freeCodeCamp

I'm Quincy Larson and you're listening to the Changelog. Welcome back everyone. This is the Changelog and I'm your host, Alex Dakoviak. This is episode 195 and today we're talking to Quincy Larson about a big subject, learning to code at Free Code Camp.

We talked to Quincy about the secret to getting good at coding and learned about the curriculum, spending a solid year 200080 hours of delivered coding practice. We discussed plans for financial sustainability of the project. We talked about the people behind it, both on the leading and the teaching side, as well as the camper side and so much more. We have four sponsors for the show today.

Codeship, DigitalOcean Outbeat and TrueSight Pulse. Our first sponsor is Codeship and have a free webinar coming up on February 25th where co founders Florian and Manuel will discuss their new continuous integration and delivery platform with native Docker support that will give a walkthrough of how the platform works. Examples of working with Docker Compose features as well as live real world examples of working with the platform. Two killer features I have to mention.

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Click through that sign up, you'll be good to go. And now onto the show. All right everyone, we're here today joined by Quincy Larson. And Quincy started an open source community.

Had to give him the show. He's been training on cheese all night. It's called FreeCodeCamp and we're here to talk about his journey and the plans and the insights the Free Code Camp and how it's having an impact on the software development world. Quincy, welcome to the show, my friend.

Thank you for having me. And I think that the best way Jeremy might be to kick this show off with yet another mention to this awesome thing we have called Change All Night. Elias R. It's our own rare.

That's how we found out about Free Code Camp. And this is an email we ship out every single night that features top repos on GitHub in the last 24 hours. So if you're on a web browser able to do so go to chainlabel. Com nightly.

Subscribe to that. But Jerry, let's keep things off with you. Tell us a bit about how we found FreeCodeCamp through Chinglong lightly. How can that blow it up to get our attention?

Yeah, well, a lot of times certain projects will get our attention because they pop up into the top new list and then eventually they'll sometimes show up in the top overall list as well, which means they're not just creating last 24 hours, but overall, the most of our repos on GitHub for the day. Free CodeCamp is one of those that has been chilling in nightly for months. I mean, it routinely is a top star repository, or at least in the top five. And we started wondering what the heck's going on with this free codecap.

Everybody loves it. It's getting started like crazy. In fact, we checked it out and it looks like it's number two overall starred repo on GitHub with something like 72,000 stars currently second only to Bootstrap, which everybody knows and loves and which has been around for quite a bit longer. So we almost just couldn't even ignore it.

It was just there in our inbox every night. Does that make you feel like, man, that make you feel like a rock star or what? Or you're doing something right? How does that impact you?

I'm extremely humbled by the attention FreeCodeCamp's been getting. And yeah, I feel great and I'm excited about the prospects. It's definitely steered a lot of developers that regularly contribute to open source to coming and putting in pull requests and filing issues and including Sahat is S A H A T. He created the Hackathon starter, which was actually the Node JS rollout, if you will, the boilerplate that I started freeco Camp with.

So he actually had like a ton of commits on FreeCodeCamp to begin with and he came back the other day and filed a PR. So was it a surprise to you? I guess to 1. Were you familiar with cheat on lately?

Did you know you had been training for months now? Basically, no, obviously on GitHub, but like you've been appearing every single time this email. I wasn't aware of that. Of course people will mention occasions like, hey, you're trending on GitHub and stuff, and I'll be like, awesome, check it out.

And I remember the first day that we were trending. It was like, I think during jQuery SF, which was a big event here in San Francisco, and I just remember the feeling like, whoa, we're right behind Facebook and Google and some other major companies that were open sourcing tools at the time. I think like React Play Framework or something was being open sourced partially. And yeah, so it was definitely a big shot in the arm in terms of morale behind the scenes, you'll notice.

But Jerry and I've kind of been watching what you've been doing simply because you're daily on our nightly radar, so to speak. And so we kind of feel like we know what you're doing already. But it's great to finally get you on the show. I'm excited to be here.

I'm a longtime changelog listener, so I was honored and thrilled when you submitted that GitHub issue requesting that I come on the show. That's cool too, because Jared, how often do we have long time listeners on the show? Is it often or is it a while? Yeah, I mean, it's less often than I'd like to hear, but it's always nice when somebody both listens and comes on the show.

And since we're mentioning the show, Quincy really enjoyed the show just before this show. So this is episode 195. Episode 194 featured Jose of A Lim talking about Elixir. You like that show a lot too, but long time listener shuts.

It's always nice to have someone on the show that's listened. It's great. So in this case you probably know what's coming next, which is the same thing we did with Jose is we like to hear about our guests Orton stories, how you got to where you are now. Because we find this to be informative, inspiring, and really help us and the listeners relate to you and what you're doing.

Free CodeCamp so could you tell us your hacker origin story? Absolutely. So I started out as a teacher and progressed to a school director over kind of a process of about 10 years. I ran schools in both the US and China.

And along the way I was doing these very repetitive workloads, you know, involving immigration, involving grade reports and enrollment documentation. And I just kind of decided that I wanted to learn more about how to automate those processes and speed things up so that I could free my school's administrative staff and teachers from the tedium of just filling in paperwork the old fashioned way. And so that kind of kicked off a journey into writing Excel macros and ultimately writing little scripts that did things. And once I was able to basically facilitate my entire staff being able to spend more time with the students and less time in front of their computer, in their offices, by themselves.

I started to really think about how this technology could be applied more broadly to help teachers and school administrators. And that's when I decided to kind of take the plunge and leave my job and just focus on learning to develop software full time. So I did that for several years. I can go a little bit into how that went.

Basically, I shuttered myself in a hacker space because I couldn't find the motivation to work at home at my kitchen table, which is my original plan. I just, there was too much to distract me. There was the fridge. There were all these little things, little excuses.

Whenever I hit like a brick wall, I had some convenient tour that I had to go do. Right? I love the feeling. So I locked myself in.

At the time, I was living in Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Hackerspace. It was just a room at the time. It was very small and it was stacked high with dead roombas and other drone type gear and stuff. And I just sat in there on their wifi and crunched through a lot of programming books and worked a lot of online courses through Coursera and edX.

And I was really all over the map. And it took me a long time to get good enough that I could actually go. I mean, like basically seven months of just going to hackathons nonstop and coding, you know, 60, 80 hours a week. And then finally I was able to get a software engineering job.

And of course it was. That itself was a completely brutal process of being told I was wrong repeatedly by both humans and machines. And I just continued learning to code because I was really passionate about helping teachers and school directors like myself just automate these workflows. And I figured that there would be a way that I could do that at the end.

Along the way I kind of discovered that the real struggle was just learning the code itself. That what I was doing, you know, the self directed learning thing, where I was spending days and days going off in the wrong direction down these rabbit holes with debugging Linux drivers and all these other things. This wasn't necessarily the optimal way of doing it. So that's when I started seriously thinking about coding education.

