Quick update on FCC's upcoming challenges

Hey Joe, keep working on the projects. You will learn a lot by doing the projects, even if they are later removed from the curriculum.

@IsaacAbrahamson @P1xt Thank you for the help! I do plan on continuing with the projects (the more I can have, the better when finding employment).

I’m going to check out Net Ninja’s YouTube videos. Bootstrap is causing a bit of a pain for me, but I can see where it is helpful.

I don’t have any real experience (except for p1xt’s algorithm challenge) with Chai, but I will certainly have a look if I can come up with some tests.

I guess it would be easier for starters, but if it will be anything like codepen, I’d rather use my own editor. (Of course you can copy paste.) But if there are some specific test, you can easily create an awfull looking page with no content and only a div with the correct ID.

I believe most projects remain the same, though there are a few basic HTML and CSS ones added. For those testing does make sense, since they are very simple and therefore easily testable. [quote=“IsaacAbrahamson, post:36, topic:33369”]
I don’t see why you couldn’t export a project from FCC to GitHub once done though, and change anything you wanted there.
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You certainly can, but I don’t like the idea of changing a working page to meet the specific tests.

Maybe I exaggerated a little and some of the problems I see, might be easy to solve. But I do think that for the advanced projects, testing will be difficult and in certain cases restrict you. I do think that the tests will be thoroughly screened before forced upon us and (hope) that all previous projects will be excluded from testing.

And I guess I just typed my longest reply ever :smile:

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i think the site is great and i cant wait for the next challenges! im almost on OO JS :slight_smile:

I am with you and @P1xt for preferring local creation, but from reading Quincy’s posts on Quora, FCC is intended to be a completely browser-based programming site. This makes it easier for new people, and for people who are wary of downloading third-party software. This is why FCC uses IDE’s and such like Cloud9 and Heroku, instead of developing locally. I think it would be a really great idea if it was possible though to code your applications completely locally. I don’t really want to create my Node apps on FCC, I feel like its much easier to do it locally then on a site. Maybe FCC will make it possible for those of us like that to upload or sites for testing or something. Anyway, if you can think of some better user-stories, have it please! I’m too busy learning Node and MongoDB in the M101JS to learn Chai.

There are some companies and schools who block some types of websites. So, this will prevent FCC members from doing challenges and projects behind their firewalls. I know my work blocks Cloud9, they use to block Channel9 even though a lot of Microsoft free training directs you there.

FCC recommends using cloud9 right now. At the coming update you will be able to supposedly build back-end apps on FCC itself, so that won’t be a problem.

I switched all of my work over to Github a while back and have been doing all of my new work there ever since. I much prefer it to working on CodePen. There were things that simply didn’t work on CodePen. Also, Codepen handled your section so you didn’t have to. That also meant that you really never learn how to do it yourself. Moving to Github requires you to do that, yourself, so you learn how. I hope there will still be a way to code locally and not be required to do everything directly on the new FCC.

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I am also a bit skeptical about the new testable user stories. If they end up imposing limits to the creativity of the campers or limiting the design decisions just because “it’s easier to test”, I think they are not a positive improvement. I hope a right balance can be found when defining those tests.

Regarding the upcoming challenges I do not understand why the “reactification” of fcc needs to be done before they are released. I take a peek once in a while in the github rep to see the progress of the new challenges because I was excited to learn about react and redux right inside fcc. And these specific sections seem to have no progress since the supposed September launch, and had tags like “super high priority” or “running late”. Suddenly those tags were removed and a bunch of other goals were set for the launch. If the goals keep changing, things will never get released, because there’s always a new shiny thing that would make fcc even better, and we have to implement that before proceeding.

I my opinion, the new challenges for the frontend section + data viz should be taken care before new stuff being planned.

Having said that, I don’t want to end my post just criticizing things. I think fcc program is great, and the main advantage over other resources on the internet are the projects. No matter how much programming challenges one makes, nothing teaches you more than actually building a project from scratch.

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Exactly this. Everyone should find a web host if they can spare $5 USD per month. There’s a lot to be said for simply being able to deploy a project.

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Thanks for your feedback. First of all, all the testable user stories will be focused on functionality (not form), and will represent the bare minimum of what needs to be done. You’ll have plenty of room for creative expression on top of completing the core requirements of the projects.

I’ve written a more detailed update on why all the changes are taking longer than expected here: https://www.quora.com/When-will-Free-Code-Camp-include-Machine-Learning-DevOps-Maths-for-Programmer-and-every-other-section-which-is-listed-as-Coming-Soon/answer/Quincy-Larson

In the past we’ve rolled out new challenges as they were ready, and each time mass panic has ensued. This is because it is hard to communicate the changes to everyone. So we plan to push all the major curriculum expansion at the same time, to minimize the tremendous communication and support burden associated with adding new challenges.

I realize this may sound counter-intuitive. Trust me - trying to communicate anything even somewhat complicated like “these new challenges are optional” or “no we didn’t lose part of your progress - these challenges are new” or “you don’t need to go back and do these challenges if you don’t want to - keep moving” - to 600,000 people - many of whom haven’t added email addresses to their accounts, or even accessed Free Code Camp in a month or two - is extremely challenging.

We will push the new front end challenges, the new test-driven projects, the completely overhauled back end challenges and projects, and the updated certificates all at the same time, and will formally announce these changes everywhere - Medium, YouTube, our forum, chat rooms, email, freecodecamp.com itself - so we can to minimize confusion within our community.

Right now, our curriculum is stable. Tons of schools and educational nonprofits are using Free Code Camp for their students. Many people have formulated long-term goals around completing specific certificates. As badly as we want to release all these new challenges our community has designed, we must weight this against the need for some semblance of stability.

Thanks for your patience.

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So is there a new deadline?I’m finishing the frontend certificate and can’t decide whether to wait for site to update or search all the sass\react\d3 info on web

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Exactly this. I have spent hard cash on my tooling. My thought has been that in addition to learning the excellent content on FreeCodeCamp I would in parallel learn a professional grade IDE ( not all that easy but I think very well worth it ) while learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node etc…

Absolutely give the choice to develop within FCC, but please don’t lock us into it. Please allow us the freedom to choose how we will learn, the tools we can use, and please give us the opportunity to host our projects where we choose, assuming of course our work can be viewed and our code easily reviewed.

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I am also interested in this reply π.

so, we’re getting React js and React native too? I hope so, those seem to be in demand.

We don’t plan to cover React Native itself in our core curriculum at this point. Maybe in the future.

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Thanks for your patience. We’re getting closer. As you already know, there has been considerable scope creep but it’s for the better imho. Most of the curriculum expansion is done and being QA’d.

We’re just waiting on a few things that have to be ready before we can ship it all at once. I can’t give you a time estimate since we got rid of deadlines, but I can tell you progress is being made every day and we won’t add any further challenges until we ship the ones we’re QA’ing.

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To clarify, the curriculum expansion is unlikely to be ready within the next 30 days.

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Any estimate for the beta to full roll out? Thank you for all the hard work, and I don’t mean to put pressure on the contributors. I know the best way to help is to help contribute / beta test myself.