Speedrunning Through Free Code Camp's Project List

After writing software in the corporate world for 9-10 years, completing my MBA, studying law and obtaining many of the things I'd thought would cement happiness, life dealt me series of gut wrenching heartbreaks instead . I took a hiatus from coding―indeed a break from almost everything familiar for nearly half a decade.

_{Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash}

In that time I learned to farm, hunt and live off the land even as I relearned how to live with―and even embrace―a mind that had been greatly altered by traumatic experiences. Some would say injured or impaired. Certainly some things became a lot harder than they had been. Nevertheless my love of reading, puzzles, problem solving and inventing persisted. And eventually I found myself longing to code again.

So it was that I found myself working on Free Code Camp's exercises about 2 years ago, approaching old skills with a beginners mindset. And for the first time in many years enjoying code to the degree I had when I first discovered computers as a kid.

Repository

e.g. https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp

Free Code Camp is a non-profit, interactive coding school online. The web learning platform itself as well as the sequence of increasingly challenging coding exercises are open source software. The free camp also includes an active online forum, chat rooms, and local groups that meetup to support one another's learning.

Even as a developer who had already been around the block many times Free Code Camp offered several advantages. First and foremost it helped me rediscover the excitement of coding. This had less to do with the exercises themselves and a lot to do with the online community. It's a great feeling when you can help someone else find their way through a problem that you yourself struggled with once upon a time.

Second it actually did update my skills after that long break. In addition it filled in a few gaps in basic knowledge that I had not known were there all along. The improvement in my fundamentals is something I have found immeasurably valuable as I returned to the field.

For me Free Code Camp functioned as a sort of a refresher course. It didn't take long before I was back to professional coding. I have also recommended it to several students and friends as an introduction to coding and the results have been spectacular.

So, two years after FCC set me back on that path I am revisiting the camp's projects as a speedrun.

Borrowing a page from the world of online gamers, speedruns are an exercise that some campers choose to do in order to gauge their own growth, compare the efficiency of different development stacks, as a personal challenge, or perhaps even for competition. In any case, the objective is to complete all the FCC certification projects as quickly as possible.

I will be undertaking my first FCC speedrun throughout the month of November. I'll post updates about the experience. In addition to testing and improving my own skills I hope to provide insights for others who are currently learning to tackle these projects.

Links

• FreeCodeCamp
• My Speedrun of the FCC projects
• The Tribute Page Project ― Completed in a little over an hour and a half

GitHub Account

https://github.com/tdreid