DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
Scrimba is Launching Fullstack Courses Now?
Scrimba is just starting to release fullstack/backend courses. They're going to be starting with 8 courses: Suppabase, Command Line Basics, Express, SQL, Nuxt, Vite, Next, and Node. I shared my honest thoughts on some of the courses, who they're for, and what part of your journey you should consider going through them.
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So Scrimba is diving into full stack. They're going to be teaching a little bit more back-end stuff to combine with their already front-end curriculum. I think it's interesting and I want to talk about it with you today. So, if you are someone considering Scrimba or you are someone that has used Scrimba in the past, you've gone through their front-end curriculum. You've really liked that, you like the instruction. You're considering learning a little bit more of the backend stuff. I'm going to just share my honest opinions on you know, if it's for you, what like, what I think of it, um, if it's going to make you a better developer, like, I'm just going to give you my honest feedback. So you know, full disclosure. Scrimba is sponsoring this video, but the reason why I do sponsored videos with Scrimba is because they pretty much give me freedom, control, to be able to say what I want and just be authentic with you guys, and that's what I'm going to do. So let's go ahead and dive in. As you can see, here's their full stack curriculum. They have eight courses to start out. Just to prove it to you, I'm going to hide my camera for a second. You see, node in the bottom right. We'll bring it back. But yeah, they actually have a lot of courses to start out the full stack curriculum so they're officially diving into the backend Now. I'm cautiously optimistic about this.
Don Hansen:Scribd is really good at frontend One of the best self-taught programs I have found for aspiring frontend developers and it's why I've partnered with them as an affiliate and I promote them all the time, because I truly believe in what they're doing and the types of front-end developers that they create. Their curriculum is really good and their instruction is really good. So I'm excited to actually and I'll dive into this a little bit later, but I'm going to try out at least one of their courses and see how I like it and maybe learn something, but I know their instruction is really good. So for them to be able to teach backend courses with their style, I think it's going to be really good if they do this right Now. I'm cautiously optimistic because I've seen many online platforms expand into variety and then the one thing they did really well, they don't do so anymore. They don't keep up to date with it, they don't provide updates, they don't keep up to date with the market. I hope that doesn't happen with Scrimba and I'm trusting that it won't. I don't think it will, but it's still something I've seen happen to so many programs where it's like man, I hope you were still a really strong front end program. But I do think Scrimba cares about the quality. They really care about the quality. They really care about their students.
Don Hansen:So expanding into full stack with their instruction style I do think overall is going to really help their students and honestly, like you, don't want to dive into backend stuff too quickly and especially too deep. If you're trying to become a front end developer, you're trying to get better with that, because I see too many aspiring developers. They just split themselves too thin and they just have a bunch of surface level knowledge. They're not really good developers even at a junior level. So get really good with the front end. If you're trying to become a front end developer, get really good with the front end before you expand into this. And if you could do that then you could start expanding your knowledge as a software engineer in general. Right, because this is where there's kind of a trap, where people think even you know, five years down the road there's some front end developers who have not even touched backend code. Right, I do think you just expand the way that you tackle problems and you just see the entire stack and you're able to work with other parts of the stack when you get at least get exposure to that.
Don Hansen:Um, so expanding your knowledge into the backend overall, I think, is going to make you a better software engineer and so for that reason alone, I think, if you've you're pretty comfortable with HTML, css and JavaScript, you've built some stuff. You dove into react, you have flushed out some projects with react. Um, maybe you've hooked up fire store, firebase, real-time database. Um, maybe you've hooked up super base, something like that, like we can see super base in the top left. I'm telling you, like fire store, um and super base, really good cloud databases that make it really easy to save data in with your front-end application. Build essentially full uh applications that are going to be impressive portfolio projects. But, as you can see, they expand past that and they are trying to make people better back at developers as well. So, again, I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm actually pretty excited if you do it the right way and you actually take the time. Don't just rush through these, but take the time to go through whatever you're trying to learn, practice problems on the side, build projects to reinforce these skills. You do all of that. You are going to expand your knowledge a lot more than a lot of people that are just kind of building simple front-end applications. So I'm excited about it. We're going to dive in and explore a little bit more and then I'm going to share honest opinions on, yeah, this whole thing.
Don Hansen:Now, one thing I want to show you and I think this is probably the coolest feature I've seen from this honestly, we're gonna dive into Express. We can just load up Express router. It's gonna autoplay. We're gonna pause that and we're going to bring this over. As you can see on the right. This is really cool. I actually love this feature. You can see that you can make requests. You see the application running. They just have an Express app running. You can actually make requests to the API that you're building.
Don Hansen:Scribble is really well known for its interactive platform where you could do a ton of stuff in the browser to make it a little bit easier for you to just play around with it and learn. Building this network tool is powerful because once you start learning backend stuff, you got to get a little bit more comfortable sending requests and receiving responses. That might not be in this friendly UI that you're so used to. It's a different environment. I think it's really cool.
