quincylarson

It took me about 7 months of studying full-time to get my first job as a developer. I hung out at the local hackerspace and worked through programming books, and most weekends I took the train to various cities around California to participate in hackathons.

You could probably do it much faster now (the tools are better, and the resources for learning are much better). Also worth noting, this was before I had kids. My wife was working full time so we still had benefits through her job during the time I was studying full time.

I recommend not quitting your job and instead taking your time and steadily expanding your skills.

We are working on adding a data science certification. First we want to get our Python curriculum live and our Statistics curriculum.

Statistics is imho the most important skill that most people don't learn in high school/college (other than coding itself). And creating this curriculum will unlock a ton of additional subjects we can teach.

These will be optional certifications that will probably be about 300 hours of coursework each, including tested projects. We're shooting for sometime in 2019 for these.

You're in luck. We've got an open source repository focused on answering that exact question: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/how-to-contribute-to-open-source

My ultimate goal in life is to help as many people as possible learn to code so everyone can make use of these mainframes we're now carrying around in our pockets.

As of 2018, machines do most of the work. But only a few people are able to tell those machines what to do.

Also, as you may have noticed, jobs are getting automated. Employment numbers here in the US look good but Amazon will only need warehouses full of people for so long before they've automated most of the work.

Also, in fields like law, a single lawyer who knows how to use technology can do the work of 10 lawyers. More of the work will be done by fewer and fewer people.

At the same time, there's so much work that needs to be done that nobody's doing. We can dramatically increase GDP and make society so much better than it is now. But only if we have people who know how to use the contemporary tools to get the work done.

So my life goal is basically to blunt the effects of technological unemployment long enough for us to reach a period of abundance. Governments should be doing this, but it's too big a risk to hope. We need to take action and educate ourselves and educate our neighbors so we can overcome these fundamental challenges that come with rapid technological change.

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Yes - we're working on a Python curriculum that will cover algorithms, data structures, and basic scripting in Python. The challenge has been getting everything to run client-side in the browser (no server interaction = no latency). We have a proof of concept and have started working on the coding challenges.

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Also, thanks for the kind words about the 5 links email. For anyone reading this who doesn't get my weekly 5 links email, here are the links I'm sending out this week (emails are going out through Mail for Good as we speak:

1. Learn JavaScript - our free 134-part video course for beginners (3.5 hour watch): https://www.freecodecamp.org/n/j4Va5cR1p

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1. Learn penetration testing, from beginner to advanced. We cover Ethical Hacking concepts like CSRF, XSS, Brute Force Attacks, SQL Injection, and more in this free video course (3 hour watch): https://www.freecodecamp.org/n/pena5cR1p

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1. Amazingly, 1 out of every 200 developers is completely blind. Here's how freeCodeCamp is helping teach even more blind people how to code (4 minute read): https://medium.freecodecamp.org/c47c68d4a237

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1. Even in an active war zones in Afghanistan, thousands of people are coming together to learn to code and expand their careers using freeCodeCamp (4 minute read): https://medium.freecodecamp.org/d553719579e

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1. Here are 670 free online programming and computer science courses you can start in December (browsable list): https://medium.freecodecamp.org/a90149ac6de4