Manuel Vila, writing for freeCodeCamp: In this article, I introduce the concept of “unified architecture” that dramatically simplifies the development of full-stack applications. Indeed, this architecture unifies the six physical layers (data access, backend model, API server, API client, frontend model, and user interface) usually seen in “well-designed” applications into one single logical layer. It is like going from a 3D world to a 2D world. Everything gets a lot easier. That “unified architecture” manifests itself as Liaison, which we linked to last week and it caused some… controversy discussion. In this article, Manuel explains why Liaison is different than similar RPC things that came before it. Interesting stuff, to say the least.

read more

Congrats to Quincy and everyone who has joined his mission with freeCodeCamp on an astounding rise: More than 40,000 freeCodeCamp graduates are now working in tech at companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Spotify. Millions of people watch freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel each month. Millions of people read freecodecamp.org/news each month. And people ask - and answer - thousands of tech-related questions each month on freecodecamp.org/forum. freeCodeCamp.org is now one of the most-used technology sites on the entire web. The future is bright. Click through to read what they accomplished in 2019 and how they’re up and running on a JAMstack.

read more

Meetup hiked their prices in a way that shifts the burden off the organizers and on to the participants. They’ve received enough blow back from this change that it wouldn’t surprise me if they adjust (or revert) course, but it may be too late. The open source community is already on the move. This will be a self-hosted Docker image that you can one-click deploy to the cloud, then configure through an admin panel. No coding required. Quincy and the freeCodeCamp team don’t have much more than a README and a schema right now, but objects in motion tend to stay in motion. It’s a great time to jump in and contribute. ✊

read more

Focus was the topic of this and this episode of Founders Talk, but from a different angle than presented in this post from Bar Franek on freeCodeCamp. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on a side hustle or if you’re a junior developer wanting to get noticed and promoted. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lead developer looking for a change of pace, from a corporate gig to a start-up or the other way around. It doesn’t matter if you’re jobless out of college. As long as you’re a programmer, no skill is more important to your success than focused, deep work.

read more

Front-end developers are often in a position of trying to interpolate between a (static) design and the (dynamic) needs of a product. When something comes up that isn’t quite covered by the design, what should you do? In an ideal world we could have a conversation with the designer, but the world is rarely ideal, so it’s useful to have at least a sense of good practices to apply. This article is great because it keeps it simple - just four straightforward principles. As author Anna 4erepawko Mészáros says: Will this help you create shiny beautiful designs? No. Will this help you create great, clear and comprehensible designs that everyone can easily understand and interact with? Absolutely.

read more

This is a solid set of recommendations from Nick Gard that will help you keep your CSS in order and in good shape. There’s a lot of rules that relate to accessibility, others to consistency, and some just to simple maintainability, but all are good to at least consider. After years of writing and maintaining a couple of very large web projects and numerous smaller ones, I have developed some heuristics for writing maintainable CSS. I have used BEM, SMACSS, and CSS Modules for naming, though this article is not about naming, per se. (I tend to use a mix of atomic classes and BEM-ish naming.) This article is more about the properties and values I use or avoid.

read more

Get your free learning on! Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central , writes for freeCodeCamp: Seven years ago, universities like MIT and Stanford first opened up free online courses to the public. Today, more than 850 schools around the world have created thousands of free online courses, popularly known as Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. I’ve compiled this list of 550 such free online courses that you can start in March. For this, I leveraged Class Central’s database of over 11,000 online courses. I’ve also included each course’s average rating.

read more

Flavio Copes is a great person to take this advice from. He’s been blogging for “more than 11 years,” more or less consistently. In this post he covers not only what you need to know to be successful, but also what you need to forget. One of ways I learn best is by doing. I literally decide on a topic I think I know something about, and I drill down in a spiral loop through things I didn’t know, or I didn’t even think about. They say you never fully understand a topic until you are able to explain it. Blogging is a low barrier to explaining things.

read more

Virginia Balseiro shared her story and experience of completing the freeCodeCamp curriculum last year. It wasn’t easy, I won’t lie. It helped that most of my friends and acquaintances don’t live near me, and I live in a small town that doesn’t offer a lot of entertainment opportunities. …I couldn’t just quit my job and study full time, since I needed to pay the bills, so I had to get really good at 3 things: Time management Discipline Organization Not only does Virginia share her experience and strategy, but also other supplemental resources she used on her freeCodeCamp journey.

read more

Quincy Larson: People have now spent more than 1 billion minutes using freeCodeCamp. That’s the equivalent of nearly 2,000 years. To put it another way — if freeCodeCamp usage was a person, it would be old enough to have broken bread with Jesus himself. Congrats to everyone who’s helped freeCodeCamp reach this milestone! Quite an accomplishment, and just the beginning for the tiny nonprofit that’s teaching the world to code. Quincy shares a bunch of numbers in this post, including traffic comparisons between freecodecamp.org and funded startups.

read more

Would you fire your top contributor — someone with a deep understanding of your product’s architecture and a ton of domain-specific knowledge? Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton writes on the freeCodeCamp blog about this exact scenario… “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F#@$ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” He declared this in front of the product design team, developers, management, and pre-launch customers. One of our project sponsors had the temerity to ask when the problem crippling our product would be fixed. No one gets a pass on being a jerk. I personally subscribe to the “no asshole rule,” and do my best to purge the assholes as soon as possible. The sooner the better, for everyone. Have you heard of the book on the subject? Here’s why Robert Sutton wrote ‘The No Asshole Rule’

read more

All you ever wanted to know about Flexbox, explained visually. 👇 is just a sample of what you’ll find when you follow the link.

read more

Tigran Hakobyan, remote software engineer at Buffer, writes on the freeCodeCamp blog: Working remotely is very different from working in the office. I don’t think you fully grasp the difference until you actually start being remote. For someone like me who never worked in a remote environment, the beginning wasn’t smooth and it came with challenges. I can clearly remember my very first day at Buffer… Tigran also shares a pretty comprehensive breakdown of a typical workday.

read more

Quincy Larson: Dozens of contributors worked on the new curriculum for more than a year. It features 6 new developer certifications - all of which are 100% free. This looks top notch. Great work to all involved!🥇

read more

You can screenshot a single element?!! 😱 Select an element and press cmd-shift-p (ctrl-shift-p on Windows) to open the Command Menu then select Capture node screenshot. There are 11 more tips just like this. Some I’m sure you know. Others you likely don’t.

read more

Manuel Vila: We are using more and more command-line tools, and while many of them are really good, I think they could be even better if they were based on more modern foundations. Because our tools are based on ancient paradigms (*nix, Bash, etc.), it’s difficult for them to be both customizable and easy to use. After working for a year trying to solve this problem, he came up with “resources”, which he says: brings an object-oriented interface to the command-line tools, making them a lot more flexible, composable, and user-friendly. The curmudgeon in me immediately thought, “old dog … new tricks”, but Manuel has a reply ready: I am well aware that I am not going to change 50 years of old practices by myself. It has to be a collective effort. So I’m trying to communicate as much as I can to find the few people crazy enough to join the adventure. Are you “crazy enough” to go on the adventure with him? Click through to find out more.

read more