Emma, Divya, and Suz are joined by Quincy Larson from freeCodeCamp where they chat about virtual conferences. Are they better than in-person conferences? What are the differences? Let’s find out!

On this special re-broadcast of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy Larson (freeCodeCamp’s founder) interviewed Adam and Jerod in the ultimate Backstage episode to celebrate a decade of conversations, news, and community here at Changelog. Yes, this month we turn 10 years old! We go deep into our origin stories, our history as a company, becoming and being a leader, the backstory of our branding, our music from Breakmaster Cylinder, and where we might be heading in the future.

Today we have a very special show for you – we’re talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But, on today’s episode we catch up with Quincy on all things freeCodeCamp.

Congrats to Quincy and everyone who has joined his mission with freeCodeCamp on an astounding rise:

More than 40,000 freeCodeCamp graduates are now working in tech at companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Spotify.

Millions of people watch freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel each month.

Millions of people read freecodecamp.org/news each month.

And people ask - and answer - thousands of tech-related questions each month on freecodecamp.org/forum.

freeCodeCamp.org is now one of the most-used technology sites on the entire web.

The future is bright. Click through to read what they accomplished in 2019 and how they’re up and running on a JAMstack.

Quincy Larson:

People have now spent more than 1 billion minutes using freeCodeCamp.

That’s the equivalent of nearly 2,000 years.

To put it another way — if freeCodeCamp usage was a person, it would be old enough to have broken bread with Jesus himself.

Congrats to everyone who’s helped freeCodeCamp reach this milestone! Quite an accomplishment, and just the beginning for the tiny nonprofit that’s teaching the world to code.

Quincy shares a bunch of numbers in this post, including traffic comparisons between freecodecamp.org and funded startups.

Quincy Larson:

Dozens of contributors worked on the new curriculum for more than a year. It features 6 new developer certifications - all of which are 100% free.

This looks top notch. Great work to all involved!🥇

Quincy Larson is the creator of an open source community called freeCodeCamp. We talked with Quincy about “the secret to getting good at coding”, their curriculum that spans a solid year (totaling 2,080 hours) of deliberate coding practice, plans for financial sustainability of the project, and the people behind it on the leading/teaching side and the camper side.