And that eventually led me to put up the prototype for Free Code camp and see if we could get any traction. I think it's interesting to hopefully repaint the story just shared. So it sounds like you came from a teacher background with no formal or traditional training in software development. You taught yourself through the school of hard knocks, basically either funny community and immersing yourself in that and then finding out that essentially software is a way to help people back into your original position, which was a teacher.

And that's sort of been your path. Is that about right? As I say, yeah, absolutely. It was a circuitous path.

But I've always been interested in education. That's my calling. I decided a long time ago that that was what I thought the major bottleneck to the progress of civilization was, was education. It wasn't, you know, a whole lot of other things that people seem to think it is, like access to capital or, you know, rule of law.

There are so many other things that you could consider. But I think education is really fundamental and it's causing a lot of the issues that we're experiencing. And technology education is going to be the biggest solution to income inequality and a lot of these other problems that we're facing in the 21st century. So just to think back through some of your struggle to learn software development and the resources and tools that were available to you.

You said you had books which you read. Maybe you could tell us some specifics there. But also some online learning tools. You also seem to be really surrounding yourself with developers, at least physically.

I don't know if you're working with them or asking them for help. But what were the biggest struggles? What was the hardest part? You said just learning the code.

Can you give us more on that? Can you go into that further? Yeah, I mean, I think learning the code is a struggle. First of all, I just want to say, as I've said a million times before, I'll continue to say anybody can learn to code.

It's just a matter of persistence. I don't think there are any innate properties that give an individual a significant advantage over another in terms of learning to code. It's just a matter of sitting down and doing it. So really, at the end of the day, it's a motivational issue.

And it's easy to get demotivated when you're reading a book that you checked out from Library where none of the code examples run because you're in Python 3 instead of Python 2, for example, and you didn't realize it, or you're enrolling in a machine learning course and you realize halfway through that you were supposed to have knowledge of this relatively advanced mathematical subject that you know nothing about, and you basically just have to put that class on hold and switch over to learning mathematics, for example. So there are a whole lot of dependency issues, if you will, where, if you imagine like learning is, you're learning a big hierarchical thing and there are so many moving parts underneath that Thing that you need to understand before you can get all the way up there. So that was a big part of the problem, was there wasn't a clear path. There certainly are clear paths.

People will every once in a while put up a blog post like, here's how you should learn machine learning. And like, do this and then this and then this and then this. But those kind of get stale after a while and resources are no longer available. Better resources come out.

Those are not necessarily updated. So we wanted to make sure that we had, like, a living curriculum that addressed that specific concern and that we really focused on just teaching, like, one very specific thing, which is web development. So maybe this is fast tracking the whole entire story a bit. But I guess the question I have this one is like, how do you go from the story you just painted teacher to, you know, in a negative word, wannabe coder, to immersing yourself in hackathons and around people revoking software, to being the person leading the charge of free code camp and encouraging others and leading people through that struggle to actually program.

Like, what makes. What made you the right person to do this? Honestly, it could have been anybody. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

There was a critical mass. I remember, like, right when I was considering leaving my career as a school director. That's when Marc Andreessen published the famous, now famous Software Z in the world essay in the Wall Street Journal. This was right after Sebastian Thrun and also Daphne Caller and Andrew had recently published their machine learning and computer science classes that were extremely popular.

The AI class and machine learning class, respectively, I think. And that really launched MOOCs and earnest, massive open online courses. So, like, this was a big discussion in education already and the shift toward technology. I really felt that I was on the leading edge of that in the sense that, like, I was one of the first people in my field to like, really realize how significant and permanent that shift was.

I think a lot of people to this day kind of even downplay the importance of these scaling technologies where you can literally teach hundreds of thousands of people instead of teaching a class of 30 at a time. So that that was a major part of it was I just happened to be receptive to these things, and I was in a position within a school where I could directly take these concepts and apply them. And another thing was, you know, I was extremely thrifty and I'd saved half of what I'd earned for the past decade. So I had like a little baseline in terms of like a Runway to support myself while I just churned through these things.

I mean, most people don't have the resources just to be able to stop what they're doing and spend little years of their life learning the code. And my hope is that they won't have to have those resources because hopefully freecodecamp will address that partially. They don't have to leave their jobs or do anything drastic. But at the time, freecodecamp didn't exist and I felt that that was the only way that I could really dive into it because everybody I saw who was taking like a half hearted approach just wasn't really getting anywhere.

So I would say that it was mostly luck and you know, like, like Oprah and all these other people have said, you know, luck is just opportunity and preparation. And the opportunity was definitely there. I think at this point, our listeners probably know what freecodecod Camp is in a very nebulous way. It's obviously an online learning community or tool, but maybe you could give us kind of the summary pitch of it for those who are driving or whatnot.

Can't go to freecomp.com, just check it out as we talk, give the high level, like what it is and what sets it apart and then we'll continue from there. Sure. FreeCodeCamp is an open source community that helps you learn how to code and helps you practice coding by building projects, including projects for real life nonprofits that need software solutions to be able to do their jobs more effectively. We launched, I think in October 2014 and along the way we've accumulated a pretty large core team of contributors, teachers and developers who are working on building this very large open source curriculum that covers web development from end to end, starting with basic HTML, CSS, jQuery and moving all the way through the front end with tools like jQuery and React and D3 and data visualization, and then also covers the back end with tools like Node JS Express and covers some database ORM stuff as well.

And ultimately throughout the course of Free Code Camp, you're not just sitting there like reading tutorials or watching videos, you're actually coding the entire time. It's approximately 2080 hours of coding practice, which is a calendar year worth of 40 hours a week work. And that involves among other things, building 10 front end projects, 10 data visualization projects, 10 backend projects that are like APIs and microservices, and then building two projects for nonprofits and maintaining two other legacy projects because we think working with legacy code is really important. And then we're working on an interview preparation component as well that'll cover like, you know, pair programming on the interview and whiteboard coding and things like that.

We focus a lot on pair programming throughout. We have live chat rooms where community members just volunteer to help each other. So at any time, if you get stuck on a coding challenge, you can just click a help, but it'll open up a chat room and you can immediately get help on whatever your issue is. And we made extensive use of external tools, so we use Gitter, which is a great.

It's kind of like Slack, but it's for open source communities and it's really well built and maintained by these gentlemen out in London. So, yeah, it's a community first and foremost. It's spread across Reddit, across Medium, and of course, we have almost a thousand local groups called campsites throughout the world where campers, that's what we call community members, campers will get together and code together. We call them coffee and codes like buy some coffee and sit down in the Starbucks or whatever cafe and just code together for a while.

It's like live in person pair programming. And sometimes it'll be two people, sometimes it'll be 40 people in like Delhi or Seoul or some of these bigger cities. It's a mix of coding, learning to code through, you know, resources, actual curriculum, a community, leveraging some social media aspects like medium, Reddit or even not so much meetups, but your local meetups, something yoga, thousands. It seemed like, I think when I zoom back out, I think that sounds really, really awesome.

