S2E8: Starting Free Code Camp with Quincy Larson

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I'm your host, Laurence Bradford. In today’s episode, I talk with Quincy Larson, the highly influential creator of Free Code Camp. Free Code Camp is an open source community of over 500,000 people learning to code together while building projects for nonprofits.

Previously, Quincy lived in China where he was a director at several schools. During this time is when Quincy first immersed himself in the world of programming through automating scripts and other kinds of workflows. In this episode, Quincy dives into how he began learning to code, what led to the creation of Free Code Camp, and future plans for the project.

Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy!

Hey Quincy, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Quincy:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Laurence:
So real quick, could you introduce yourself to the listeners?

Quincy:
Sure, I'm Quincy Larson and I'm a teacher at Free Code Camp and a contributor of the open source project.

Laurence:
Awesome. So I am sure most of the listeners are familiar with Free Code Camp. I'm sure a ton have also done it themselves, but could you just explain a little bit about what that is and what you guys are doing there?

Quincy:
Sure. We're an open source community that helps people learn to code and then we practice the skills that we've developed by building projects for nonprofits. We are completely open source. We started almost exactly two years ago. So far about 5,000 people who have worked through our curriculum and built projects for nonprofits, about 5,000 people have gotten their first developer job.

Laurence:
5,000 people have gotten their first job. Wow, that's awesome.

Quincy:
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. I guess it's to be expected when you have a really high level of usage. Our open source community has about 250,000 people using it every month. Of those, a majority of them have not yet gotten their first developer job. So it's very much aimed towards beginners and even absolute beginners, although pretty much everything in the curriculum is completely skippable, you just have to build the actual projects at the end of each section, and if you do that then you can move on and you can get the certificates and you can work on projects for nonprofits.

Laurence:
Yeah, nice. I love how you combine the building real-life projects with nonprofits as part of the curriculum. I kind of want to rewind a bit. What were you doing before you were in the tech space?

Quincy:
I worked as a teacher and as a school director for about 10 years after school. Basically I ran schools in the U.S. and in China and I taught and at some point I was more and more interested in using technology to help my teaching staff be more effective and help my administrative staff be more effective so they could spend less time doing paperwork and more time interacting with our students.

Gradually, the more I went into technology, learning these kinds of things, how to automate work flows and such, the more interested I got in just learning how to properly code. So I left teaching and running a school as a field and just focused heads down on learning how to use Linux really well, learning how databases worked, learning how to program. I did that for several months. I went to a ton of hackathons, like a hackathon every weekend or two. After awhile of doing that, I was able to get a developer job and then after that developer job I was able to get some freelance work and then eventually I ended up starting the Free Code Camp community.

Laurence:
Awesome. How long ago was that? You were living in China, correct?

Quincy:
I moved back from China and I was living in Santa Barbara, California.

Laurence:
Okay, cool. But before you even moved back to the United States, you kind of had this, you got interested in technology and learning how to program?

Quincy:
Yeah, it was really when I was in Santa Barbara, that was when I started to get into it. Even though Santa Barbara is a relatively small town, there are a lot of tech companies there. There are some that are quite innovative. There was a company called Eucalyptus that was doing virtualization, I think, at the time. That got me really interested and there were just a bunch of hard core programmers who practiced the hacker ethic and were just very serious about using technology to level the proverbial playing field and give individuals more power in the world.

That's when I really got interested in technology, was in Santa Barbara, thanks in large part to the Santa Barbara Hackerspace, which is an excellent organization where people just get together and build things, write software, use 3D printers, use laser cutters, all kinds of cool gear. So that was really what, that was when I found my tribe, so to speak and started hanging out with those people regularly and just absorbing as much as I could.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so cool. I'm learning so much already because I didn't realize that after you were in China you then moved to Santa Barbara. Of course now I do know that you live in San Francisco. I kind of want to still circle back to that Santa Barbara time. Was that where you got your first job then, as a developer?

