Thoughts and Reflections from a Winner of Google Code-in 2017 Hello world! My name is Marco Burstein, and I‘m thrilled to share my experience as a winner of Google Code-in 2017. For those who may not be familiar, Google Code-in is an annual online competition that introduces pre-university students aged 13 to 17 to the…
If you‘re a member of the freeCodeCamp community, chances are you‘re familiar with Quincy Larson‘s famous "5 links worth your time" emails. Every Friday, over 4 million people around the world open their inbox to find a carefully curated selection of tutorials, guides, tools, and inspiration to fuel their coding journey. As a full-stack developer,…
Open source software (OSS) is the backbone of the modern tech industry. According to a 2020 report from Sonatype, the supply of OSS packages has increased by 75% over the past two years, with the average enterprise using nearly 132,000 different open source components. From web frameworks to machine learning libraries, OSS powers innovation across…
As a small-town girl from India who grew up dreaming of becoming a software developer, I never imagined I would one day intern at Mozilla, one of the world‘s leading open source organizations. But thanks to the Outreachy program, that unlikely dream became a reality. Discovering Open Source and Outreachy My journey into open source…
As a full-stack developer and professional coder, I‘ve had the opportunity to work with a wide range of technologies and tools throughout my career. One of the most powerful and transformative forces I‘ve encountered in the world of software development is open source. Open source refers to a collaborative model of software development where the…
As a developer who has spent the better part of a decade building software and participating in open source communities, I‘m always eager to zoom out and understand the larger patterns shaping the ecosystem. Open source is a pillar of modern software development, yet we‘re still in the early days of learning how to measure…
As a full-stack developer and open source maintainer, I know firsthand how challenging it can be to manage a popular project. With the growth in users and contributors comes an increase in complexity, especially around building, testing and releasing new versions. Recently, I had the opportunity to make a significant contribution to the Phoenix Framework,…
The world of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving, with new breakthroughs and advancements happening at a breakneck pace. At the forefront of this AI revolution are open source projects and tools that are making it easier than ever for developers, researchers, and hobbyists to harness the power of AI and machine learning (ML). In…
As a full-stack developer who has worked on and maintained several popular open source projects over the years, I‘ve seen firsthand how vibrant communities and prolific collaboration are the lifeblood of the open source world. New contributors bring fresh energy, diverse perspectives, and creative problem-solving approaches that are essential to the continuous innovation that open…
Background Before starting the 100 Days of Code challenge, I had about two years of experience as a full-stack web developer, working primarily with Python and Django on the back-end and jQuery on the front-end. I was comfortable with the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but hadn‘t delved deeply into modern JavaScript or explored…
This post is part of an ongoing series of interviews with open source contributors and leaders. In this installment, we talk with Balasankar C, a Distribution Engineer at GitLab and active contributor to free and open source software (FOSS) projects including Debian, GNOME, Firefox and more. Introducing Balasankar C Balasankar (Balu) C has been a…
As full-stack developers at Hack4Impact, an organization that creates open source software for nonprofits and social good, we‘ve learned a lot about what it takes to create impactful projects. But even the most useful codebases can languish without the proper care and attention. This was the case for one of our most valuable internal projects:…