But I also heard you say earlier that you bootstrap this thing on your own time. It sounded like. So there's a little bit of a story I'm kind of missing there, which is like, if you put away for 10 years, a decade, you know, half of what you earned, it sounds like you fit the bill. You.

I'm not trying to like, harp on how much money it takes. I'm trying to just figure out how this thing moves and how this thing operates, because it's not just you, it's a we. So I want to figure out the Wii and I also want to figure out, you know, if you bankrolled it and then now it's free for all. Like how in general, I guess the bootstrapping process was.

And then obviously it's free for all now. But you have some ways you're making money. So over the course of our. Pull some of that out as you're able to.

So what do you think about the bootstrapping process of this thing. Sure. So, I mean, like, bootstrapping is a term that is generally used for products to charge. And FreeCodeCamp will never charge.

We're never going to charge campers to learn. We're never going to charge the nonprofits we help. We're never going to sell your data to somebody so that we can make money. In fact, we give away basically all the anonymized data.

It's only semi anonymized, but basically you can opt out of that if you want, but we're not going to give away like your email address, for example. But basically we have almost no income. Almost all the income right now comes through merchandise. We sell T shirts occasionally.

We'll have a teespring campaign and we're getting ready to start selling some stickers and some other cool stuff through our shop. We don't accept donations. We don't accept like a turn down funding. I think that my goal with FreeCodeCamp is keep FreeCodeCamp as independent as possible and to retain as much control as possible.

Because I see FreeCodeCamp is something that could easily be screwed up if we brought in like a lot of. A lot of corporate interests or like angel or VC fund people. We just had a show on that. Actually.

I don't feel that one with Nadia a freeing. So obviously you can kind of see where I'm coming from, where Jada I come from is because we're where there's a lot of altruistic goals and ideas out there. I'm not saying one little bit. Just trying to do some big investigating with you out loud.

And we got a little break here in just a second. But I think what I'm trying to figure out is one, you know, you spent some money doing this and it's not just you, it's we. We have a chance with your personal life. You've got a family, you've got things like that.

So I think, you know, we're always looking for the sustainability side of, of ideas like this because one, you built something awesome. Two, it's super popular. Three, it's helping people. I see you tweeting, I see people saying, you know, in 20 hours I learned some stuff.

And boom, I built this calculator. I built this thing with node or whatever. So obviously there's results. I'm just kind of figuring out how, you know, how I keep it moving, how you're, how you're funded, how you keep funding, how you keep people motivated, invested, whatever.

So hopefully you're taking us on that journey. But let's, let's pause it since we're, we're sort of at a pause moment here. We'll take this quick break. We'll come back, we'll a bit deeper on those topics.

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And Jared, during the break, we kind of talked a little bit to kind of realign some thoughts here. And you brought up something, Jared. People may not know this about you, but you're part of Interface School there in Omaha, Nebraska. And we kind of talked about how it's a capitalistic endeavor and that people are, you know, they're getting value from the teaching that goes on at this coding school.

And Quincy, with what he's doing with this and those who have joined the effort to the rest of the campus, so to speak. And Quincy, I think what we're trying to do really is just figure out, for the listener's sake, everyone who wants to invest, whether it's getting involved in learning or pitching in on becoming a teacher or just becoming a camper and whatever that entails. You know, from a revenue perspective, from a bootstrapping perspective you mentioned, it's kind of focused on products. But, you know, what kind of endeavor is this for you?

Is this a capitalistic endeavor or is this a give back to community endeavor? How do you frame sustainability when it comes to project? Sure, first of all, this is an endeavor of, you know, this is an idealistic venture in the sense that my goal is to remake the world more in the likeness of how I think it should be, which is obviously something that has to be funded somehow. But it's important to note that I am not interested in getting rich.

I'm happy to spend the rest of my day sitting in my closet where I am now eating microwave burritos and coding all day and going for runs around the bay. Area. What I think. I think that pre code camp can absolutely fund itself through helping campers find jobs after they finish Free code camp.

So far, maybe several hundred campers have found jobs after they've worked through FreeCodeCamp's curriculum. And we're not doing anything to capture that value. Basically, they're just going and getting the jobs on their own. There are a lot of ways that we could potentially become kind of an intermediary, and one of them is through our job board that we've already built.

That basically our job board is special in that it is for campers and for employers who specifically want to hire campers who completed some of our certifications. And that's a very hands off, kind of laissez faire approach to matchmaking campers with employers. That will work really well in the long term when we have a high volume of campers completing those certifications. And right now we only have less than a thousand people who've completed the certification.

Out of the 225,000 campers that have registered at all on FreeCodeCamp so far, we saw 222,000 campers, and suddenly you said a thousand have completed a certification. That's not challenge. That's a certification. That's a certification.

So it's approximately 400 hours of coursework. So a lot of it is. All this stuff is so new that people just haven't had time to work through it. But we think that people will have time as FreeCodeCamp continues.

It's just so far, FreeCodeCamp is very, very new in the big scene. Yeah, I mean, like I said, we said, you know, there's a call. It's been on a radar because it's been training on GitHub. It's getting started like crazy.

Obviously, it's doing something that's getting the attention of the masses, those who are on GitHub and 14 projects and contributing back. The number does seem a little skewed to me with, you know, quarter million campers and a thousand certifications, and obviously you're still sort of figuring things out. How do you feel about, you know, that number, that skew, basically, that ratio and what. I guess, given the fact that you're still new and still figuring things out, what are you doing to sort of match those numbers to high ratios?

Sure. Well, we're comfortable with a relatively low ratio. You know, Daphne Caller, who founded Coursera, is, you know, fond of answering the question of like, you know, attrition, essentially. Like attrition is a red herring.

Right. Because these are people that wouldn't learn any coding at all. And if they hadn't come to freecodecamp, they may have just, you know, said, well, I'm not going to bother learning more. Maybe they'll come to freeco camp for users for a while, they'll switch on the resource, they'll come back.

We see that all the time. Because FreeCodeCamp is hard. I mean, we definitely, we're not like the Weider class, your first year of physics or whatever, but we are definitely. We make no pretenses about learning to code being an easy endeavor.

No, it's a serious endeavor that takes a lot of commitment and a lot of effort on your part and time investment and you have to allocate your time accordingly. I mean, 2,080 hours, that's really to get started. That's to be job ready and really just take the first step as a developer of actually getting a job and working for a while. Peter Norvig, the director of Google's I think research right now, I think is what he's doing.

He famously said, you know, learn to code in 10,000 hours. And he believes that learning to code is like a serious input of time and energy. It's not something that you just trivially choose. And of course a lot of people just want to try it out and see if it's for them.

Now, I certainly believe everybody can learn to code if they persist in their effort in practice. A lot of people are going to procrastinate or they're going to just decide that like they don't want to worry about it right now. And invariably those people come back several months later they'll come back and they'll start working on it again. So what we're experiencing is, you know, we have more than 100,000 people use FreeCodeCamp every month.