Quincy:
Yeah. So I can tell you a little bit about that. I was a Ruby developer at the time. I went to a Ruby meetup and it was just a bunch of people, hanging out, drinking beer, talking about Ruby. I just introduced myself and we got to talking and then they wanted to interview me. They misunderstood my job description. I told them I was in operations because I was running schools. They misinterpreted that at DevOps. Operations in terms of being a sysadmin. So they wanted to meet with me and by the time they realized halfway through the conversation that I didn't actually have a background in operations, the guy who interviewed me admitted that, "Oh, operations is an overloaded term." I report to the chief operating officer but he's not a programmer. So by that time we had already built enough rapport that they were like, "Well yeah, let's just bring you in as a junior developer."

That was what I ultimately, I got a ton of experience with agile development, I got a ton of experience doing test-driven development and to some extent behavior-driven development. They were very rigorous, as far as applying agile software development best practices, and were constantly sharing books and stuff. It was a very helpful experience. I learned so much during that period of time.

Laurence:
Yeah, I love that story of how it was kind of like, a misunderstanding, you got into the office and halfway through realized that operations meant, the different meanings that it has. I feel like I could so see that happening because you're right. There's operations managers, there's chief operating, COO. It reminds me of development too, because of course there's web development, but there's also business development, economic development, and probably a bunch of other ways that word could be used that I can't even think of right now, but yeah that's really funny.

Quincy:
Yeah, it was a happy accident, but honestly it just goes to show that you got to put yourself out there and if you're in the right room with the right people a high enough number of times, the probability of them saying, "Hey, what are you doing these days, would you be interested in interviewing," just gradually notches up.

At Free Code Camp when people ask me for general advice, like very simple, actionable advice, I always give them two pieces of advice. I try to keep it simple. One is to code every single day. Just a little each day as much as you can. And the second one is just to hang out with other people who code, as much as possible. By doing that second one, just hanging out with people who code, you're building your network and you're increasing the likelihood that someone is going to want to interview you and you're basically going to get in through the back door, so to speak, as opposed to being a resume in a stack of resumes, applying through some web forum.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's absolutely amazing advice. As you were sharing that I was sort of thinking about my own life over the last few years. I remember, this relates to the second point of hanging out with people who code, when my boyfriend, he was originally studying, I think economics in college and he ended up switching majors to computer science, he was doing a minor, wanted to do the major. He began hanging out with more people in the computer science program and because I was with him often, I began hanging out with more people from his computer science program and it certainly had an impact on me as well. Not as far as tangible job opportunities I've gotten from it, but just being around people that were in the computer science program and hearing them talk about things in code and in tech.

Quincy:
It's extremely motivating, Laurence. I'll tell you, being here in San Francisco for example, you walk into any cafe in the city and there are people that have their laptops out and they're talking back and forth and you hear people talking about Linux commands as frequently as you do talking about sitcoms or something. It's just what people talk about here. Having that kind of environment, and you know, not everybody can uproot and move to San Francisco, it's a very expensive city to live in, unfortunately. I'm hoping that they'll fix that in the coming decades.

Just being able to find some place where people are constantly talking about technology, whether it's a hacker space or whether it's just a university computer lab or whether it's, there are so many clubs at universities. Even if you don't go to a specific university, you can still often participate in their clubs. Just go wherever the people, wherever the developers are, go there, and spend as much time as you can. I promise you, you will get your time's worth.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. It's amazing how much you can pick up just from listening in on conversations. I feel like there's so many, I'm just thinking back, this would have been a few years ago, just listening into the conversations and first I had no idea what anyone was talking about but over time, slowly picking up on the jargon and the terms and what not.

Quincy:
Yeah, it puts, it gives you a whole lot, it's quantity. Just constantly being immersed in it. I'll tell you one thing, the most important thing about hanging out with other people who code is that it's motivating. It's hard to get really down and feel like, "Oh I can't do this," when you're surrounded by people who are doing it.

