We’re pretty enamored with integrating with learn-to-code tools. Most recently CodeCombat and Project Euler. Before that was Code School, back when that was a thing. And of course we have our GitHub integration, aka Gitminder. Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with freeCodeCamp! As part of this official integration we’re proud to announce that freeCodeCamp is now one of the charity options, available in our very fancy Beemium plan. Check us out on freeCodeCamp’s list of Gold Sustaining Sponsors.
You’re probably here because you either know and love Beeminder, or you’re a fan of freeCodeCamp. In case it’s the latter, we’ll start with a quick explanation of what Beeminder’s all about. (Beeminder users have heard this a million times — jump to the freeCodeCamp section!) For the full Beeminder story, you could dive in to our best-of blog posts or check out our amazing Beeminder community forum.
What’s special about Beeminder is that we combine Quantified Self — i.e., self-tracking data collection and visualization — with commitment contracts. If you don’t know anything about commitment contracts, it works like this with Beeminder: We plot your progress on a graph and represent your commitment as a literal bright red line. If you cross that line, we charge you money. Long-time Beeminder users find that those stings (get it?) are well worth it for all the awesomeness we induce the rest of the time. But if the thought of having to pay money is too scary, that’s perfect: you’ll be very motivated to keep all your datapoints above the red line.
freeCodeCamp
New to freeCodeCamp? It looks like this:
You write code to solve problems, right in the browser, hit control-enter, and hear a chime and get a point if your solution works. It’s very satisfying, not to mention edifying!
When you connect that to Beeminder, you get a graph like this:
Nicky has 4 days to earn their next 10 points on freeCodeCamp or they’re going to owe Beeminder $5!
Getting Started
Here’s how to get one of those of your very own.
Sign up for both Beeminder and freeCodeCamp, of course. Note your freeCodeCamp username. (Also you’ll need to make your profile and points public in your freeCodeCamp settings so Beeminder can see them.) Then click “New Goal” on Beeminder (or go to beeminder.com/new) and click the freeCodeCamp logo. That brings you to a screen like this:
Fill that in and you’re off to the races. You’ll never have to do anything on Beeminder. Just go earn more freeCodeCamp points when Beeminder yells at you!