And a lot of times it's like, it's like they're strolling in and out of FreeCODEcamp as their motivation waxes and wanes and then at some point they'll lock in, alright, I can really do this. They'll kind of clear the proverbial, the proverbial logjam and they'll just keep jamming forward through the curriculum. And once they get that momentum and they really start to believe that they can learn to code, that's when they start clearing these certifications and that's when they go out and get jobs. But it's just an innately challenging process.

So as Daphne Caller says, you know, when Amouk has 1 or 2% completion rate. She's quick to point out that of the people who put forth a serious effort, it's much higher. It's like 60 or 70% of people who really do spend the time to complete the first or second week's assignments. Those people will go on to complete it at about the same rate that a university class will.

And for us, I think it's probably very similar. Our numbers are very similar to that. It's just that we're so new that it's not reflected directly in our outcomes yet. So if we just back up a little, or maybe not back up a, zoom out a little bit, talk philosophically a little bit.

As Adam said, I'm co founder of a web school here in Oaha, so definitely seeing the need and kind of taking a hybrid approach, both, you know, IRL plus adjunct of online tools as a strategy, you know, teaching 10 people at a time. Not going for the massive numbers. But we profile our students, our potential students and one thing that we look for in a potential student is exactly what you said you had, which is why you made it through the slog of learning, which is that perseverance, you know, hard headedness, like some sort of intrinsic self motivation. And you know, most people that I've had experience with, with online only self learning is that problem that you've kind of been touching on, which is the waxing waning of interest or not able to get through that logjam.

And so it seems like in my experience having somebody, a real life instructor or a mentor or I guess maybe in your case a pair is a good way to get more people through that logjam and move, you know, beyond the ones who are going to be, you know, the 20 Larsons of the world who are just going to teach themselves no matter what, you know, come hell or high water and get more people through the course to success. Is that something you guys are thinking about? How I know you said you mentioned you have these campouts or these copying codes. Is there any sort of angle of taking the technique you guys have the broad swath approach of like let's get it the curriculum online for everybody.

And then a lot of the code schools are taking the other approach, like let's get it in real life for a few people. And it seems like you can meet in the middle and say, well we can take this online thing where we're having less than 1% at this point. I understand your point with it's kind of new. So it takes time to get people to the certification.

But let's just call it 1% success rate if certification is the definition of success. And let's work on bolstering that with real other people to come alongside and get people to log. You sure. I'll tell you, I strongly believe that in person learning is critical to establishing that motivation I was talking about earlier.

Because if you're literally alone in your closet like I am right now, it can be very isolating. However, you know, we have the online community component, but that's just a part of it. We have the in person copying codes. That's a big part of it too.

But we actively encourage our campers to go participate in as many hackathons as they can, to go to tech talks, to go to conferences if they feel so motivated to enroll in an intensive coding boot camp or other short term program. And I see tremendous value in those. A lot of coding schools are adopting FreeCodeCamp as part of their pre course work or even part of their core curriculum. And we definitely, I just want to say that we support what they're doing and we think that there should be a wide variety of modalities for learning to code.

There are certain people for whom attending one of those programs is simply not plausible. Maybe they have a lot of kids and they've got a full time job and they simply can't do anything that's intensive at all. So what we're hoping freecode can't do is just give them a slow trickle over the course of years. Because if you're only doing it two hours a day, it probably is going to take you years to get good enough to be able to transition your career, maybe to transition within your company, which is what a lot of our campers do.

They'll apply for slightly more technical positions within the current company. And that's been kind of a path to success because they get more practical experience and they can keep their income stream and all that. But yeah, I think that in person activities is critical to maintaining motivation into contextualizing a lot of the lessons. If you see somebody standing in front of the whiteboard to diagram out a design pattern or how a scheme actually looks, it's no longer so abstract and you can kind of internalize it and suddenly it becomes part of your gestalt of how works or how this different technology works.

The other huge aspect of it, which I've seen firsthand, is all of those speed bumps that you hit that are actually just barriers. You call them dependencies. Earlier, like you had the wrong version of Python or you're typing this command wrong. Some of those things are like, it's useful to get through that on your own because it's that again, you've proven to yourself, I can solve this problem, I can get over the speed bump.

But a lot of those are just gigantic wastes of time. And you're not actually learning, right? You're just banging your head against the wall. And if you only have two hours a day to do this, you're investing, you know, the two hours a day, and you spend that entire time hitting these dependencies or whatever the problem happens to be and not learning.

Having somebody who can, in a moment, move that thing out of your way and you can just continue on your learning path is hugely valuable. Yeah, I agree. And I would say that that's one of the major reasons that freecodecamp exists, is to give you, like, a clear path forward so that you can spend less time out in the sticks, so to speak, going down rabbit holes and, you know, fixing things that are not active. A lot of people get caught up in deploying servers and doing all this, like, ops or DevOps type stuff early on, and it feels like you're being productive because you're following this tutorial, you're getting server, but you're not actually coding.

And if you think about, like, becoming a software developer, what is the biggest, you know, the biggest aspect of that career? It's coding. And I think that people should spend as much time coding as possible and as little time worrying about, you know, configuring their flavor of vim shortcuts or whatever, or whatever ancillary stuff that can seem like it's a productive, relevant use of your time, but in fact is not an optimal amount or an optimal application of your time, considering that you need to get thousands of hours of coding under your belt before you really get very good. Maybe, maybe help us guide this call a bit would be to help us understand what your version of success for this would be.

Maybe not right now, but where do you hope to go? What are some of the milestones, success goals that you. Maybe not numbers, but just, you know, aspirational ideas. What do you think success for this is?

Success for FreeCodeCamp would be helping a lot of people in aggregate. Not necessarily a high percentage of applicants, but a lot of people in aggregate be able to transition from whatever they're doing right now to working as software engineers. And in terms of the goal, the scope of freecodecamp, you know, this isn't some project that I'm going to get bored with and move on and go start building different job libraries like that. This is where I literally see my career.

Like I'm hoping that 50 years from now freecodecamp is still going strong. I would like my. One of my personal heroes is Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia and really got the critical mass necessary to sustain that and make this incredible resource that if you look at the total amount of time that went into building Wikipedia, I mean it's the equivalent of building the Egyptian pyramid several times over. And it's all because he just planted the seed and kind of nurtured it early on and got a whole bunch of other people to come over and contribute.

And my hope is that with FreeCodeCamp we can, we can get even more teachers and even more developers coming in to really build this amazing online resource so that anyone anywhere in the world who has the motivation can sit down and learn to code in a very efficient way that is free of a lot of the issues associated with self directed learning in general of not knowing exactly what to do or having to deal with like resources that do not interoperate properly because they're dealing with different content or maybe excessive overlap between different resources. For example, there's this resource density of early content that teaches you the most fundamental aspects and there's also this density of advanced tutorials, but there's very little in between that would help you bridge from one side to the other. So what we want to do is create a reliable bridge from the people who are stuck in kind of beginner resource mode where they're jumping from tutorial to tutorial to actually have something where they can hunker down for the long term and expend a lot of time and energy just learning all the intermediary aspects of coding. And then they'll be in the advanced state where they can rely on the Gamma tutorials and effectively use Google Stack Overflow, all the other tools to be able to accomplish whatever they need to accomplish.