Laurence:
Yeah, certainly. It's educational, motivating, and like you said, being in that environment, you're able to soak so much in. So back to you, you're in Santa Barbara, you get your first job as a junior developer, how long were you there for?

Quincy:
Less than a year and then I decided to move to San Francisco and just do some freelance work and try to learn more. I had been going to San Francisco every chance I got because there were just so many amazing workshops and events and every night of the week in San Francisco there was a different coding related event, like the co-working space I'm at right now has an event, it's Microsoft Reactor, this is my first time to be here. They have a programming event tonight called Proto Tonight where basically two people, two strangers get together and work on some project, building out a quick little prototype over the course of two hours. It's a really fun way to meet people and work with them and I've been to several of these events.

My point is, these things happen constantly. Monday through Thursday there are great events, especially Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If you get a chance and you're looking for an opportunity to come out to San Francisco, I recommend getting on Meetup, just seeing what events are going on. If you can't afford an expensive hotel get a hostel, there are hostels here and just hit up the event. There's usually a hackathon every weekend or so. A lot of them are free. Pretty much everything that I go to is free. Or it cost $20 and you get a huge meal out of it. It's very much worth taking a trip out to the Bay Area and going to some of these events.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so awesome. Oh my gosh, I have so many questions. I don't want to jump ahead too far but I'm just so curious I have to ask. I know you're super busy, you run Free Code Camp, you also are an avid writer on Quora, I'm just curious, how many events do you go to a week? When I say event, it could be a meetup, it could be a conference, it could be a workshop, whatever. I'm just super interested in what that breakdown is.

Quincy:
Sure, so I'll tell you Laurence, I used to go to literally three events a week. I would just figure out a way to work it into my schedule. I'd be like, "Okay, I'm going to work out of this place." And that's another thing, in San Francisco there are just a tremendous number of free places you can work. A lot of times you need to know somebody in order to get into the space, but there are also a lot of free open places where you can go and work. I'm actually going to write an article on Medium about that. I think my friends will be kind of upset that I write that because then a lot more people will know about these places. They are really nice, they're equipped with WiFi.

When I'm in event mode, like right now, my wife and my newborn, she just turned one, her name is Jocelyn, my wife Jade and Jocelyn went back to China to hang out with our extended family for a month so I have time to go to events. Normally fatherhood prevents me from participating in a lot of these events. Back before fatherhood I would go to like three events a week and as many hackathons as possible. I think during the seven months after I quit my job, before I got my first job as a developer, that entire time I was going to hackathons and events and I probably went to more than 12 hackathons during that period of time. Probably 60 or 80 events.

Laurence:
Wow, that's super impressive. I remember when I first started learning how to code. I was in Thailand when I first began learning and then I came back to the U.S. pretty quickly. My first two months back I think I went to ten Girl Develop It workshops. It wasn't a happy hour it was a workshop, pretty much any workshop I could go to that was a Girl Develop It one I went to. I went to them all, this was back in Philadelphia, the first two months.

Now of course my schedule's a bit different but I think it's so impactful to be learning and collaborating with other people. So that totally makes sense, now that you have a newborn, a wife, fatherhood takes precedence over the hackathons and the different meetups. I'm super curious to know because when I think of Code Camp, I think of the online community, but also you do have in person communities but they're all around the world. How many cities are there meetups now for Free Code Camp?

Quincy:
So, meetup.com, I think maybe 50 or 60 proper meetup accounts. We tell people they can do it if they want but meetup charges $15 a month to have it. We just do Facebook groups because Facebook groups are free and like not everybody loves Facebook, I certainly don't, but everybody has a Facebook account generally unless they're intentionally boycotting Facebook. It's very easy to onboard people and then once they join your Facebook group, announcements and things like that just kind of propagate naturally. They don't have to remember to go check meetup or something like that. Facebook has a built in events functionality and stuff.

