How to: Feb 8, 2025
1. freeCodeCamp just published a comprehensive course on modern web development using powerful tools like Next.js, React, and Strapi. This is an intermediate course, but you can code along at home even if you're a beginner. You'll build a fully-functional summer camp website, complete with event management, pagination, form handling, and more. (6 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-full-stack-app-with-nextjs-and-strapi

2. Learn clustering algorithms in Python. This freeCodeCamp handbook will teach you key techniques for Unsupervised Machine Learning so you can build more sophisticated AI systems. You'll learn about K-Means Clustering, Hierarchical Clustering, DBSCAN Clustering, t-SNE, and more. We've included a ton of code examples and data visualizations to make it easier for you to digest all of these engineering insights. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/clustering-in-python-a-machine-learning-handbook/

3. On this week's podcast, I interview Rishab Kumar about his journey from working at a gas station to working at Google as a software engineer. He couldn't afford to finish university in Canada, so he taught himself DevOps and how to build cloud infrastructure. We talk about how he persisted in applying to jobs at big tech companies despite rejections, and how he earned tons of cloud engineering certifications along the way. He shares actionable advice for anyone who wants to get into the field. (1 hour watch or listen in your favorite podcast app): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/from-gas-station-to-google-self-taught-cloud-engineer-rishab-kumar-podcast-158/

4. If you're interested in security – and you should be – then this handbook is for you. You'll build your own scalable access control system for your apps. First you'll start by exploring the open source CASL library, a popular off-the-shelf tool for authorizing user access. Then you'll set to work coding your own permissions validation framework. (full-length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-scalable-access-control-for-your-web-app/

5. Learn asynchronous programming with TypeScript. If you already know some JavaScript, you can probably pick up TypeScript pretty easily. It's just JavaScript with statically typed variables, which results in fewer bugs. We recently upgraded our open source freeCodeCamp codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript. Anyway, this handbook will teach you key Async programming concepts like Promises, Callbacks, and Async/Await. (full-length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-async-programming-in-typescript-promises-asyncawait-and-callbacks/

Quote of the Week: *"If I was going to start learning programming from zero, where I had zero context, I'd learn IT fundamentals: how networking works, how the internet works, DNS, how packets transfer data, how computers communicate with each other. Because at the end of the day, all these servers in the cloud use networking to talk to each other. The second skill I'd spend my time on is learning how Linux works."* — Rishab Kumar, software engineer and my guest on this week's freeCodeCamp podcast