How to: May 24, 2024
1. This university-level precalculus course will help you learn mathematical concepts and apply them using Python. Ed Pratowski has decades of experience teaching both math and computer science. This hands-on course will not only teach you the mathematical concepts and notation – it will also show you how to implement these in Python as runnable code. This freeCodeCamp course will also prepare you for our more advanced engineering mathematics courses that we'll publish over the coming 36 months. (12 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-college-precalculus-with-python/

2. On this week's podcast, I interview ThePrimeagen, a former Netflix engineer who live-streams his coding on Twitch. He shares his thoughts on AI tools and why he ripped GitHub Copilot out from his code editor. He thinks AI will create more software engineer jobs than it destroys. We also explore his love of hard Nintendo games and why he left Silicon Valley to live on a horse ranch in South Dakota. (2 hour watch or listen in your favorite podcast app): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ai-is-overrated-why-theprimeagen-ripped-out-github-copilot-from-his-code-editor-podcast-124/

3. freeCodeCamp just published a handbook that can help you prepare for coding interviews during your job search. You'll learn key JavaScript concepts like hoisting, closures, and currying – all with code examples. You'll also learn how to use Asynchronous Programming keywords like async and await. This is an excellent reference that you can come back to time and time again, so be sure to bookmark it. (full-length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/js-interview-prep-handbook/

4. We also published a comprehensive handbook on Object-Oriented Programming in JavaScript. This will teach you how JS Classes work, and how you can use them to implement design patterns. You'll learn about Constructors, Class Field Methods, the “super” keyword, and the famously confusing “this” keyword. Learn it, know it, live it. (full-length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/javascript-class-handbook/

5. In Machine Learning, Fine-Tuning is the process of taking a model that you've already trained (or a foundation model like Llama) and enhancing it with your own datasets. For example, you could take a Large Language Model and make it much better at chess by fine-tuning it by feeding it thousands of famous chess games. This course will first teach you about Quantization, a technique to optimize models for efficiency. Then you'll learn modern methods of fine-tuning like LORA and QLORA. Next you'll delve into Gradient-based optimization methods. Finally you'll learn how to build AI pipelines and how to fine-tune models using your own datasets. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/fine-tuning-llm-models-course/

Quote of the Week: *"Calculus is fundamentally naive. Almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future – or better yet, reconstruct the past."* — Steven H. Strogatz, Mathematician, Author, and Professor at Cornell