We try to keep things as simple as possible on our forum and in our chat rooms. The fewer rules, the better. So this means that becoming a forum moderator is a pretty straight-forward process.

If you regularly contribute to the conversation on Free Code Camp's forum, and are interested in becoming a moderator, you can contact Michael Henderson, who's our core team member in charge of our forum: forum.freecodecamp.com/users/michaelhenderson/act…

He can consider making you a moderator.

We don't have any expectation of a specific number of hours or anything like that. We just appreciate that you are willing to volunteer your time and make our forum a better place to discuss technology and coding!

Thank you for responding Quincy! =]

I think it's awesome that they're including Bash in Windows soon. It will make it much easier to be a developer in the Windows environment - which is still the dominant desktop environment, especially in China and India. I will applaud any effort for a company to become more transparent and open source. Here's hoping Apple's next 😄

Our community of campers is wonderful. Even with a quarter million campers using Free Code Camp every month, we get very few "trolls" we get in our chat room and on our forum.

I do wish more of our campers would take advantage of their local study groups. Campers who regularly meet and code together seem to get developer jobs much faster.

Computerphile: youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA LevelUp Tuts: youtube.com/channel/UCyU5wkjgQYGRB0hIHMwm2Sg DevTips: youtube.com/channel/UCyIe-61Y8C4_o-zZCtO4ETQ

And of course Free Code Camp's YouTube channel, which is run by Briana and Wesley on our core team: youtube.com/channel/UC8butISFwT-Wl7EV0hUK0BQ

Unless you are an experienced developer who's worked with a lot of different languages on a lot of different projects, I recommend going with the default tools. Today, those are JavaScript and Node.js.

There are a ton of resources for learning JavaScript and Node.js (such as FreeCodeCamp.com) and it is extremely well documented compared to most other languages.

Also, regardless of which languages and frameworks you use, you will still need to use JavaScript. So make your life easier and just focus on learning that one language well.

JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. It is by far the most popular and most useful language used for open source development these days. There are a ton of entry-level development jobs where you would need to know JavaScript well. There are also a ton of great resources for learning it.

Every developer should to learn some basic design and front end skills. Employers are increasingly expecting developers to know both front end and back end - especially front end. I've written a bit more about this here, with data to support this claim: quora.com/Computer-Programming-How-does-the-numbe…

Keep in mind that visual design (how something looks) and user experience design (how something) are two different disciplines. Some of the best designed sites, such as Quora, are quite simple visually, but have excellent user experience design.

You can also draw inspiration from other developers' projects on CodePen.

As far as learning design, the best approach is to practice. Free Code Camp will give you experience building more than a dozen front-end focused projects (along with plenty of back-end focused projects). These will give you ample opportunity to apply design concepts.

I have only two big tips:

1. code every day
2. hang out with other people who code

Yes - we are expanding our challenges significantly. You can follow along with our community's efforts to create these new in-depth challenges here: github.com/FreeCodeCamp/CurriculumExpansion/issues

All of these will be optional, and will help you further understand important web development concepts. These will better prepare you for the projects.

In the meantime, campers are building these projects using a combination of our challenges and other external resources that we discuss on our forum (https://forum.freecodecamp.com), and asking lots of questions in our help chatrooms.

I wouldn't recommend trying to learn a new language quickly. Learning to program takes a long time. I wrote some more advice on this here: medium.freecodecamp.com/learn-to-code-by-coding-d…

Also, focus on learning one language thoroughly (and building a ton of projects with it) before attempting to learn a second one.

Thanks for your kind words.

For people who haven't yet finished college yet, I strongly recommend getting a degree in computer science. For everyone else, I recommend taking free online computer science course s from great universities. Here's the best list of these: https://www.class-central.com/subject/cs

Even though some HR people will filter you out because you don't have a bachelors in CS, I still wouldn't recommend going back to get a second degree. Instead, learn the underlying theory and work on extending your network.

I've written about how most developers claim to be self-taught and less than half of them have computer science degrees here: medium.freecodecamp.com/2-out-of-3-developers-are…

Thanks for your kind words.

Staying motivated is the biggest challenge of all. Just keep coding every day and know that the more you practice and learn, the faster you will be able to get a developer job.

Instead of studying math independent of programming, I recommend solving Project Euler challenges. These will help you learn applied mathematics and practice programming at the same time: https://projecteuler.net/

The biggest hurdle is to actually believe that you can get a job as a software developer.

Many people still believe in a "fixed mindset" and think that some people are "born to code", when the reality is that anyone can learn to code if they put in the time and effort.

There are so many open developer jobs. They are increasing in number all the time. And software development is already one of the most popular professions in the world. There are more than 19 million software developers out there, but that's nowhere near the number that the world needs.

Most people give up because they don't see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But that light is there, off in the distance. You just have to keep going.

You definitely should start a hacklab. Every community - no matter how small - should have a place were people get together and code. But before you do, though, I recommend talking with other people who are doing this.

Here's a huge list of them - many of whom may be within a day's commute for you: wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

One way of gauging interest within your community would be to put together some coffee-and-code events and talking to the people who show up.

Free Code Camp has never charged people or asked for donations, so I'm not an authority on these things 😄

We had a serious MongoDB issue almost exactly a year ago.

Basically, we had some inefficient database queries and our data was growing exponentially.

It was a nightmare, and Berkeley Martinez and I worked on this for like three days straight.

I wrote a full retrospective on it here so that you will hopefully never have to go through this yourself: medium.freecodecamp.com/rebuilding-the-747-at-35-…

First and foremost, you should be familiar with GitHub. There are a ton of ways you can contribute without even really knowing Node, Express, and JavaScript all that well.

Ideally, you'll want to get Free Code Camp running locally on your computer, which doesn't require so much understanding of Node/Express as it requires an ability to carefully follow directions (and our project is not unique in this regard).

I wrote a short guide a few days ago about getting started contributing to open source: quora.com/What-is-a-step-by-step-procedure-to-bec…