freeCodeCamp Top Contributors – How We Select, Recognize, and Reward Prolific Volunteers

freeCodeCamp.org is only possible thanks to the thousands of contributors around the world who help expand and improve the community. They do this mainly through:

• creating articles, videos, and podcasts about programming and technology
• contributing to freeCodeCamp’s curriculum, codebase, and our many open source projects
• helping people on our forums, chat rooms, and other online communities
• contributing translations and subtitles for our courses and tutorials

Every year around the holiday season, we look back at the many volunteers who contributed to the community. We choose a few key contributors and bestow upon them the coveted status of "Top Contributor."

Top Contributors in 2018

In 2018, we invited top contributors to parties in New York City, Hong Kong, and Dublin.

Here are some videos of these events, which were live-streamed on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel:

Here's the full list of 2018 Top Contributors.

Top Contributors in 2019

In 2019, we manufactured special backpacks and shipped them to top contributors around the world.

Prolific freeCodeCamp author Chris Blakely posing with his 2019 Top Contributor backpack

Here's a full list of 2019's Top Contributors.

Top Contributors in 2020

Since in-person events were out of the question in 2020, we weren't able to gather to celebrate our community's top contributors. But we were still able to recognize them virtually.

Here's a full list of 2020's Top Contributors.

How You Can Become a Top Contributor

Our Top Contributors are a good mix of teachers, authors, video creators, translators, and open source contributors from throughout our global community. They come from a broad range of cities around the world and bring to our community a wide variety of skills.

The global freeCodeCamp community has more than 6,000 contributors, and only 100 to 200 of them make the list each year.

We thank you all for your contributions — even if you didn’t make this short list. We would love for you to be on next year’s list!

If you're interested, here's how to get started contributing to the freeCodeCamp community.