So that's what I see for Code Kit is like ideally it's a bridge from a novice to a fairly advanced job ready coder that can be used by anybody, anywhere in the world for free, at their own pace. So like any strong bridge out there, you've got a lot of support, right? FreeCodeCamp is not just you slide this Quincy. I'm sure you don't want to be because that'll be a lonely track.

Help us understand. We really haven't talked about who else is involved. You mentioned teachers, you mentioned mentors, you mentioned in real life opportunities, you mentioned Pair programming, curriculum. I'm sure there's somebody creating curriculum.

So paint a picture for who's behind this. And I guess it's a dovetail of that after that, maybe if you can lead in some motivations, how you're motivated, what people are motivated by, and how hard it might be to get them to buy into your dream. FreeCodeCamp is our core team, I think currently 17 people. I can tell you some of the people on that core team name some people.

So Michael Johnson in Washington D.C. is in charge of our nonprofit projects. And we've broken everything out in terms of like, product ownership and traditional Agile practice. So Michael Johnson owns the nonprofit projects in terms of like coordinating our volunteer Agile project managers who are working toward getting experience for their certifications.

And he also goes out and identifies and vets all of these nonprofits that want different projects built. And then he actually oversees the entire process of pairing up two campers who completed our, you know, three outstanding certifications, which is 1200 hours worth of work, and then pairing them up and getting them on a team with Agile project manager and the nonprofit stakeholder to actually build the project. And we repeated this process almost 20 times now done more than half a million dollars worth of pro bono coding for nonprofits. So he owns that.

Berkeley Martinez owns our open source code base and he is responsible for making sure that we have CI that runs and that we're using style guide that's enforced by eSlint, we're using Airbnb JavaScript style guide and that generally like stuff is not introduced that makes freecodecamp buggier or less secure. So he's kind of like the fun police in many ways on the freecodecamp repo. Rex is over in Sacramento area and he's an electrical engineer who is also quite good at coding and he's in charge of our JavaScript curriculum. Brianna Swift is a K12 music teacher who's also quite good at coding and very good at teaching.

And she's in charge of our video curriculum. So she stands in front of the whiteboard and records these two minute videos that talk about everything from computer security to Big O notation and all these other concepts that are more theoretical rather than practical. So she basically is the ownership. She has ownership of the theory curriculum and Rex has ownership of the practical curriculum in terms of coding challenges.

Then we have Justin Richardson, who's in Toronto, who's in charge of our campsites. And as I said, we have nearly a thousand of these campsites, each of which has its own Facebook group. And basically we coordinate these coffee and code events and other events. Like people go to hackathons together and things like that through these Facebook groups.

We have Nathan Leniz, who has built a lot of our ancillary tools. He's in Washington. He's in the army bomb squad. He literally takes apart bombs all day.

That's his day job. And then afterward he comes and pulls another shift doing, you know, node development for free code shin bombs. And then we've got like a whole lot of other people. I could go on.

We have just a whole lot of issue moderators. We have moderators in our chat room. When you have thousands and thousands of people in your chat system, you do need to keep out the occasional teenager who decided to come in and harass people. So we're very vigilant about that.

There are so many people involved. I feel embarrassed that I can't name them all right off the top of my head. But I am extremely grateful for all these people. And they are doing 95, 99% of the work that is done on free code camp.

And my percentage, my overall percentage of things that I do keeps decreasing because there are just so many more contributors coming in. We have almost 300 contributors on our open source repo. And then we have just a ton of people that are going out and like evangelizing our campsites in various cities and getting people to come in and sit down and learn to code with them. Wow, it's a big.

Yeah, a lot going on there, Quincy. I think. I think we do want to touch on, like, how you motivate these people. A lot of people, open source, you know, they want their project to get traction.

You know, they have a great idea, they have some valuable software they've written, and maybe people aren't paying attention to it, maybe haven't been able to motivate others to help them with a PR or a bug request. And I think that's an insight that people like have is when we see somebody who's been successful in two things. You brought a lot of users. Okay.

I think some of that can be explained by your hardcore curriculum and the free aspect of it. You've also brought a lot of contributors, as you just listed off a bunch of them and can't even remember them all. So we'll take a break, but we really want to hear from both sides how you motivate people to become part of the community and help out the side, especially with your. The freeness of everything.

And on the other side, some success stories of users that have used freecodecamp. And I'm sure these are some of the motivations you see, you know, kind of transforming people's lives. So we'll take a break, leave a second to think about a few of those things, and we'll be right back. I'm here with Thomas Watson of oppy and as listeners of the show, you know the wheel to turn things on their heads.

And that's no different than sponsorships. And one thing we're doing is we're going deeper into the organizations we work with. Oppbee is doing some really interesting things around application performance monitoring, specifically around Node js. And Thomas has an interesting story on how he got started with OPPY and also starting out their nodes, of course.

So, Thomas, say hello. Hey. Hello, everybody. Thomas, you got an interesting story here with how you came to be at OPP Beat.

It seems like the node support is kind of thanks to you. So what's the backstory on that? Yeah, so I've been doing node js for almost 5 years and I found oppeed, they were doing aka performance monitoring and I wanted to have that for my stuff that I was doing. And they didn't have node support.

So I basically approached them and said, hey, can I do an unofficial Node JS implementation? And they were like, yeah, sure, I would love that. And I did that. And then slowly we started to work more and more together.

And all of a sudden I find myself being employed now at being there, the Node JS lead. And I'm now responsible for this agent that I started back in the data open source project. And I'm responsible for that AdoptView and that's the one you install on your production servers to ensure the health and performance of your application. So that's that module's outbeat node.

And so things began with that open source repo. I was happy to interact with this. Yeah, I started under my own GitHub account and just did it for myself in my own projects and people started using it and DOCP got really happy with it. And then when we decided to to join forces, we will dog on GitHub to announce your sites on GitHub.com, that's really interesting to see, like, because we'll get into this here in a second.

But you have this passion for open source. But how you know, your own personal drive and desire for something on a particular, you know, language platform like Node and then a service like Offy to get that application performance monitoring into your own apps. You're like, hey, you don't have it, but I can write this. And now you actually work there and build it out.

Yeah, that's a beautiful open source. The connection with a lot of people and you can basically do what you want for yourself. And then if people like it, you see what it's actually in this case it's this really awesome place. I'm doing this really awesome stuff with Node actually down in the machine room, so to speak, which is really, really interesting to do.

And right now we actually are. We're just going out of beta soon. You can go to opi.com nokia and sign up for the beta if you want to try the stuff. So the Outbeat Node module, can you talk a bit about what it does?

