2020 was a long, challenging year. But one bright spot is the thousands of people who contributed to freeCodeCamp this year. They're helping our nonprofit accomplish its mission to create free learning resources for everyone.

And in this article, I'm going to publicly thank the 148 kind people who, in my humble opinion, contributed the most to our global developer community in 2020.

In 2020, people used freeCodeCamp for a grand total of more than 1.3 billion minutes. That's 2,500 years, or an average of 2,500 people using freeCodeCamp at any given moment.

freeCodeCamp is a tiny donor supported nonprofit with a budget of only $498,521.

And yet we are able to accomplish the mission of a 100-person nonprofit with a multi-million dollar budget.

How are we able to do this?

Because we have a global community of volunteer contributors.

I have met with all of these people over the years, and I can say without hesitation: these contributors are among the most kind, thoughtful people I've ever met.

And on the final day of 2020, I want to recognize their incredible efforts and all that they've accomplished this year.

Without further ado, here are 2020's top contributors who make possible freeCodeCamp's ambitious mission of helping people around the world learn to code for free.

I've broken this list down into 4 broad categories:

Forum contributors. These are people who helped answer questions on the freeCodeCamp forum. They also gave people feedback on their coding projects, and helped keep the forum a friendly, inclusive place.
Code contributors. freeCodeCamp (and its sister project, DevDocs.io) are open source. In 2020, we merged 1,397 commits from contributors around the world into freeCodeCamp's main repository. Contributors have also helped translate freeCodeCamp's curriculum into both Spanish and Chinese, and we will launch those translations soon.
Publication contributors. The freeCodeCamp community runs an academic journal of sorts. And to date, we've edited and published more than 7,000 tutorials on math, computer science, programming, and career advice.
YouTube course contributors. The freeCodeCamp community also runs a YouTube channel with full-length courses on a wide variety of software engineering tools and concepts. We published more than 120 full-length courses in 2020 from dozens of contributors.

Many of these contributors are familiar faces. They have been contributing to our community's mission for years. And there are also plenty of new people who just recently discovered the community.

How We're Celebrating These Top Contributors

Once it is safe to do so, we are going to throw some big, in-person top contributor parties in major cities around the world.

Last time we did this, we had parties in New York City, Dublin, and Hong Kong. And this time, we'll try to do it in even more cities so more top contributors can participate.

We're also recognizing these contributors by adding a special top contributor badge to their freeCodeCamp public profiles.

This list is in alphabetical order, by category of contribution. Note that many of these people contributed in several ways to the community. But for simplicity, I chose a single category to represents their contributions.

Also note that a few of our contributors prefer to remain pseudo-anonymous, so you may see some silly names in here as well.

freeCodeCamp Forum Top Contributors

(Links point to the contributor's freeCodeCamp forum account.)

freeCodeCamp Codebase Top Contributors

(Links point to the contributor's GitHub account.)

freeCodeCamp Community Publication Top Contributors

(Links point to the contributor's freeCodeCamp News profile.)

freeCodeCamp Community YouTube Channel Top Contributors

(Links point to the contributor's YouTube channel.)

How You Can Get Involved in the freeCodeCamp Community in 2021

If you are interested in joining these kind people and contributing to freeCodeCamp's mission, we would welcome your help.

The most immediate way you can help is to start hanging out on the freeCodeCamp forum, answering people's questions there, and giving them feedback on their projects. You can join the forum here.

If you want to contribute to the freeCodeCamp curriculum, translations, and codebase, we have an entire guide on how to get started with this.

If you want to write helpful tutorials and publish them in freeCodeCamp's publication, here's our style guide, which includes steps for applying as an author. Please note that we are quite selective, but that if we do accept you as an author, you will get a lot of guidance from our editorial team.

And finally, if you want to contribute to the freeCodeCamp community YouTube channel, we are also quite selective. But we've written an entire handbook for how to create helpful videos on YouTube, which includes application instructions.

2021 is going to be a big year for the freeCodeCamp community

I've already written a bit about what we're working on in 2021. And I'm going to announce a few other big initiatives soon as well.

The freeCodeCamp community is building up a lot of momentum, and we are helping a lot of people. And all of this is possible thanks to the thoughtful contributions of these top contributors, and all of you future top contributors as well.

Happy coding.

The Top freeCodeCamp Contributors of 2020