We have 1,500 different cities that we have these Facebook groups. We call them campsites. They're completely autonomously run by campers who volunteer to lead their local community. What we encourage for campers to do is just keep it casual and don't spend a whole lot of time necessarily building up relationships with local bootcamps or hacker spaces or other types of venues. They can certainly do that. A lot of them will work with Microsoft or Google or whatever big companies happen to have a satellite office in their town and they'll use that as a venue, which is wonderful if they can do that, but we don't want to put a whole bunch of pressure on them. We just say, hey, why don't you do what are called Coffee and Codes. You go to a local cafe, two or more people, just sit down and code together. Super casual. Usually these happen after work and they're scheduled three or four days in advance. It's just super casual, whoever can come, comes. No money changes hands. We don't specifically prohibit if people want to order a bunch of pizza and distribute the cost.

We basically have given these groups full autonomy to make their own rules and decide how they want to do it. What we're focused on doing is creating lots of resources for these groups. We have an open, a fully creative commons asset repo on GitHub, where literally every asset we've ever made is creative commons license and people can use it if they want to make a poster or if they want to create some sort of asset they use to promote an event online. We're trying to create as much documentation as possible and use our forum as a way to share best practices back and forth between the different groups. So yeah, that's our campsites.

Basically, completely driven by campers for campers.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so awesome and I feel like it's so in line with what you were saying before about putting yourself out there, meeting people, getting involved in the community, and at the same time, keeping things casual. It sounds like a lot of the networking and the events you go to kind of have that theme, you could say. I love how you have this huge community in person. And you have this online community as well. I know you guys use Gitter, you have activity going on in Facebook groups, on GitHub, on various forums. I think you guys have your own Free Code Camp forum and of course on Medium, where you guys have the publication. I'm interested in knowing, when you started Free Code Camp about two years ago, what role did your own in-person community have in the success of Free Code Camp?

Quincy:
Great question. First of all, Berkeley Martinez, who is the main developer for the Free Code Camp platform and he does the DevOps stuff with making sure our servers work and continuous integration, like all the GitHub integrations and things like that. Berkeley Martinez and I actually met at a hackathon at Wix. Wix had this big hackathon and if you participated in the hackathon you got a free coworking space for like six months. So we did that and we were both always hanging out up at Wix. You may have heard of Wix, it's a website builder. They were really cool and we got to hang out with their engineering team and everything and learn a lot of their practices for operating at scale.

Berkeley and I were sitting next to each other every day and eventually when it came time, we're like, "Hey, I can't handle all this development stuff on my own." Instead of just asking Berkeley for guidance when I got stuck and stuff, Berkley actually joined in a formal role. So that was one thing where constantly being out there and meeting people, I bumped into Berkeley 40 or 50 times before he eventually joined the team. So just constantly bumping into people like that. That was definitely one thing. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head.

Virtually all of the major contributors to Free Code Camp have just kind of emerged. Like Michael Johnson who runs all our nonprofit projects and runs our Open Source For Good program, he discovered Free Code Camp through seeing us, I think seeing us on Hacker News or some article that I wrote or something on Reddit. Then the rest of the core team just heard about us and joined us. Briana, who was on your show a few weeks ago, she just, I'm not sure how she discovered Free Code Camp. The role of in-person networks was important for getting Free Code Camp off the ground and it's of diminished importance since.

Laurence:
Yeah, that makes sense, since it's grown in size. I feel like this is a conversation I have with people about, I call it online networking I guess you could say. I don't really like the word networking, I like to think of it as just building relationships and friends and things like that, vs. in person networking. Personally, I've always done a lot better with online networking, so connecting with people online. I kind of joke now with some of my coworkers here, so many of my good friends I've never met in person, they're just online. I don't know if you feel the same way at all. I know, I do believe in person stuff has value too, but there's just so many more people you can connect with online.

