We're so delighted that we could convince Quincy Larson to come and speak today.

Quincy's bean around educating people on the web for a really long time.

He's one of the founders of free code camp, which is this resource that does incredible work.

Teaching coding to so many meet many people assistant, higher community that sprung up in its huge and free free code camp is a great example of where the jam stack has been applied to.

Great effect.

So you wanted to try and grab some of that knowledge, grab some of the stories about that from Quincy and share those with you today.

So I think I should get out of your way.

And we should, uh we should welcome Quincy onto the stage.

So everyone Quincy lesson.

Thanks, Phil.

Hey, everyone.

I'm just gonna make sure that everything works.

Okay.

Uh, first of all, welcome.

I hope you all are enjoying the jam.

Said calm so far.

Who's enjoying it?

Raise your hand if you enjoy it.

Yeah, All right.

Lots of hands in the air.

Great.

So I'm Quincy, and I'm gonna talk about how freak oh, Camp uses the jam stack to serve millions of people around the world who are learning to code first.

I'm gonna talk about the history of freak.

Oh, camp and our tooling over the years and how we gradually converged on jam Stack is we want to do things.

Then I'm gonna talk a little bit about why we chose the jam stack.

And some of the new ways were applying the jam stack.

So first, who hear his herd of free cocaine before?

Okay, how many people have read like a freak?

Oh, Camp article Or watch the video on YouTube channel.

How many people have used the freak?

Oh, camp curriculum itself and the interactive coding challenges.

Okay, quite a few.

Great.

Um, So what is free Coke camp all about?

We're all about access.

We want everybody in the world to be able to learn to code because we believe everyone in the world should learn to code not just the kids, but the adults.

Median age of people who are using freak O campus 30.

We want people who are anywhere in the world, regardless of what kind of data plan they have.

What kind of access to electricity they have, which is an issue in a lot of countries.

We want people who can learn to code on their hand me down phone in Mumbai or people in Oakland who can learn to code at a public library.

So we want everything to be browser based.

We wanted to be completely self paced so that you can learn to code even if you have kids.

If you have a full time job, if you have a mortgage and a whole lot of other competing obligations, you can still figure out a slice of time where you can learn a coat.

So making everything browser based, self paced, importantly, completely free allows the maximum number of people to learn to code and makes it possible for everybody to harness thes mainframes that we're carrying around in our pockets and the incredibly inexpensive computational power that's all around us.

We want everyone to be able to do that and to be more productive as a result.

So I started freak okay, back in 2014 I had this, you know, it kind of pretentious, I think quote.

But it's from Lausa and I'm a huge.

I spent a lot of time in China.

And it was I just wanted to create a community where people could learn to code, and I tinkered with that.

For years, I worked as a teacher in the school director for about a decade before I eventually learned to code, and the way I did it was purely driven by necessity.

I needed to help my teaching staff be more productive so they could spend less time change of their desk, doing immigration, paperwork and great reports and more time actually interacting with the learners.

So I just Googled around and figured out how to write Excel, Mac Rose.

I figured out how to use this tool called auto hockey toe like programmatically click through government forms and things like that.

OK, hockey fans.

Great.

So, um, that was my introduction to coating it in my thirties.

Um, and once I realized what an impact, just a little bit of programming capability had I decided I needed to help his many people learn to code as possible, not just the next generation who are getting millions of dollars in funding from the billing Melinda Gates Foundation and things like that, but but working adults who already mid career we wanted a resource that they could use.

So, uh, I iterated for about two years on different adult education technology products, essentially and eventually, uh, I simplified everything down and one very aggressive sprint in my closet office and I got a freak.

Oh, Camp live after about three days for hard work, shut out to the noun project for this landing stage, But, uh, I started tweeting it out.

People started coming.

People started hanging out and helping one another.

And initially we were just using a lot of existing.

Resource is we were using a lot of Stanford courses M I t courses, and we'd all work through these together and we just keep each other motivated and help each other get unstuck and chat.

And eventually people started getting jobs.

And here's a snapshot from Arlington Alumni Association.

We got almost 54,000 people people working at I B M X censured ta tah, Amazon, Microsoft and Ella Google.

So these people would turn around and they'd apply the skills they just learned and help improve freak Oh, camp itself so very quickly free Coke camp went from just being basically a list of resource is to being a full fledged interactive curriculum, and we became, like a legitimate, fairly respectable, respectable open source project.

And, uh, we also had a whole bunch of people create free cocaine study groups around the world because they wanted to be able to meet in person.

These were completely Federated.

And there wasn't really any formal leadership for me because it was still just me at this point.

But we had people.

I'm just gonna click through him so you can see some of these groups because, I mean, for me, it just blew my mind.

It still blows my mind that these people are getting together often every week in their city.

So he was Manchester, Sao Paulo.

So Guangzhou Manila, When a side is Vienna, what you mean city also known as Saigon, Mexico City, Sydney, Dhaka.

And at this point, like more and more people are using freak Oh, camp.

We were getting millions of people coming to freak.

Oh, camp and we became a five, a one c three nonprofit, which was always our goal.

But it takes a long time to do that in the United States.

So we got tax exempt status and people started donating to us.

And so we had.

Resource is too bring on a full time team.

So I I looked out and I chose four people in the community who had been prolific contributors who were already doing all this work for free and their free time.

And I said, Come on, let's just get you doing this full time.

So here, here, the me plus these four people, these are the people that run free co came to work.

So freak, Oh, camp at its core is really just a content community.

We generate a whole lot of learning content.

We're not a technology company.

We're never going to be like riding the bleeding edge.

Uh, we don't want to be Facebook and have their caliber engineering team necessarily.

We just want stuff that works reliably that helps people learn to code for free.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the different types of content we have, because that's very important to the jam stack.

James Stack is, in my opinion, an ideal platform for delivering tons of content to tons of people.

So we have our open source curriculum We, which is powered by the jam stack.

We have the freak Oh, Camp Guide, which we'll talk about in a minute.

Also powered by the Jam stack.

We have tons of videos, articles, podcasts and then we've got our whole portfolio and certification system.

So this is the curriculum.

It's about 1800 hours worth of coding challenges.

Um, and I'll just go ahead and tell you what one looks like if you're curious, in case you haven't checked one out yet.

Um, so from the landing page was a click.

Curriculum will make it a little bit bigger.

You kind of scroll through and see.

We've got six different certifications.

We've got the the HTML CIA says Certification Responsible design.

We have a Java script, algorithms and data structures, which is just Java script.

You don't have to mess with any a similar CSS.

You're just writing out rhythms and getting tested.

Pass.

Then we have front and libraries that covers react sas.

A couple other popular library's data visualization if he dies in micro surfaces and information security in quality assurance.

So you know we're covering all the what I view the fundamentals of Web development all the way up to some basic security and testing.

And then we also have just thousands of hours of interview prep.

If anybody's going out interviewing and they want to be ableto really do well on the coding interviews like whiteboard, coating interviews and stuff, you can drill on here.

So that's the curriculum.

And we'll just click through into one of these challenges turning image into a link so you can see that the interface is like super simple, Big Tex.

And, uh, you know, you've got the the instructions over here.

You've got the coding editor.

You got the consul for the output, and then you've got a preview of what this html CSS would render.

And, uh, if you scroll down here, you can run the tests and it will immediately tell you pretty much instantaneously, Uh, and one of the reasons this is so fast, is it?

It's all running in the client.

This is a static page.

Um, and you can, uh, you know, reset your code if you want, and you can get a hint.

Um, and that'll take you to the guide article.

You can also watch a video, and I'm pretty proud of this because we just implemented this.

I talk a lot about freak.

Oh, camp being very data light.

That's very important for us.

We have tons of people in Africa, South Asia, places that don't necessarily have the best data plans and the best telecommunication systems in the world.

You could definitely argue that the 20% of Americans that don't have broadband could benefit from this is well so, um, images can be links.

If you look at this browser here, there's an image, and it's not currently a link, but we can make it into a link by nesting.

All right, so basically, it's a it's a verbal explanation, and you you can see the cursor moving around and you can.

This can be refreshed.

This code can be changed.

Uh, if I go up here and say, um, instead of click, let's say Dingle Hopper here, you know, and then I could just, uh, resume, and I can refresh this and it should automatically update.

So this is a cool tool called scrim ba, and this is not something we personally built.

But it's our friends in Scandinavia who are building this project, and it uses 1 1/100 off the data that a YouTube video would use 1 1/100 So it's two orders of magnitude smaller, I think, if my understanding, how mind if he's working Matthews.

Right?

So, um, it's really cool.

It just it memorizes like like it memorizes it Logs like dom elements in their positions and stuff like that.

And then it just has audio track.

So it renders all this in real time s.

Oh, this is, uh, things like this, the ability to click ask for help and you go to the Forum and we've got a pre populated template of what you post in our forum so active that generally people get an answer within less than an hour, even though it's a forum.

And the assumption is it's asynchronous.

So we've the coding environment completely static, completely client side.

You go here and it just loads everything like the first.

The first time you visited just loads everything up.

And then if you really drill into the like, some of the later challenges may slightly sneak some additional data in there, I'm not gonna open up the network and inspect it.

But, uh, the idea is that it's static and it immediately works.

And everything is amazing, even if you have, ah, horrible Internet connection.

And there are a whole lot of other advantages which I'll talk about the minute that you've been hearing about all day.

Um, so we've got the curriculum.

This is the core of freak.

Oh, camps.

1800 hours.

Of course work.

You can earn certifications if you complete the five required projects for each certification, you can totally skipper.

That's another thing.

We want to experience developers to be able to just parachute in and complete the required projects, which all have their own test sweets and everything.

You can build them anywhere you can build on your local computer.

You could build it on code pen glitch.

Wherever you just pull in our CD in Lincoln, you've got the tests and everything and run against your code.

And once you get all the test passing, boom, go toe freak.

Oh, camp paste in the URL to your project and you can claim the certification.

Put it on your LinkedIn or your CV.

So we've got the certifications.

Then we've got, like a portfolio essentially, which is just your activity on freak.

Oh, camp.

And we're working on a way that you can add, like a time line of everywhere you've worked and going to school and also additional projects you've done outside of the freak.

Okay, create our hope is that people don't have to sign for Lincoln.

So then we have the free cocaine guide.

This is something we just launched, like a year ago.

Completely static 4500 articles served through the jam stack, like with Gatsby.

So these cover these give you good enough explanations on pretty much any programming terminology or concepts you might need.