Free Code Camp Site Improvement August 2015

Sunday's Improvements

• replaced our getting-started videos with a simple 10-minute process (using GIFs instead of videos)
• doubled the number of our HTML5 and Bootstrap challenges
• replaced Codecademy's JavaScript and jQuery challenges with our own challenges
• added our own Object-oriented Programming and Functional Programming challenges
• added two new Front End Project front end challenges (Personal Portfolio and Simon game), and moved our Front End Projects to much earlier in our curriculum
• completely replaced our Field Guide with a searchable, and easily-editable open-source wiki
• made it so your Algorithm code is stored in your browser, so if you leave the page, your code will be there when you come back
• simplified our portfolio pages. You can now click a single button to mirror your Free Code Camp profile with your GitHub profile. Algorithm solutions are no longer shown here, but they'll eventually be accessible through our API.
• fixed some issues with Brownie Points and Streaks
• improved our Camper News page by removing the (mostly unused) comments and adding one-click upvoting
• added a Creative Commons license to literally all of our images and text
• thanks to Loopback, everything is now an API, and we will soon publish cool ways to interact with Free Code Camp's (non-sensitive) data

FAQ

The challenge I was most recently doing disappeared.

You can just keep going. If you have time to go back and try our new challenges, they should be a quick review for you. Otherwise, keep moving forward.

Why are you deploying all these improvements at once?

We've been working on some of the features for months on our Staging branch. Most of them were held up by a single task: our transition to Loopback. @BerkeleyTrue started working on this back in March.

Was deploying everything at once necessary?

Probably not. Going forward, we will deploy new code several times a day (as we did prior to the Loopback feature). We plan to start using a continuous integration and other agile best practices as we reduce our technical debt.