Quincy:
It's great to meet people in person. We're having Free Code Camp's second year birthday at the WeWork here in SOMA, south of market San Francisco, in a couple days. That's going to be really exciting because I'll finally get to meet all these campers here in the Bay Area that I've been interacting with through Facebook and Gitter and GitHub as we merged their pull requests and things like that.

I think meeting in person is a luxury in this day and age. You don't have to work with people, it's very nice to have in my opinion, actually physically meeting with them. It's amazing how much gets done without actually physically meeting. Unfortunately due to the visa situations and the economics of physically traveling from one location to another and getting a hotel, it's prohibitive for a lot of people to come to San Francisco. Prohibitive for me from a time perspective and from a cost perspective to fly out to for example, Vienna.

I've been talking a lot with the leader, Free Code Camp Vienna over there and I really want to go and check out their awesome campsite but it's probably not going to happen, at least not in the next year, that I'll be able to make it out to Europe.

So I feel like I'm building extremely strong bonds with all of these people through working alongside them on the Free Code Camp project and extending the community through just helping them get their campsites going and giving them guidance on how they can apply for jobs and coaching them on that whenever they message me with a question. I try to respond to literally everybody that messages me, so I'm talking to sometimes hundreds of people a day.

When everything is asynchronous and people are just reaching out to you through email or through messages on Gitter, it's actually, it's nice because you can just sit down and go through everything at one time instead of constantly being interrupted throughout the day. I feel that you can have richer relationships in person but you can have, I can only meet somebody for coffee once every three or four months, right? But I can talk to them every single day if I'm talking to them through Gitter.

Laurence:
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Yeah, certainly. For the listeners, I was talking to Quincy about this before we hit record, I was saying one of the nice things about living in New York is that there are so many more people here, of course. And then also a lot of people come here to visit or come to conferences or what have you. So just since I've been able to live here, I've been living here the last few months, I've got to connect with so many people in person than before, as I call them, online friends. Then I actually got to bring that connection or that friendship into the real life. It's been really awesome and that's definitely been an advantage of living here.

I know similarly for San Francisco, a lot of people in the tech community do go there, or go there to visit for one reason or another. Of course there's a lot of people already living there. I agree completely. There's going to be people that, unfortunately, I'll probably never get to meet in real life, but I'm still able to connect with them every day or weekly online.

Quincy:
Yeah, and that's substantial. If you think about it, you can still see their pictures, you can still hear their voice, you can Skype, you can see their face while you're having a face to face through a computer. You can screen share with tools like Skype and Hangouts and you can see their workflow. At the end of the day, I feel the closest to people when I'm working alongside them. Helping them figure out how we can get that PR merged, that pull request merged, or helping them figure out what's going wrong with their local development environment, for example. Or them helping me understand how we can improve Free Code Camp's user experience, for example. There's so many ways that we can collaborate and I genuinely feel like I learn who people are best by experiencing what they do and how they think. You don't need to be in the same room with somebody to be able to do that.

Laurence:
Yes, I love that. So changing gears a little here, this is something I've always thought when I think of Quincy Larson, because it seems like you never sleep. I mentioned this before but you're writing on Quora, you're managing these different communities, you're emailing people, you're running Free Code Camp. How do you do it all?

Quincy:
I'm very flattered. I do sleep about seven and a half hours a night, so sleep is very important. Exercise is very important, I try to run an hour a day. I'd also say that eating healthy is relatively important. I'm not going to say that I have some weird diet or something, I just eat whatever, but I make sure I eat enough.

As far as productivity, I think the most important thing about being productive is knowing what to say no to. Like knowing your own limits. A lot of times people will, there's a temptation to want to do things yourself, right? There's a temptation to want to drop things and do them right now but if you can triage things and you can think about what can be done immediately so you can see that you don't have to put it on your to do list, that can be tremendously helpful. Things that are longer term, that you may never actually need to do, you can kick those down the road and just address them later, that's great.

