by Michael D. Johnson

My farewell to freeCodeCamp

Berkeley, Quincy, and Michael after Dim Sum in California.

When I first discovered freeCodeCamp, it was about two weeks old.

Back then, it was nothing more than a list of free coding resources on the web and a HipChat chat room. There were only a few thousand people in the entire community.

Since shortly after that day, I’ve enjoyed the immense privilege of overseeing all of our pro bono development to help nonprofits, and a pride in being the other name on each of your certificates.

It has been an honor to be the nonprofit guy at freeCodeCamp. It is truly a dream job. I’ve learned so much from the volunteers, and from Quincy and Berkeley in particular, as we’ve grown to over a million users.

Now it’s time for the community to push forward without me.

When I launched Open Source for Good, I could never have predicted how quickly we would impact so many nonprofits.

We’ve helped 30 individual nonprofits save millions of dollars by building custom tools, pro bono, and the more general purpose tools the community is building will help trounce that number.

From making collaborating easier, to helping nonprofits email constituents at a cost of next to nothing, and a whole heap of other solutions, the community is just getting started developing truly robust and useful open source tools.

But in order for these efforts to scale along with the massive growth of the freeCodeCamp community, there is a need to de-centralize freeCodeCamp’s pro bono efforts. This means enabling the community itself to drive the program.

I have submitted my resignation in good spirits, confident that Open Source for Good’s best days remain ahead.

The past three years, I’ve been incredibly grateful to get to know so many amazing and talented developers from all over the world. The very late nights and early mornings have always been worth it — to collaborate with you, to be wowed by your progress as volunteers, and to learn so much about your lives and home countries.

I’ve seen good things come to those who give, as so many of you have secured your first coding jobs.

And I’ve also been grateful to get to know so many nonprofit leaders — a driven class of people whose visions led them to seek us out, and allowed for us to create something out of nothing.

As for me — my passion remains coding for a cause, and I will continue to oversee the development of tools that help nonprofits.

Follow me to stay updated on those efforts, or just to share your story of how you’re impacting your local nonprofit through Open Source for Good.

I can’t wait to hear about it. :)

~Michael