non-profit, etc? (@reub)
Take this quiz real quick and it will give you an idea of how you can contribute to our open source community given your skills, interests, and time availability: https://www.qzzr.com/c/quiz/175881/free-code-camp-volunteer-quiz8
Has anyone offered to buy fCC? (@reub)
We’re a nonprofit and you can’t buy a nonprofit or own it. freeCodeCamp is owned by the public. There’s no equity — just seats on the board, which I share with Michael D. Johnson and Berkeley Martinez.
What is the one thing you would tell someone that has been struggling with coding and cannot see the light at the end of tunnel? (@waltera)
Learning to code is hard. But anyone can learn if they are sufficiently persistent. Never, never, never, never, never give up.
What are a few good tips to know as a beginner freelancer? (@colegottdank)
Check out https://devchat.tv/freelancers6 — it’s by far the best resource on this.
Do you have any plans for adding soft skills to the FCC program? For example, Agile methodologies, conflict resolution, estimating complexity, risk management, etc? (Jim Medlock)
Yes — we have so much content in the pipes. We operate without deadlines though (we’re volunteer-driven) so the question is never if — it’s when. Soft skills are a priority. We’re recording lots of YouTube videos and writing Medium articles on these, and creating cohesive guides on so many things. If you’re interested in helping with any of this, shoot me an email.
And a final message from Chance Taken, founder of Chingu Cohorts:
BIG THANKS to Quincy for sharing his time and thoughts. Another thanks to @peterjmartinson who orchestrated this wonderful adventure. And of course, Periklis Panagiotis Arnaoutis and Traci Cremeans who built the wheels that allowed this to take place!