Don Hansen:I love backend stuff, but it's new right and they created a really simple tool to use to be able to test out what you're building. This is something that a lot of backend courses lack, or sometimes they'll just have videos and you got to replicate it in your own editor and that's all you can do right away, and sometimes the setup alone can be a little bit complicated and overwhelming for some people. So giving a quick, easy tool to be able to test out your code here, this is awesome, and I know it's a new feature. There might be some bugs and things they need to tweak, but I know they are continuing to flush out this feature. There might be some bugs and things they need to tweak, but I know they are continuing to flush out this feature, but I honestly think this is one of the best features I found on Scrimpa. I love it, so I am probably going to be using it. We'll talk a bit about this, but I definitely want to utilize this tool to be able to build out the course that I'm building for Scrimpa. I think it's powerful. Check it out and try it out for yourself.
Don Hansen:But I'm not just shouting out this feature and I'm not even just shouting out the course and then kind of moving on. I'm actually going to be participating in one of these courses. So I have kind of went through the basic next tutorial and the documentation and spun up a simple next application. But I never really went through a full course and I never got really comfortable with next. So I'm actually going to be diving into their next course live on stream, so you'll probably see that on YouTube, at the very least on Twitch. But I'm going to try out one of these courses for myself.
Don Hansen:Again, I think the instruction is really good and I think there is a need for really good next courses with this amount of interactivity. So I'm really interested to check it out. So we've warped to the next outline right now so you can see their course and all the lessons that you're going to be learning. Essentially, what they're probably trying to do is kind of just get you a lot of the foundations, the fundamentals of next to be able to get up and running and be able to build applications with Next, and you're probably going to have to expand into documentation like anything else. But one thing Scrimba does really well and I'm confident about they give you a good foundation to be comfortable building stuff with it. So I'm going to be diving into. Next, you can check out some of those live streams. If you ever want to see my schedule, you can always go to twitchtv, slash Don the developer or my discord. I have my schedule there as well. But yeah, we'll just try it out and see if these courses are any good.
Don Hansen:So let's go back to the eight courses that you're going to be learning and I just kind of want to talk about this and we'll talk about what they're starting out with and I'll share my honest opinions with it. I think a lot of people are going to be starting out with Node and they might expand into something like Express and now that you learn the routing side of things, now maybe we want to interact with the database and so we dive into sql, um and we kind of just expand from there. So it would be really interesting to see them like I love that they're actually teaching sql first rather than tossing you into an orm that abstracts that out. You should be writing sql if you're learning back end, like you should be starting off writing SQL and you should be eventually writing really crappy queries that show you why knowing a little bit of SQL could be helpful, because sometimes ORMs don't always give you the most efficient way to retrieve data or manipulate data.
Don Hansen:But the fact that they are diving into SQL, they're diving into command line basics. This is actually a big one that I think all front end developers should take, no matter whether you're trying to go full stack or not. Like this is powerful. A lot of front end developers, a lot of new ones, are still using the GitHub client like the GUI, like they're just not comfortable with the command line. That's crazy to me. You're going to be using the command line so often in a professional position. You want to get comfortable with the command line pretty quickly and I think it's intimidating for a lot of people. So I love that they're teaching this course. But before we even dive into this stuff, you know I kind of mentioned it in the past Supabase and Firestore or Firebase Realtime Database can be initial solutions for your front-end applications if you don't want to dive into Fullstack or you kind of just want to get some exposure into saving your data and retrieving it when you do refresh that page and you come back to your app.
Don Hansen:It has some convenient stuff like authentication as well at least Firebase does. But this is kind of a really good lineup of initial courses and you have a bit of a war between next and next, which is always entertaining to see. But they're just different and they have different ecosystem, different conventions, different cultures even. But when you're getting in the realm of full stack, that is very popular and trending. You'll often hear about Next or Nuxt to be able to spin up applications. I think these are really good tools to be able to spin up a quick application without having to really dive deep into the backend and flush that out.
Don Hansen:And, depending on like how heavy the framework is, you know you're going through a lot of boilerplate stuff initially before you could even dive into feature work. So if you're just trying to get an app up and you really want to get good with front end and you are trying to just flesh out a more impressive professional project, usually that's going to save data. I do think Nuxt and Next can be pretty useful tools, but the fact that they're diving into backend stuff as well, that's promising. And I'm actually creating a course for Nest not Next. But Nest On the backend it's a little bit of a heavier framework. It uses Express under the hood but it can get you exposure to a more fleshed out framework where I think a lot of people, when they dive into Node tutorials they learned a little bit of Express. It's very minimal, it's easy to build bad habits and I think getting exposure to a heavier framework that has heavier restrictions and the community has kind of influenced the conventions around it usually pretty good conventions for developers or that's agreed on upon developers I think that the fact that Scrimba is really fleshing out some heavier backend stuff, they are pretty serious about this and that's awesome.
