One year ago, I moved back from South Korea. I was living on my savings from a couple teaching gigs, not quite sure what to do next.

Then my friend Thomas Klein reached out to me. He invited me to help him revive Fresno’s Free Code Camp Fresno chapter.

I’d run a local tech community before, and I knew it was a lot of work. Especially if you do it all on your own. But it’s also a lot of fun. So I told Tom that if he and I could do it as a team, I’d be happy to do it all again.

As much as I love coding on my own, I’ve always enjoyed coding in groups even more. Back in Korea, I started my own coding meetup. But all of this happened before Free Code Camp came on the scene.

You can imagine how jealous I was when I found out about the new Free Code Camp chapter in Busan right before my flight back to the states. To my surprise, it was led by my old professor from Daegu, Stephen Mayeux.

I was able to study a lot of Stephen’s strategies and and apply them toward the newly-revived Fresno chapter.

Finding an awesome venue

That day we took over a hashtag

I reached out to Talisha, the event coordinator at Bitwise, which is the “mothership of technological education, collaboration and innovation for Fresno.” She mentioned that she was looking for something different from the other events hosted there, and was excited about our Free Code Camp chapter.

Together, we decided to organize a pair programming session every first Saturday of the month. On the third Saturday, the event was more of a coffee-and-code affair that would gradually turn into a dynamic code lap session.

I’ll never forget the moment that Thomas and I looked over at each other and smiled as the dialog in the room grew louder and louder with people sharing their love of code.

Accomplishments from our first year

Our first meetup was at the Bitwise’s previous building.

Our code camp strives to create an open environment where everyone can congregate and grow together.

In the past year, we’ve: