How to: July 26, 2024
1. System Design questions come up all the time in developer interviews. Employers ask these because they want to make sure that you know how to turn design requirements into production-grade code. Thankfully, freeCodeCamp has a new crash course will teach you the key concepts. You'll learn about Scalability, Availability, Data Handling, High-Level Architecture, and more. (1 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-system-design-principles

2. Learn to code your own sticky note app using React and Appwrite, a Backend-as-a-Service tool. Dennis Ivy is an excellent programming teacher, and he'll walk you through building this beginner-level app step-by-step. You can code along at home. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-sticky-notes-app-with-react-and-appwrite/

3. Learn how to do heavy-duty Machine Learning without first needing to get a PhD in mathematics. On this week's podcast, I interview Daniel Bourke, who has created many popular AI learning resources over the years. We talk about how as a kid he broke into his school's network and gave himself good grades, just like Matthew Broderick in Wargames. Daniel then spent years fixing people's computers from around the Brisbane area before learning how to code. He explains how Machine Learning actually works, and what LLMs are doing for you behind the scenes. (2 hour watch or listen in your favorite podcast app): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-get-machine-learning-skills-without-doing-a-phd-in-math-podcast-133-with-daniel-bourke/

4. Learn how to use React's Context API. This lets you share values between React components a lot more easily than the old-fashioned way of passing props down a component tree. This tutorial will give you lots of practical examples of how to leverage the power of the Context API in your apps. (20 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/react-context-api-tutorial-examples/

5. Lazy Loading doesn't sound like it would be a good thing, but in the case of JavaScript performance, it is. Lazy Loading is a design pattern where you only fetch mission-critical data from the server first, then go back to get other data as needed. This tutorial will teach you how to perform Lazy Loading using React and the popular Next.js framework. You'll learn about Dynamic Import, Suspense, and React.lazy. You'll also learn the limits of this design pattern, and why developers don't just use it for everything under the sun. (30 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/next-js-performance-optimization/

Joke of the Week: *"There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."* — Leon Bambrick, programmer