Don Hansen:I'm really excited to see how far they take this and see how people respond to it. But it would be interesting to see this really get fleshed out into. You know two different um, twice the amount of courses um and I'm curious what direction they're going to go with that. And I'll just say what I would like to see. I would love to see them actually dive into javascript on the back end. I would like to see them um have like a sequelized course and maybe even a prisma course and just continue diving a little bit deeper into a lot of the common stuff, like complex but common stuff you're going to be using if you actually start aiming for backup positions in the Node realm, and that's where a lot of tutorials fall short. They don't really go into heavier uh tooling, heavier libraries that are very, very popular in the professional world. So I'd love to see sqlize, I'd love to see prisma. Um, I like that. They're actually diving into veet. Um, veet is actually.
Don Hansen:You know, this might be counter to even what the React docs recommend, but for junior developers I don't recommend going into Next right away. No, no, no, like that enforces conventions too early. You want to play around with it. You want to kind of build your own opinions first and, just you know, explore React Router Like Next is really strict with this routing. You want to explore React R router and figure out routing on your own. How do you want to organize this? But Vite allows you to do that with a very simple command. You just spin up a React application, you play around with it. Vite is such an awesome tool to be able to just get your React app up, get a dev environment up and you're just playing around learning React.
Don Hansen:Now what I'd also love to see them do is expand into Webpack. Webpack is going to be more common professionally and Webpack is. I wouldn't say it's too much harder, but it does. It feels a little bit more complex for people that haven't really used it yet. I find that Vite is a little bit simpler. I think it tries to be simpler. Both can end up being complex with their configuration but Webpack tends to be has a little bit of a higher learning curve and I think getting comfortable with that, even as an aspiring front-end developer like it's something you should dive into as you are trying to apply for front-end positions because webpack is really really common so I can expand quite a bit from there. But I think, like some of the courses that I mentioned, are going to be pretty foundational with a lot of the positions that you're going to be applying for for full stack, for back-end in the node.
Don Hansen:But, like I said, I'm cautiously optimistic about it and, given just the instruction quality in general, I highly recommend you check it out. If you're trying to learn any of these like, I highly recommend that you check it out, try the courses for yourself, see how they work for you and ultimately you got to figure out like if this teaching style works for you, right? If Scrimba's kind of culture and their style works for you. That's what choosing courses to learn coding is about. So ultimately, like I am cautiously optimistic about this. Like I said, if they continue to flesh this out and they take the backend seriously and they keep up with the front end, this is gonna be one of the best self-taught courses out there or platforms out there Like this is really. This can make aspiring developers who have gone down the front end path. It can make them really good software engineers really good software engineers.
Don Hansen:Once you start expanding into the backend realm and getting more exposure into just kind of different ways of doing things. Because even just front end versus back end, like you're going to be solving different problems and you have to use the languages that you're learning in a different way to solve those problems and you're going to be thinking about them in a different way. You're going to be organizing your code in a different way. There's different conventions on both sides. So, like I actually love that they're expanding into this, I am excited to try out the next course and I like, if you like, scrimba's way of teaching, I think they're going to probably have some of the best back-end courses in the node realm that you're going to find, and that's my honest opinion about it.
Don Hansen:And I'm going to go to the next course and maybe I realize that's not the case. I don't know, you know me. I'm going to give you my honest opinion about it and I'm going to go to the next course and maybe I realize that's not the case. I don't know, you know me, I'm going to give you my honest opinion about it. But if you want to expand into the back end, I highly recommend that you check out Scramba and maybe you decide that Node isn't for you. Right, you could expand outside of that. You could watch YouTube videos. There are other courses that you could try out.
Don Hansen:But like I think they're going to give a beginner friendly way to dive into the backend, that doesn't seem overwhelming, because that's kind of the problem with a lot of aspiring front end developers when they start diving into the backend, if you're not used to it, it's a different type of learning. It's not as visual. I think the tool that they built can help with that a little bit but it's different and I think going through a beginner-friendly course that teaches it in a way that's fun and engaging is the right way to go for diving into the backend, because the backend can be a little bit rough around the edges. I think it's fun, I love it, but anyways, check it out for yourself, let me know what you think.
Don Hansen:And if you want a discount, I have a affiliate link in the description below. I get a little commission when you click on that, but by all means you don't have to click on that. I'm not like trying to get you to. You could just go to skrmbacom and try it out yourself. I get none of the commission for that. I still highly recommend Skrba. They're an awesome platform. I feel really fortunate to work with them. But yeah, leave your feedback below. Try out the courses and if you find bugs, if you feel like you wish they did something a little bit different, I'm totally open to that. Leave it in the comments below, but let me know what you think.