So it basically sits on your server inside your Node JS app. You require it at the top of your main program and it just monitors the overall health of your application on a request basis. So incoming HTTP requests to your Node server figures out what's flow, what's performing badly, what should you take a look at to optimize? Maybe it's the database thing, maybe it's the redis cache or something else.

And it also bunches errors happening in production. So we will break down the error, figure out who made that code, when was it committed to git, when was it pushed to production. So you can hold a sign error as well to the developers who actually is responsible for the code that's breaking. So obviously your passion for open source and your passion for giving back, you know, got you doing some of the stuff with opbeat and what we just described there with your notes, support and whatnot.

Can you talk a bit about your work at nodeschool, the open source you've written just some of your passions around open source and how do you think about open source? Yeah, I really love open source. I've been a big open source software user for over 20 years. So when I joined the Node JS community 5 years ago and finding such a big open source spirit in the community was really exciting.

So I've now gone from open source using the open source developer. I love to teach, that's one of my passions. And especially of course I love teach programming. So there's something called a node school where I try to help out as much as I can to teach other people Node JS and you get to do that not only, you know, on the web, kind of remotely, so to speak, you also get to do it face to face.

Yeah, you can go to nodeschool IO and you can take some courses Online, but you can also join some of the regional chapters in Community. There will be a Node school event where we will have tutors who can help you out with your questions. And you can actually do some of these online courses. You can do them in person, in real life, with people who know Node really well.

And I try to do as much as I can organize one game code where I'm from. Cool. If you want to follow with Thomas, you can check him [email protected] Watson that's last name W-A T S O N. If you want to sign up for the Outbeat Node JS video, do so outbeat.com nodejs and now back to the show.

All right, we're back with Quincy Larson talking about Free Code Camp and the community that he's built around the community of contributors, of users. I think you named 17 core contributors and many, many more. And before the break, we were wondering how you went about building this community. How do you motivate people when there's no promise of money to be so involved and give so much their time to this awesome community?

It's really challenging initially to get people to care about you. I really felt like for the first month after I put together the Node JS prototype and started online, and we immediately created a chat room, which I think, in retrospect, was very wise. I didn't attempt to create all the resources myself initially. We were using a lot of Stanford classes, things like that, as our challenges, and we since moved to almost all internal content, but we got that live.

And I just hang out in the chat room and whenever somebody came in, I was like, hey, how's it going? Blah, blah, blah. Probably scared more people away than I actually, like, retain that way. Bombard them.

Yeah. But I mean, I literally, this is my life, you know, I have a young daughter and I spend as much time as I can with her, but often, like, the time I'm spending with her is me, like, running around the city, pushing a stroller on the phone with a contributor. I answer all of our team email myself. Still, I spent a good amount of time in the chat room looking at GitHub issues.

I just try to, like, lead by example by being as involved as possible and being completely down to earth on approachable. If you send me a message on Gitter or on Twitter or on Quora or any of these other platforms on Active On, I will get back to you. I can't promise it'll be immediate, but I will get back to you. And I think it's worth the time to accept that additional, you know, communication overhead, so to speak, of trying to answer everybody's questions and make sure everybody feels their feedback is heard.

Because a lot of times great feedback just comes out of nowhere and it's like, wow, why didn't we think of this before? So I would say that by trying to establish personal relationships at scale, just by cording off 50 hours of a week to talk to people, that has been instrumental in helping us build a team. I mean, I can tell you some people that have joined that just kind of wandered in and started talking to me and I was able to convince them to contribute. You know, Rafael up in Brooklyn, he took over our wiki and he's done an amazing job.

And I think it was just like a casual, you know, he messaged me with some question on Gitter and I was able to like wrangle him into like, hey, you should write wiki entry on this. And we have our own wiki which we're moving from GitHub. We're using GitHub's wiki. We're moving over to our own wiki using an awesome react driven tool called Gatsby.

If you haven't heard of it, it's great. Wesley McCann is kind of this nomad out in on the east coast and he's the kind of guy that hops on a bicycle and bikes from Tampa to Boulder and he took over our Twitch live streaming. And there's a guy named Evaristo who's from, I think the Netherlands and he was a data scientist and had this academic stats background and everything. He was really interested in our data and he created the data science chat room on Gitter and has basically been leading a lot of other academics and statisticians who are interested in working with our data and learning more from, I guess, what amounts to a new paradigm in education.

I don't think Freeco camp is precedented in terms of the specific combination of her mutations anyway. And then Vladimir tomorrow, he's like a church director down in Bogota, Colombia, and he was very interested in translating freecodecamp into Spanish. And he did it so quickly. He did it very quickly.

And we wrote the logic to actually, we just launched that during our big livestream a couple days ago on Twitch. But basically he handled the Spanish translation so well and coordinated the volunteer effort so well that I was like, man, you should own our internationalization effort. So recognizing people that are doing great things and just giving them the reins and trusting that they're going to do a Good thing. Here's an interesting anecdote.

There's a guy who Bill Gates has only met one time or two times ever, and Bill Gates trusts his entire like $80 billion estate with this one finance guy because he just got a good impression. He didn't want to micromanage it. He didn't want to tell this guy how to do his job because he didn't have the diamond experts to do that within the level of reliability. So he's like, look, you're clearly doing a good job with this.

You know, take it over. And I think that approach has worked really well. I've delegated thanks to Ben McMahon, a high school student out in Dublin, Ireland. We just gave him this project called the Challenge O Matic, which was like kind of a GUI way to create challenges for free Code King's curriculum so you didn't have to go in and just build them JSON like I was building back in the old day.

And he just took it and ran and built it. And so much of our code base is the product of these people that just kind of wandered in and ended up being extremely productive. It's kind of like they follow a power law. Like 90% of the people who come forward are going to put in a pull request and be of some level of utility, which we greatly appreciate, of course.

And then occasionally we get these proverbial whales who just come in and like, are extreme dynamite dynamos of energy and just code non stop all day, all night. That's what they love doing. You know the guy I talked with earlier, talked about earlier, Nathan, who's in the Army, New Year's Eve 2015 or 2014 New Year's Eve. Like we didn't even realize that New Year's had come and gone because we were so in depth on our pair programming session.

That's deep. Yeah, I mean like, we were just in the zone. We were like bonded at like the soul level. I think that's the pair programming too.

I mean to have that kind of attention span and be totally zoned in, totally in flow. Yeah. And pair programming. Great.

And I can't say enough good things about it. Like that's, that's the main modality of coding these days because it's simultaneously it produces better code, which is proven, they've done research, and it produces less buggy code than individuals coding for a considered amount of time. And at the same time it's like bonding and you get to understand a person. You know, it's like the heat of battle.

You truly Know a man's soul, you know, I mean, that's how I feel about fair programming, you know, love it. You don't really know somebody unless you pair programming with them. So it's a great way to like, not only understand them better and get mean. And at the same time, I can, you know, teach them a little bit about my, my particular worldview in terms of like features and how to like, keep free code camp as simple as possible, which we're constantly calling features to get in there just because they complicate the user experience.