Having a sane system that is not a whole lot of overhead for you to run is important. I use a text editor and I literally just have a couple words and then I hit enter. Do this, do this. Then as I finish those things I delete them from the to do list. That to do list is relatively static day to day. I just go in and clean it up and use Google Calendar to make sure that I don't oversleep and miss a meeting. The main thing is living asynchronously which I wrote an article about recently, and trying to keep as much of your communication in as asynchronous manner as possible.

Laurence:
That's awesome. So you're saying, you just use a text editor and keep a basic to do list there, nothing crazy or fancy, like bullet journals or whatever the new rage is.

Quincy:
I've experimented with everything Laurence and I honestly believe the simpler a system is, the more likely it's going to last. I've used OmniFocus, I've used the Getting Things Done methodology. I thought that was really good but honestly, it was just too much overhead to sort things into different bins. Generally, if it takes less than two minutes I just do it immediately, if it takes longer than that, I add it to my list. If it's something where I need to talk to somebody and I'm blocked, I just send them a message asynchronously and just say, "Hey, when can we talk." Or I'll have time blocked out when my baby is asleep and I can actually talk on the phone without waking her up and then I leave Skype open and people come to me when it's convenient for them. Rather than have the overhead of a meeting when it's only going to be a two or three minute call, you know?

So little things like that, not using calendar appointments unless necessary because in some way, having those calendar invites in there is kind of like, it just burdens you psychologically, knowing that, "Oh at 6:00 I'm going for a run with Jeff, I need to make sure I'm going to be available at that exact time." You carry all these things around in your working memory throughout the day and they kind of sap your ability to juggle other things. So just being able to clear your plate and go into zen mode on whatever it is you're doing. Whether you're writing an article, like for me, writing articles on Medium and answering questions on Quora and staying on top of the Free Code Camp support and all the social media and stuff and actually getting features built out on Free Code Camp which these days is more supervisory. I try to describe things and coach campers to build those so that I can give them the experience actually building things and just help with the quality assurance and user experience aspects. Basically, just try to keep things as simple as you possibly can but no simpler.

Laurence:
Yeah, I love that. Sometimes I jump around. Now, at work at least, I've gotten into writing things on my Mac text area, or the notes area. It's just a basic to do list, nothing crazy. Then I just check things off or delete them, or move them down because I like to see things. I take pride in seeing everything I've done, all the checkboxes over a period of time. When you were talking about writing on Medium or Quora, I'm curious, is there a time of day that you block out for writing? In the morning or at night or something?

Quincy:
Generally I do have a little ritual, which is I write a lot of notes and I get a really rough draft done at night. I don't trust myself at two or three in the morning when my sleep schedule's jacked up because I'm trying to avoid when my baby is awake because I can't really work then. So basically I'll write late at night and then I'll wake up and in the morning I'll look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and then I'll go through it and edit and publish. And also, that helps because people are actually reading in the morning. Nobody's going to be reading it if I publish at two in the morning. Well I guess I'm on the West Coast and we do have a lot of people in Asia that read, so they would be awake. But yeah, absolutely, just doing work at night when it's quiet, that's when I do the really focused work, then checking it the next day before I send it out, because you don't want to be pushing stuff late at night. I've heard of some developers have a rule, like no committing after midnight.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's really smart. Personally, my brain shuts down after 11 unless I've had too much caffeine during the day. I love to do writing and stuff like that, even just before noon because in the afternoon my creativity shuts down a little bit.

Quincy:
What time do you wake up?

Laurence:
So before I moved here, when I was living in Boston, I would wake up, people will probably die, but I would wake up every day at 6:14am.

Quincy:
Wow. That's a very specific time.

