freeCodeCamp cost me ten cents a page at the library

Three years ago I sat at my kitchen table at ten at night with a secondhand ThinkPad I paid a hundred and twenty dollars for. The kids were asleep. The battery held eleven minutes, so it stayed plugged in. I'd just quit a good HVAC job to build websites for a living, and I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag. I typed "learn HTML free" and landed on freeCodeCamp. I'll be honest. I didn't expect much from a website that doesn't charge anything.

So here's the thing. The curriculum was never the expensive part of this. The expensive part is the hours, and nobody sells those. The $2,000 course in the brochure sells you a schedule and a person to be accountable to. Some people need that, and I'm not knocking it. But the material underneath is the same material I was getting for free, and I've built four years of client work on it.

I'm not telling you to change careers. I'm telling you what it cost me when I did.

What I actually used

1. A library card. Free, and it took ten minutes at the front desk. The librarians knew my name by spring, which tells you something about the pace.
2. The ThinkPad. A 2016 model, $120 used from a guy my old shop foreman knew. The same machine that finally retired last year and got replaced by the little Mac.
3. freeCodeCamp itself. Free, and it stays free. They're a charity that runs on donations, and donating is optional. I've never been asked for a card.
4. Printing. The library charges ten cents a page. I printed their HTML handbook in one go that first winter, a hundred and forty pages, about fourteen dollars. The lessons lived on the screen after that. Paper is for the stuff you're stuck on.
5. Internet. Already in the house.

Grand total, about $134 before I earned my first dollar from a website. Set that against the bootcamp brochures that filled my mailbox that year. They had payment plans. The $2,000 course kept emailing me about a cohort that was closing soon. Cohorts are still closing, as far as I know.

What it looks like now

The curriculum got rebuilt since I went through it. It's now one long Certified Full Stack Developer path, and it's still free. Roughly 3,000 hours of workshops, lectures, labs, and quizzes, spread across six certifications: responsive web design, JavaScript, front-end libraries, Python, relational databases, and back-end development. Each one ends in real projects, and the full path ends in a capstone and a proctored final exam. The JavaScript certification is exam-based now, which is new this year.

Two things worth knowing if you start. The older certifications, the kind I earned, are set to expire at the end of 2027 per their own announcement. The new ones are valid for three years and renew free. And it's slow. My first certification took months of evenings. I'm still learning. I don't know React well, and I'll say that out loud to anybody.

One more thing, since people ask. Nobody at a client meeting has ever asked me for a certificate. They ask what the site costs and whether it will still work in a year. The certifications are for you. They prove you finished. The sites prove the rest.

The framing and the drywall

When somebody at LuAnn's asks what HTML even is, I tell them it's the framing of a house. Two-by-fours, door openings, where the walls go. CSS is the drywall and the paint. You don't paint before the walls exist. freeCodeCamp teaches framing first, in that order, and it's the right order. Every cheap website that looks wrong is missing drywall, not framing.

What to do Monday

Go to freecodecamp.org tonight on whatever machine you've got, make the free account, and give the first HTML lesson one hour. Not a weekend. Not a payment plan. One hour, then go to bed and come back tomorrow. If the hour feels impossible, the course was never going to be your problem anyway.