Want to keep things simple. So we've got a lot of other people that are coming forward that look like they're gonna be incredible contributors as well. Like every day I'm getting, you know, messages from various professional. Lots of domain experts that want to help out.

So my key to sustaining this chain reaction, which I was lucky enough to kick off, is just listening to people and giving them agency. While we're on that note, since you talked about pair programming, let's talk about the stack behind this. Like, what is built in, how do you ship it, who's involved? And you talked about, you know, during the process of parabroming, you get a chance to share your philosophies and keeping things simple.

So it sounds like there's some core values that get shared through these interactions you have with the team. What's it like, what's it built on? And share that with us. Sure.

We started out with basically the MeanStack, MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node, and now we're using MongoDB still and Node still. We're using Loopback, which is also by strong loop that I think created and maintain Express. And we're also using. We've moved to React and we're moving from our own open source implementation of Flux called ThundercastJS, which Berkeley, who I said is in charge of our repo, he built this flux tool called ThundercastJS.

But he's recently come around to the fact that Dan Abramov is a genius and has like, you can't talk Redux. So we're moving to Redux as well. So Berkeley's transitioning to that. And so soon it'll be like a full single page react experience.

What about curriculum? How do you author curriculum? How do you get that into the system? So what we do is we just create these JSON files and we used to just do it manually.

Like I would insert HTML in the JSON and then seed it in that way. It's really easy because instead of having some Data somewhere, it just gets blown up every time you reseed it. And that way, like it's very easy to go in and add a translation to it or add a new feature to all the challenges. So we just stored in all this JSON.

And in terms of curriculum development, if you're curious about that too, it's very like we basically say like what we did in December was we said we want to have react D3 and sass covered. Sass, we were switching from less to SAS because Bootstraps move from less of Sass. And we're going to continue using anti Bootstrap because we think it's awesome. And if bootstrap is using SaaS, well, if it's enough for Bootstrap, it's probably enough for us.

So we're moving over to SaaS and we wanted to teach all those. But what we want to do is we're very focused on evaluation criteria rather than process. So we'd start with the evaluation criteria and then we build the curriculum to work people up to it. So what we did first was our community put together 15 new challenges or 10 new challenges specifically for the data visualization component.

And we launched React and SASS in with data visualization because even though you could argue it's part of front end development, more so. But we created like 5D3 challenges where you build, you know, visualizations of increasing complexity and five React SaaS challenges where you can use any tools you want. You have to use React and Sass, including on up to creating a roguelike RPG game right in browser that runs. And all these projects ideally run right on codepen so you don't have to spend a lot of time, you know, bootstrapping a development environment thing.

Codepen's been great and, and we use Cloud 9 for the back end challenges just because it's simpler than trying to say, okay, now go download this VM now. And so run all these commands to set up your Linux environment, you know. So are those companies involved by any chance, like you mentioned Twitch earlier, that your live channel and people getting back and pouring in may not be monetarily but just free resources. Are they pitching anyway?

No, we look into doing corporate sponsorships. It's something we may explore again in the future. But like we didn't want to, we didn't need to, frankly. We still have, you know, a couple years worth of Runway even on my savings.

So we're kind of slow rolling getting revenue, if you will. I think if we can get it through our community through merchandise like Stickers, laptop stickers, T shirts, potentially like Raspberry PIs loaded up with our curriculum and things like that, then we will absolutely do that first and then we'll consider, you know, doing things that might compromise our perceived neutrality. I mean, I don't think it's a big deal. Every good podcast that listened to has core sponsors.

I don't think anything of it. So. But we just, personally we were like, well, we can cross the bridge. Part of it was like a lot of people didn't understand a lot of the organizations we approached to just kind of feel after this didn't understand what Freeco Camp was.

And they thought we were like a hackathon and they were just used to background hackathons, for example. So they've been this and that and as a result, like they. It's complicated, but we're going to consider that maybe down the road, but if we support ourselves purely through matching campers to complete our curriculum with employers who want to hire them, which if you look at the recruitment business and like hire common ol companies, obviously there's money there. And if we're creating hundreds of thousands of skilled developers, I'm not concerned about us being able to sustain ourselves.

Right. I mean, I want to bring the sustainability thing again just because I mentioned those opportunities, just like are they giving back in some sort of way? But you talked about Runway and things like that and not quite this late in the game, but I really hate bringing it back up. As you mentioned, I have to, you know, is there a burn rate?

Do you have expenses? Like, how do these things work for you? Like you said, you've got your own savings and so you're essentially fitting the bill, so to speak, for everything going on with a, with a plan to eventually somehow figure out because there are opportunities. But you're gonna figure out later on once you hit some sort of place and sort of milestone to say, okay, now it's time to think about how we can generate some revenue.

T shirts, obviously stickers back to community. Makes sense for short term, but not long term gain. Yeah, I mean we've been thinking about these for a long time because obviously one freeco can't continue. And make no mistake, the worst case scenario, we shut down freeco can't the effort.

It's open source and somebody just relaunched it. And we certainly do everything we could. It's kind of like Parse is shutting down, but they're open sourcing pretty much everything. So it's not really a loss, it's just inconvenient Facebook.

So you expect that way? Yeah, I think it's good, but I don't think we're at any risk of doing that. Like worst case scenario, we could open it up to donations and I mean with hundreds of thousands of people using FreeCodeCamp right now, and we're hoping to hit a million by 2017, you know, I think that we could generate enough to cover the server cost, which are not that significant. And the main cost associated for free codec is my opportunity cost.

If you're familiar with the economic concept of opportunity cost as a software engineer, I could go out and get a pretty good job so that income enough for going working on freecodecamp but you know, I don't really care about money that much. Like I said, I'm happy to just eat micro burritos and sit in my closet and cool all day, which costs almost nothing. Like my daily would be like 20 bucks. And then, you know, my wife has a good job and she has benefits.

I'm very fortunate for that, you know, because if we need to go see a doctor, take our baby to the doctor, we can do that no problem. So. So there's two reasons why we asked that question. And the reason I clarify this is because I don't want anyone to think we have or I have the wrong idea with trying to drive that question home is like, we think like the change law of this show is listened to by all sorts of kind of people.

Right? People come to this show, maybe this one particularly because of who you are, what you're doing, because they aspire to be like or they have the same dreams as you do. And it's not to say, you know, like negatively how you getting there, but more like how you getting there because somebody else might be wanting to ask that same question and follow the same path and jump on the same ship you're already on. And so I just want to clarify that so it's not mistaken anyway, I know it's probably not and I'm over clarifying it, but that's it.

So yeah, I mean if I could, if anybody's interested in my advice, right. I really want you to help these people listening know what you're doing. Higher donors, they can get them burritos. Advice is burritos.

Burritos cost low, save money. I mean if you're going out buying brand new cars off the lot, like there's a good chance you're not able to afford to finance an operation like this and you're going to be at the behalf going to be beholden to these bankers and other people that are, you know, maybe not the most high, frankly, and don't share your. Their interests are not aligned with you. They want to pump you full of steroids and run you up to a liquidation.

