Open Source Project of the Week: freeCodeCamp

Each week for the month of March, we’re celebrating and highlighting forward-thinking open source projects that are using Zenhub to manage their collaboration and visibility.

What is the freeCodeCamp open source project?

The freeCodeCamp mission is simple: teach people to code, for free. The project has created thousands of coding lessons, as well as articles, high-quality videos, and study groups – all freely available – to help people learn the basics of programming.

Who’s running the freeCodeCamp open source project?

The non-profit that runs freeCodeCamp (also called freeCodeCamp) was founded by former journalist and school director, Quincy Larson, whose first foray into programming was trying to automate data entry for his teachers.

freeCodeCamp open source goals

Though freeCodeCamp was born in San Francisco in 2014, its core values come from the hacker ethos of the 1980s and Stewart Brand’s famous line: “Information wants to be free.” But freeCodeCamp takes it a step further with the project aiming to make educational software information not only free but accessible. In keeping with the principles of open source, everyone should be able to both benefit from it and contribute to it.

See Zenhub at work

Running a large open source project with many different contributors and information pipelines can make for a lot of overhead. Open source projects can use The Zenhub to centralize information. For example, freeCodeCamp uses Zenhub for sorting and filtering features that help make sense of it all, namely Boards and labels.

With Boards, the freeCodeCamp team can centralize information flows and customize pipelines. For example, they reordered and removed pipelines based on their own workflows and processes. Due to the asynchronous nature of open source development, Boards helps streamline hand-offs between development stages in a remote environment.

Labels, meanwhile, complement the asynchronous nature of open source projects. By leveraging Labels, the freeCodeCamp team can flag issues without the need to message someone or otherwise coordinate with them directly. It also helps contributors see important information at-a-glance from the Board view.

Why you should contribute

With a proven track record — over 40,000 freeCodeCamp graduates are now working as developers — contributing to freeCodeCamp is a chance to support an organization that’s giving back to the broader open source and software development community.

Where You Can Learn More

To learn more about freeCodeCamp and the impact it is making:

• Check out the FAQ
• Visit the alumni page
• Download the Zenhub browser extension, and take a look at freeCodeCamp’s ZenHub board in GitHub

Zenhub offers the tools and workflows that teams working on open source projects in GitHub need. It puts core open source collaboration principles like openness and transparency into practice, enabling projects and organizations to code in the open. It’s the only industry tool that lets you manage your team’s work across both public and private repos. And it makes it easier for all team members to communicate with each other, set goals, plan with more transparency and participation, and ship releases more predictably. Get a free 14-day trial.

Learn more about open source project management here.