Hacktoberfest 2018 update

Hi contributor team!

For the past month, we’ve been working to restructure freeCodeCamp’s repositories in the following ways:

Improvement #1: We’re simplifying open source contributions to freeCodeCamp by merging the learning platfrom, the curriculum, and the guide into a single repository (www.github.com/freecodecamp/freecodecamp). This way you’ll only need to clone a single repo, and you can open all your GitHub issues and pull requests on that same single repo. Also, we’re writing a single command line script that will install everything and get freeCodeCamp running on your local computer so you can develop with ease.

Improvement #2: We’re moving the coding challenges from JSON seed files over to markdown files. Each challenge will have its own markdown file, which will make it much easier to edit challenges - right in GitHub’s UI if you want.

Improvement #3: We’re moving all of our subdomains to subdirectories:

We’re doing this because…

Improvement #4: We’re launching subdomains for major world languages! We’re starting with Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, and hope to add additional languages soon. For example, chinese.freecodecamp.org/forum will be the new Chinese forum. We’re running our entire curriculum and guide through Google Translate’s API so that they will be available in their entirety for each language. Then native speakers will gradually make pull reuqests to help improve these machine translations to make them read more naturally. I’ve already started reaching out to contributors who speak these languages. If you speak one of these languages and want to assume a leadership role, email me at quincy@freecodecamp.org and we can discuss this.

Improvement #5: Finally, each of these languages will have their own forum with their own servers located around the world.

Whew. That’s a lot of changes we’re working on. You can see how things are going on our Next branch. We’re working to get all this live ASAP.

As part of this process, we’re getting ready to put the freeCodeCamp Guide into archive mode. Currently there are about 1,200 pull requests open there (and we’re getting several new pull requests every hour).

While Stuart, Mrugesh, and Beau work on the machine translation effort, I’ll be working on merging the outstanding Guide pull requests.

Right now, I could use your help QA’ing and merge as many of these Guide pull requests as we can. I’m happy to hop on a call with you and show you how to QA and merge these, and to give you write permission to the repo. Just shoot me an email at quincy@freecodecamp.org.

Thanks for your time. With some hard work, we’ll be ready to kick into full Hacktoberfest mode next week, and to open freeCodeCamp up to a whole planet full of people who would prefer to learn to code in their own native language.

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Great news @quincylarson.

I currently have issues getting it up and running - should I just wait until the new version of the repo is finalised and try again then?

Yes, as of this post all the dev is rapid and happening on the next branch. We hope to get this ready for contributions within this week.

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