A liquidity event which dhh. Like the guy created Rails, wrote an awesome article on Medium about how, you know, you should figure out a way to sustain your organization without financing. So if you can save up money, that's one easy way you can self fund. But even if you do sell fund, how do you get traction?

Well, if you look at how Pinterest took off, you know, the guy wrote handwritten letters to every single person who signed up for Pinterest and mailed them to them physically. Like, can you imagine opening up your mailbox and you got a letter from the founder of the service you just signed up for? Like, it takes grit. It's not something you should take trivial.

It's extremely difficult to get past that initial indifference towards your project. And you know, like, no amount of money is gonna get you past that. You can't Google as your way out of people just not giving a damn about your project. Well, let's, let's take that opportunity to turn into a break real quick.

When we come back, some closing questions we have are obviously some of the traditional closing questions we have, which is open source radar, who's your hero? But specifically, since we're on this topic, we want to talk about your needs. You know, there's somebody out there that wants to get involved, wants to help out, whether it's teaching, helping with curriculum, whether it's mentoring, whatever it might be. Let's talk about some of your needs.

And then we haven't quite touched on getting started and I feel like there's some people out there that already started. But nonetheless, let's waste out at least what it takes to get started with RICO camp and what that process is like. So let's touch on that when we come back from this break. We're excited to be working with BMC to spread the word about Trueslake Pulse, their SaaS based monitoring service for cloud and server infrastructure that lets you monitor, visualize and alert with one second resolution.

I had a chance to talk to Mike Moran, the senior architect about what real time monitoring is. Take a listen. Real time obviously means different things to different people. To us, real time is one second.

So for us, we have one second metrics on everything that we collect. We'll pull all of that, push it to our servers and you can See it roughly in about four to eight seconds, depending on where that falls in the interval. So we'll pull one second data and within eight seconds you can see it streaming live on your dashboard. So during this conversation with Mike, I was trying to figure out what real time monitoring means to them.

And I was also trying to figure out who might use it and why they would care about one second resolution timing when it comes to monitoring their infrastructure. And this is how they broke down for me. I think at the beginning you kind of look at it and that's a very niche side of the market. But I think as things have changed, you can look at e commerce companies or you can look at anybody who's running an application.

We now have stacks that are very nimble and we end up with things like restarts that are quick or our stacks change very, very quickly now. So our spikes maybe aren't something that, you know, it's not Black Friday and you'll end this gradual spike or this immediate spike that lasts for a long time. You now have a lot of things happening because you have so many interconnected systems. You have microservices and dependencies everywhere.

Something happening in one obviously affects other things, but if it's something small or happens very quickly, you don't notice that. And at this point with Mike, I was like, well, what's a better example? Give me a real world example that everyone knows about that could really explain how important it is to have one second near real time monitoring on infrastructure level stuff that really matters. The heartbeat, so to speak, of an infrastructure.

This is what I had to say. It's pretty interesting. If you're looking at your EKG and you're looking at your heartbeat, how many doctors would ever look at your heartbeat at a minute interval or a 15 second interval? It'd be crazy because you'd miss whatever was happening with your heart and that's something that you would want to screw it.

Wow, what a great real world example of what that exactly means. I don't know about you, but I don't mess with my heart. My heart keeps you going, your heart keeps you going. And if you value the heart of your business, the heart of your infrastructure, you're care about one second resolution, timing and care about real time monitoring.

And BMC's True Sight Pulse truly is something you should take a look at. Head to bmc.com truesightpulse all one word, no hyphens and tell them that you'll send you. All right, we're back from our Final break of the show. And Quincy, obviously we've loved diving deep in this conversation with you.

We've talked about where you personally came from. We've talked about your goals and motivations. A lot of give back to those who are involved, those who are actually making it through. And I think there's a lot of people out there right now who are thinking, I want to get involved, whether it's becoming a camper and getting taught or mentored or, you know, taking part of, you know, pair programming and all these different things you've mentioned on the show here today.

But there's a lot of people out there who want to get involved somehow. So what are your needs? How can people help out? How can they get involved?

And not only how, but if they want to do it, specifically, where can they go to, like, take the next step? One thing we're really big on is internationalization. A lot of people are not native English speakers and would benefit tremendously from not having to simultaneously learn English encoding. So we are basically all of our video challenges where, you know, Brianna stands in front of the whiteboard and draws diagrams and explains theoretical concepts.

We would love to have those rerecorded by native Portuguese speakers, native Chinese speakers, various world languages. We would also like to have our wiki translated into all these different languages because our wiki is like, we're trying to build a kind of a very easy to read and friendly version of maybe Mozilla's developer network or some of these other resources that are maybe a little bit more centric and not quite as beginner friendly. We want to make it really, really, really beginner friendly and eschew as much jargon as possible. So that is one area where we could definitely use help.

So both the translation and the creation of those challenges of those videos and of those wiki articles is one place where you could, if you're listening, you want to get some open source contributions. Like Matt Millweg from WordPress was saying, like, everybody who goes to boot camp or some sort of intensive program should try to get as many open source contributions under his or her belt as possible. Well, we absolutely will take any contribution seriously. Look at them.

And we would love your contributions and you can contribute all those and all that stuff. We'll go through GitHub, so you'll get GitHub credit for it. GitHub credit, love that idea. PRs as credit.

What about the teaching side and curriculum, mentoring? You know, you mentioned, I think just through conversation that some of the people that have stepped up and got involved, have done so through their, you know, small contributions. And you sort of noted that they're really good at hand more responsibility based on doing really good with small responsibilities. But what about those teachers who are like, you know what, I just want to give back.

I got like five hours a week. There are opportunities for teachers, mentors, you know, how can they step in? Is that an opportunity for them? Well, there is one immediate way that anyone can give back, which is to just jump into our chat rooms.

And we have help rooms on a variety of topics, data visualization, back end development, things like that. And if you were interested in jumping into one of those, you could help answer questions from our community. Because people will frequently get blocked or they'll stumble and they'll just click the help button and go in and explain the problem and often just explain it to somebody and having somebody listening. If you don't know the answer, you've helped them just by having them articulate their problem.

And of course, if you have time, if you're a teacher and you actually have a good presence and are good in front of the whiteboard, you could help write some scripts and record some scripts of that we can include in our theory curriculum. Another way you can help out is if you become part of the campsite nearest your city, which there's a good chance that there's one within, you know, a 30 minute drive or a bus ride of where you live. If you want to take a, you know, a Thursday evening and go over to one of the coffee and code events and offer to help people out and just be there and be an example. If you're already an experienced software engineer, that'd be wonderful.

If you're an experienced teacher and you just want to kind of help people understand by applying general teaching methods, help them understand a concept that they're struggling with, that would be wonderful and I guarantee you you'll meet a lot of interesting people and they'll be extremely grateful. Fantastic. Well, obviously, as you know listeners, we have some awesome show notes. This is episode 195.