I object to the new revision of free code camp

I understand that you need 1000’s of hours to get good at coding. However, I feel like changing the currículum and placing extra project requirements on people lacks integrity. At my university, students are held to the currículum that is in place during the year they enter. I feel that free code camp should do the same. I am a third of the way through and I was planning on finishing in five months with the three certs since my well being depends on getting to the non profit volunteer work.

Paper qualifications don’t mean that much. It’s the skills you have that employers will look at. Web development tech changes rapidly and I think it’s great that fCC is updating its curriculum to match the kinds of skills in demand today.

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Freecodecamp is not college. The principle behind FCC is for you to learn, for free, if you want to. The new curriculum is not longer, there are less projects per certificate, they are also more focused on the specific skill of that certificate.

I’m finishing the beta right now, not a single project took more than a day to complete after learning the technology behind it. Comparing this to college isn’t fair nor applicable.

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FCC is free and is a godsend. Don’t complain.

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Almost none of the new material is required and anyone who has completed the work when Beta goes live will be “grandfathered”.

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where can i find the new free code camp

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The new curriculum is now in beta testing. If you’re interested in being a beta tester (or just seeing what is coming) check out this forum thread.
Here is a brief explanation of the decision to wait for a single large release.
When will then be now?

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lol thanks…another question will all the work i’ve done already be for nothing?? or will the work carry on onto the release of the of free code camp??

The work you’ve done on freecodecamp.com will stay on freecodecamp.com. Anything you do on beta.freecodecamp.com will NOT be copied to freecodecamp.com.

To the original OP: Unfortunately that’s the way it works in the real world. Requirements can change. Software tools can change. Well, your tools are guaranteed to change at some time, that is fact. In other words, we all need to learn what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from under us because that’s how things work.

Also I had a computer science professor (for more than one class) who was notorious for adding requirements on a whim to a long term project or assignment. He would even do that a day before the assignment was due. He said we might as well get used to it. Literally his words. He did tell interesting stories, though - he was a math PhD, and he told us that in graduate school he had a teacher who would deduct points for every single step you got wrong on a test problem. No partial credit. In other words, this could potentially leave you with a negative score.

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I don’t know, I like that the new projects will actually be testable. I’m not very far into this (just finished baby’s first portfolio project) but I had kind of been wishing there’d be a way for me to get a better sense if my code was actually any good (yes, there’s the forums, but those are hit and miss for feedback), and more projects = more practice. (shrugs)

Thanks for the information Ariel.

The goal is to actually have the skills to be a capable developer not to have a useless certificate. If your goal is the certificate then you should probably rethink what you are trying to accomplish on this site.

The current front-end developer certificate is nearly useless since you still need to learn A LOT more to actually become a front-end developer. I just looked at the beta certificates for the first time and they seem to be far more meaningful since they are more specific.

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To DWAbrego: Yes, in agile programming, reacting to the clients opinion after each incremental prototype is an integral part of the game and requirements change dynamically. However, many companies also maintain their software with the version of the stack that they started off with due to the fact that the opportunity cost of moving to the latest version of say python 3.x could be too expensive.

I actually like the new curriculum due to the fact that it puts a heavier emphasis on core HTML and CSS concepts and gives you the flexibility to choose your front end framework for the intermediate front end design projects. However, I feel like the site is becoming too bloated with the latest buzz words and could be difficult to navigate for someone new to the game. Quincy Larson, the creator of the site himself, said that one of the mistakes he made was trying to learn too many languages when he first started and because of that chose full stack javascript for the curriculum. Maybe the unique frameworks and libraries could be further grouped into tracks to help people decide?

That being said my primary issue was with opportunity cost. I think we all have unique life situations and the current curriculum actually benefits me more in my personal circumstance.

To Dusky Pixel: I would not say that the certificate is useless. I actually successfully interned at a fortune 500 company and received a full time job offer as an embedded systems software engineer a while back with less domain specific knowledge for that field than what is taught in the front end certificate for web development. You just need to market yourself well at career fairs, developer meetups, and online. Many companies are primarily concerned about your potential to succeed. They figure that if you are smart, you will have the skills to pick up any technology they use.

However, I am primarily interested in completing the curriculum so that I can do the volunteer work for non-profits.

When I say useless I obviously do not mean completely useless. That still is a lot to learn to reach that point but it kind of gives people a false sense of how much they actually know. After I finished the front-end requirements I felt job ready but then I decided to randomly take some react course by Cory House and realized I still had A LOT to learn. I actually felt like just quitting web development completely since I was so overwhelmed by how much new stuff that one course actually taught.

There is definitely a decent amount of posts about people getting a job with the knowledge of a front-end developer certificate from here but I think the actual number is still far lower than what more focused certificates will achieve. It will be far more motivating getting more frequent easier certificates I think… After seeing your topic I decided to actually turn in my front-end work to get the certificate finally even though I finished the stuff 6 months ago and still felt a bit proud that I accomplished the requirements.