Laurence:
I know, my first alarm would go off then. I'd usually lay in bed for 10-15 minutes and then I'd get up and shower. I'd usually be out of the house by 7:30. Since moving to New York, you know, the city that never sleeps, my schedule's changed a bit and now, unfortunately, I'm usually getting up around 7-7:30. For me, I wish I was still getting up that early because I would get so much done those first few hours of the day. I guess I go to bed a bit later now. And I do work later, I think that's normal. Maybe it is in San Francisco too, but I think a lot of people in New York will start their day around 10am and end around six or seven.

Quincy:
Yeah, that's pretty typical out here.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. Here's it just on a later beat or something. At least compared to Boston I guess and where I was living before in Pennsylvania. Like restaurants are busier and people eat dinner later. Back before it was 6:00 and here it's like eight or nine, is when the restaurants are busy. Anyway, that's a whole other story. Alright Quincy, thank you so much for talking to me today. I want to kind of end things by hearing you explain where Free Code Camp is going in the future, what your plans are for the coming months.

Quincy:
Sure, so right now we're working on a new curriculum. It's not a new curriculum, it's a significant expansion to our curriculum with several hundred new challenges that are almost all optional, by the way. Don't worry, you're not going to have to go back and do a bunch of additional work if you've already made a ton of progress. And that's going to cover a lot of new technologies and it's also going to cover the fundamentals much more thoroughly. A lot more basic JavaScript, a lot more functional programming and object oriented programming.

We're incorporating ES6 or ES2016, as they're calling it now. We're incorporating all that and we're going to have a lot more design focus early on where we actually talk about visual design and user design concepts. Very basic. We're not trying to turn campers into designers, but just give them a little bit of sensibilities. And then, in addition to that, we are working on fully reactifying Free Code Camp's platform so it's a single page application. Ideally it'll be downloadable, so you'll be able to use it offline and whenever you reconnect it'll send all your progress up to Free Code Camp.

So those are some of the things we're working on. It will be a few more months before we finish all of that but I'm very optimistic that it will make Free Code Camp a lot faster and a lot more accessible, which are two of our key principles. We want Free Code Camp to be as accessible as possible and as convenient as possible. We also want it to be as rigorous as possible and cover these topics fairly exhaustively at a basic level so you have confidence when you go into job interviews that you're going to understand the concepts that they're going to ask you about.

Laurence:
Yes, so much. That's awesome. That sounds like so much exciting stuff. I'm excited to see those developments in the curriculum with some of the design and the user experience. I feel like there are resources online that cover that, but not as much as, at least from what I've seen, web development and what not.

Quincy:
Yeah, and these are all going to be fully interactive. Even our backend challenges, which I didn't mention those, but we're building an entirely new Node Express curriculum, it's not going to be NodeSchool anymore. We love NodeSchool but we've built something that runs in the browser that we believe will be more convenient. That is all going to be available soon too and it will be very convenient and everything will be test based.

One thing that we're doing is all of our projects currently are subjectively evaluated like when you build a project you have these agile user stories, you build it according to those user stories. We're going to go back and actually write automated tests to verify that those user stories are fulfilled, so there will be no ambiguity that you've completed a project. So you might have to fulfill eight or ten user stories but you'll have a test to verify that it's been built up.

Laurence:
Nice, that's so awesome. So finally, where can people find you online, Quincy?

Quincy:
I have a Twitter account, my handle is @ossia, which is pronounced Ossia and it means an alternate passage of music. And since I'm all about open source and it happens to have an oss at the beginning of it. The main places though that I'm active are Medium and Quora.

Laurence:
Yeah, awesome. We'll definitely include links to your accounts on the Show Notes for those. Yeah, great Medium and great Quora you have going on there, it's very impressive. Thank you again Quincy for chatting with me today.

Quincy:
Thank you so much for having me, Laurence.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Quincy. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. if you're listening to this episode into the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation of the page and type in the name Quincy Larson. This episode should appear as the first result.

If you enjoyed this interview, head over to my website, Learn to Code With Me, where you can find even more awesome code related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code. Again, the URL to download that is learntocodewith.me. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you next week!

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