In this post, I wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite tools for leveling up with code: FreeCodeCamp. This non-profit organization has the mission to create high value code training for the world. I have a few friends who have engaged in their content for starting web development. In my experience, I have found courses appropriate for advanced developers too. The founder of FreeCodeCamp, Quincy Larson, has made it clear that they hope to keep materials and content for free forever. Quincy observes the economic power a technology career can give to individuals and families. As a teacher who turned to software development, he saw an opportunity to apply his skills as a teacher to open opportunities for countless others. I deeply admire the contribution he’s made to the world.
According to this article from Forbes.com, FreeCodeCamp has celebrated many noteworthy achievements:
– The organization has graduated over 40 thousand students from their devs to noteworthy companies
– Over 11 thousand tutorials
– Their courses provide thousands of “hands on learning” content
– Great YouTube channel and supportive forums
At my level, I know that I want to refresh my thinking around responsive design and CSS. They also have a feature rich course on PyTorch, one of the hottest machine learning frameworks in the Python community.
If you’re looking into jumping into the software development or software quality market and not break the bank, I can’t recommend FreeCodeCamp enough. I have started coaching a few friends through this content. I would recommend exploring the following topics and actions if you want to make yourself a potent contributor to the industry.
– Get to know responsive web design, HTML and CSS
– Get to know JavaScript
– Get to know a little bit of Express or NestJs to explore backend development
– React has become the most popular front-end framework in our industry. When appropriate, get to know this popular component framework
– Build a project that involves “screen scraping” data that you care about.
– Build a simple project that involves a simple front-end and backend. Build something that you care about.
Get better a little bit every day: We do need to respect the journey of software craftsmanship. You can become overwhelmed by the level of information and natural anxiety connected to learning something out of your comfort zone. It’s important to focus on enjoying the journey and getting better a little bit at a time.
How do you get started? Check out the FreeCodeCamp website and sign up. I would recommend exploring the following topic themes: Responsive web design, JavaScript, Front-end development libraries and backend API’s. Create a pace that works for you. Most code camps last 6 to 9 months. I personally keep a habit of learning something new for 20 minutes each day.
Make a good Github profile with sample projects: As a hiring leader, I enjoy checking out the public github profile of potentials. Once you have explored some of the basics, make sure to share your work on your public github profile. Please see the following article for details on this. A well groomed github profile can help communicate your passion and commitment to growing in learning.
Do not travel your coding journey alone. I encourage you to connect with the FreeCodeCamp forums or find a Google developer group or similar meetup. In our Google developer group, we try to keep an active Discord that’s friendly to people learning to code.
Build with projects: In the past year, I have been a bit more quiet on blogging due to some family challenges. I, however, continue to grow myself using projects that are fun. If you explore this blog, you can see that we have built a lot of stuff around the passions of my family: music, bird watching, minecraft, robots, and lego building. At InspiredToEducate, we believe that you should build projects that you find fun. It’s a great way to keep your motivation high because you want to build a thing that solves a problem in your life.
Related Links:
- How FreeCodeCamp has evolved over time from Coding Newbie Podcast
- Code Academy – Another great tool for learning JavaScript
- Google Developer Group of Central Florida – Make sure to join our Discord
- Free ebooks and tools for learning JavaScript