The Art of Technical Writing: An Interview with FreeCode Camp Founder Quincy Larson

Discussing the art of Technical Writing, the future of Education, and the role of LLMs in the future of Writing

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” - Unknown

The art of Technical Writing, writing in general, is fast evolving with the increasing prominence of platforms which provide tools for the growth and relative independence of writers(think Substack) and, of course, the advent of Large Language Models like ChatGPT is causing of a seismic shift in the role of writers in the society.

Today, Edem Gold; a member of the Tech Writers Stack community interviews Quincy Larson. Quincy is the founder of FreeCode Camp, which is arguably the most visited location on the internet with regard to Software Development; In the year 2021, FreeCode Camp recorded 2.1 Billion Minutes (4000 years) of Tutorial Instruction.

In this interview, we get Quincy’s view on the art of Technical Writing, the future of Education, and the role of LLMs in the future of Writing.

Enjoy!

Edem: First, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you, what is your day job, what are your professional interests?

Quincy: I'm Quincy Larson, and I run freeCodeCamp.org. I'm recording a new season of the freeCodeCamp podcast, where I talk with lots of developers from the freeCodeCamp community.

My main goal is to help fulfill freeCodeCamp's mission of creating free learning resources for busy adults who want to get into tech.

Edem: How, when, and why did you begin writing about technical topics on the Internet?

Quincy: I started writing technical tutorials on freeCodeCamp back in 2014, and have written several hundred of them. I recently published a book called "How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job."

Edem: Incredible! What’s your writing process like? How do you organize your writing schedule? How much time does writing take you, on average?

Quincy: I start with the headline. The headline is the most important element because it's the one thing that everyone reads when they're deciding to read further.

Most of my tutorials are about problems I've personally encountered while coding or doing non-coding work. I create an outline, take screenshots, and go through and flesh out the tutorial with examples and clear, concise guidance.

A lot of my thinking about technical writing is distilled into this style guide we use for the freeCodeCamp community publication: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/developer-news-style-guide/

Edem: Let’s talk a bit about your work at freeCodeCamp. How valuable is formal education (a college degree) compared to community or self-taught education? Do you view them as complementary or competitive?

Quincy: They are complementary. But at the end of the day, practical experience is the most important. I encourage people to finish university if they are able to. But if they are later in life and don't have time to go back to school – or doing so would be financially difficult – I encourage them to instead focus on getting work experience.

Edem: What’s the role of traditional education in the near future?

Quincy: It will continue to be important, though there will be better and better alternatives, such as professional certifications.

Edem: How do you ensure that the content in FreeCodeCamp's courses is accessible to all people globally, regardless of language, culture, or disability? What internal processes and systems do you use to assist you in achieving this goal?

Quincy: We spend a great deal of time and energy on accessibility and localization. If you want to localize your own website, I strongly recommend a tool called CrowdIn.

Edem: Do you believe that free resources can offer the same quality of education as paid alternatives?

Quincy: Yes. freeCodeCamp already rivals the best-paid learning resources in quality, just like Wikipedia rivals the best-paid encyclopedias in quality.

Edem: How do you balance the need to generate revenue with the goal of making coding education accessible to everyone?

Quincy: We're a 501(c)(3) public charity, which means there's no incentive for us to earn profit. I am the founder, and even I don't own any equity in freeCodeCamp. No one does.

This means that we can focus on getting enough funds to pay for servers and staff, and we do not need to worry about making a profit for investors. This takes a lot of pressure off and lets us focus on making the best coding education resources we can, rather than worrying much about generating revenue.

Edem: From an ethical standpoint, what measures can be taken to ensure the long-term sustainability and quality of free resources in the ever-changing landscape of technology and education?

Quincy: The main trade-off is choosing which grants to accept. We do not want freeCodeCamp to become plastered with advertisements just to be able to pay for servers and staff. But we have added some ads to address the reality that running a website with 100,000s daily visitors does cost money.

We've been careful always to label advertisements and always to say when we've received a grant from a company to develop a particular course.

Edem: How revolutionary are LLMs and generative AI in general for coding? What does it look like in a year? Five years? Twenty?

Quincy: LLMs are impressive, but their output is still nowhere near the quality of writing that you get from an experienced technical writer. And the code you get is generally not as elegant and reliable/safe as the code an experienced developer would write.

It will be interesting to see how they improve over the next 5 years. It may be that a lot of the "low-hanging fruit" has already been consumed, and we may have to wait longer for the next major breakthrough.

I am optimistic that these tools will help developers and authors. I use GPT-4 to help me come up with code examples, which I can then test, then put into my articles. I also sometimes use GPT-4 to help me come up with an outline for a tutorial idea. But I do not use GPT-4's text itself in my articles. It's not good enough.

If you think GPT-4's writing is good, keep practising your writing. You will eventually come to recognize GPT-4's limitations and see how tutorials written by human authors are more fun to read and usually more clear and more helpful.

Edem: Interesting! What kind of advice could you give people considering or getting started with technical writing?

Quincy: The advice I got: "Throw your first million words away."

That's extreme. But the message behind it is essentially that you are going to suck at writing for the first few years, but the more you write, the better you'll get.

I sat down at my keyboard and wrote out the answers to these questions in about 15 minutes. And I was able to do this pretty effortlessly because of the many waking years I've spent at the keyboard across my 42 years of life.

Keep writing and you will get there.

Edem: Thank you very much for your time Quincy. Any closing words you’d like to share with the readers of The Tech Writers Stack?

Quincy: Happy writing, and happy coding. You've got this.

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The Tech Writing Stack is a community-powered publication aimed at helping tech writers to collaborate and grow together.