How to: August 23, 2025
1. freeCodeCamp just published our first-ever chess course, taught by a software engineer on our team who has an ELO rating of 2285, putting him among top competitive players. Ihechikara Abba will teach you how to think strategically and checkmate your opponents. This beginner-level course starts off with algebraic chess notation and identifying the squares. Then you'll learn several endgame patterns. We published both a handbook and an accompanying YouTube course for you to reference and share with your friends. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/checkmate-patterns-in-chess-for-beginners

2. freeCodeCamp also published this comprehensive course on how to build your own AI shopping agent. Software Engineer Ania Kubów will teach you how to use Node, LangChain's LangGraph, Gemini, MongoDB, and other popular tools to build your agent. By the end of this course, your agent will be able to autonomously perceive, plan, act, and respond to your users. It will also be able to decide when it has enough information to respond, and when it needs to first reach out for external information by searching product databases. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/building-an-ai-powered-e-commerce-chat-assistant-with-mongodb/

3. On this week's freeCodeCamp podcast I interview a developer who dropped out of college and worked as a park ranger, preventing Yogi Bear from stealing pic-a-nic baskets. In all seriousness, he performed important preservation work and even hiked the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. He shares tips for learning programming even when you have no money, and how to surround yourself with ambitious peers who can help you learn faster. (1 hour watch or listen in your favorite podcast app): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/from-drop-out-to-backpacker-to-self-taught-developer-with-dominick-monaco-podcast-183/

4. Alibaba just dropped the latest version of their Qwen LLM and already the freeCodeCamp community has a comprehensive course on how to train it from scratch. You'll learn about its architecture, Training Hyperparameters, Muon Optimization, RoPE Positional Embeddings, inference, text generation, and more. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-and-train-qwen3-from-scratch/

5. Learn the field of System Design from a dev who applies the principles both to software development and to his day-to-day life. You'll learn about scalability issues, the CAP Theorem, Caching & CDNs, Rate Limiting, and other key concepts. (50 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-key-system-design-principles-behind-high-traffic-platforms-like-gaming-and-job-discovery/

Quote of the Week:
*"Big change happens in small increments. Big change is possible with really small, consistent effort."* — Software Engineer Dominick Monaco on how he iterated his way to working as a developer over time, on this week's freeCodeCamp podcast