How to: Apr 25, 2025
1. freeCodeCamp just published a comprehensive Python course that will walk you through building your own Llama 4-style Large Language Model. You'll learn about the inner workings of LLMs: Transformer Block Architecture, Feedforward Networks, Rotary Positional Embeddings, and the attention mechanism itself. Then you'll build a tokenizer and train a model to generate text. (4 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-your-own-llama-4-llm-from-scratch/

2. If all these machine learning terms you keep hearing are confusing or intimidating, no worries. freeCodeCamp just published this crash course that will explain these terms simply with the help of animations. You'll learn about Gradient Descent, Regularization, Decision Trees, and the Transformer model itself. (30 minute YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/essential-machine-learning-concepts-animated/

3. On this week's freeCodeCamp podcast, I interview Tae'lur Alexis about her journey from working at McDonald's to working as a software engineer. She taught herself programming using freeCodeCamp. After 5 years of working as a developer, she started to specialize in information security. And last year she moved overseas to work remotely from Thailand. She has a ton of actionable tips for people who want to start a career in software development, and for experienced devs who want to transition into security. (1 hour watch or listen in your favorite podcast app): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/from-fast-food-worker-to-cybersecurity-engineer-with-taelur-alexis-podcast-169/

4. freeCodeCamp just published a JavaScript Array course that covers everything you need to know about the Array data structure. You'll learn methods like push, pop, slice, map, filter, and reduce. You'll even learn about more advanced techniques like flatMap and findLastIndex. This course also includes tons of code examples and comprehension check questions to help you retain everything as you learn it. (3 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/all-about-javascript-arrays/

5. Learn REST API Architecture by building your own movie database app using back-end JavaScript. Representational State Transfer (REST) is the most common architecture for building APIs these days because it allows your server to be stateless. That is, it can serve new requests without any memory of its previous requests. This beginner tutorial will walk you through installing Express, setting up your webserver, configuring routes, and writing to your database. (25 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-rest-api-principles-by-building-an-express-app/

Quote of the Week: *“As a developer, you can’t just jump straight to learning security. You have to start with Linux and networking. I had to go back and study how to build servers from scratch, set up a tech stack, and then learn how to break those systems. Building and breaking – it’s a constant cycle. That’s how I really started to understand security.”* — Tae'lur Alexis on this week's freeCodeCamp podcast, talking about her journey from web developer to security engineer