Updates February 11 2016

On February 11, 2016, we made the following improvements to Free Code Camp:

Fixing the bottlenecks that made FreeCodeCamp.com so slow

• Our open source community is growing rapidly, and this week our site has slowed to a crawl during peak hours.
• We've gone through, identified several bottlenecks, and fixed them. Free Code Camp should now be faster than ever.
• A huge thanks to @berkeleytrue for leading this effort, and to the many campers who helped QA these improvements.

Introducing our new Wiki

• Our wiki is now on FreeCodeCamp.com itself (as opposed to on our main project's GitHub Wiki).
• Our wiki pops out like our chat and map do. We welcome feedback on this new functionality. Hotkeys, context aware wiki articles, and other features will come soon.
• A big thanks to @saintpeter, @hallaathrad, and @awesomeaniruddh, along with many other campers for their hard work on this!

Opening our Shop

• We have a new t-shirt campaign going on until February 15. Hurry up and buy one of these awesome Free Code Camp t-shirts: click here for our US campaign | click here for our EU campaign
• We created a new shop page. It only links to our t-shirt campaign now, but we will soon have laptop stickers and other cool gear.

Retiring Camper News

• Over the past year, Camper News has been a modest success. But so has our subreddit, which allows for commenting, moderation, and many other features. So we are shifting to Reddit for news sharing.
• We recommend creating a Reddit account if you don't already have one and joining our subreddit. You can now share links with our entire community there, as well as your thoughts and questions.
• We will keep Camper News live for a while, but we're removing the link to it from our navigation menu, and removing the challenge that introduced it.

Updating challenges

• Many campers asked that we create an easier, HTML-focused project to precede "Build a Personal Portfolio Webpage". So we've created a new project that can be completed using only HTML and Bootstrap called "Build a Tribute Page".
• We also resequenced our front end projects. Here's how they're now structured:
  • Basic Front End Projects
    • Build a Tribute Page
    • Build a Personal Portfolio Webpage
  • Intermediate Front End Projects
    • Build a Random Quote Machine
    • Show the Local Weather
    • Build a Wikipedia Viewer
    • Use the Twitch.tv JSON API
  • Advanced Front End Projects
    • Build a JavaScript Calculator
    • Build a Pomodoro Clock
    • Build a Tic Tac Toe Game
    • Build a Simon Game
• You'll note that we've removed the "Build a Camper News Viewer" project since we're retiring Camper News. If you've previously completed that challenge, the "Build a Tribute Page" should already be marked completed for you on your map.
• Also, for "Build a Tic Tac Toe Game", you no longer need to make it unbeatable. (You certainly can if you want - here's how. Although doing so is a useful exercise, writing an AI is a departure from the project's focus, which is front end development.
• We added three new optional challenges that help you join our:
  • subreddit
  • Medium publication
  • Twitch.tv channel

Coming soon

• We will launch our Spanish challenges in the next few days.
• We plan to release optional React, Sass, and D3 challenges this Spring. But don't wait - you can complete the projects with the help of these projects' official documentation - 16 campers have already done just that.

Happy coding!