freeCodeCamp Dallas Website Rewrite

Rob Bertram

freeCodeCamp Dallas is a very different experience for campers today than before COVID. We used to enjoy monthly in person meetings and networked in person with learners at many stages in their development. Today, our meetings are virtual over a video call. Most of us have not met our fellow learners in person. As a consequence, our experience online is more important than ever. We now have a thriving Discord channel with daily messages about career advice, coding help, and have even started a cohorts program where we split into teams and build projects together. In many ways, forcing us online has moved us into a place where we are more effective in our mission: helping one another to learn code at a professional level. With this goal in mind, we believe building a robust website will help us expand our mission.

The site will allow campers to work on professional grade code

The fCC Dallas admins are passionate about creating competent entry level software engineers and supporting them through the early stages of their careers. An important part of our strategy is ensuring that we continue supporting learners as they progress in their abilities. Previously, our meetings were centered around the lowest common denominator in terms of skill level which turned into elementary HTML, CSS, or JavaScript presentations. Today, we offer a more robust path forward. Beginners learn their craft through the official fCC Dallas site. As soon as they are competent enough to participate, we encourage them to participate in our cohorts program where they will build with other learners and are provided a mentor. These projects are incredibly important in developing software engineers as they prepare for job readiness.

The freeCodeCamp Dallas website is intended to be an open source, professional grade project for our most advanced campers. The difference between the site and cohorts is that the expected quality for code is much higher. In cohorts, campers are generally focused on making their code work and experimenting with new technology. Contributing to this website will focus on a clear understanding of established patterns and how to effectively work within the bounds of established paradigms -- just like they would do as individual contributors at their first company. The expected tech stack for this site will be much more nuanced than many of the cohorts projects -- especially when we begin building out our dashboard. We expect that this level of exposure to tooling, patterns, and code review will stretch our most advanced campers. This kind of experience provides the knowledge and experience needed to effectively interview and exceed performance expectations of entry level software engineers.

The site will allow us to expand our online engagement

As mentioned previously, our support for campers is almost exclusively digital. Working in digital spaces could be greatly aided by a website in terms of providing:

• An explanation of the free services and mentorship opportunities we provide.
• Spaces for technical recruiters to assess camper profiles and portfolios.
• A clear and organized place to organize our programs such as having sign up forms and rosters for Cohorts.
• A dashboard for campers where they can track their involvement with fCC Dallas.
• Blog content
• And much more!

The possibilities for this website are endless.

The site will allow campers to submit blog posts to build their credibility and confidence

Trying to get your first job is a long, demoralizing process. We want to give our campers every advantage possible to help them stick out from the crowd. One really great way to stand out is if employers find published content about software when googling their names. It immediately gives them insights into what the job applicant is interested in, knows about, and a rough idea of how they think about code -- and that can make all the difference.

Another advantage of encouraging blogging among campers is that it gives their mentors a lens into their thought process. It allows us to further shape and develop nuance in the way that people think about software, and that by itself is exciting.

We believe that freeCodeCamp Dallas can produce competitive entry level candidates. Our aspirations are to produce not only great candidates, but provide them with opportunities and exposure to people and places that can help them as they enter the field of software engineering. We hope that this website expands our influence to highlight and grow our campers as well as educating businesses and recruiters of the opportunities that excellent entry level candidates bring to software teams.