Making a free open source CC/MIT licensed course on building products using javascript

Hi, my name’s Tim and you might remember me from my original post I made about 8 months ago — I promised to teach people to build products using javascript for free. No strings attached. The idea was to make a course that showcases and talks about technologies that are used day-to-day in development (intermediate/advanced level), not talk about development basics.Few days ago I’ve uploaded the final video of the course. All materials are published absolutely free, without any ads and under permissive licenses (MIT for code, Creative Commons for videos).

The course ended up containing 11 core videos (along with a bunch of off-topic videos on related topics) that go through the process of creating the client-server application using javascript. Node.js along with libraries like express.js, passport, etc is used on a backend. React with Webpack, Redux, RxJS and that kind of stuff is used on front-end. All of that is packaged into Docker containers, tested and deployed using Gitlab-CI.The videos cover the full process of creating the app:

• figuring out the idea,
• setting up a project with git,
• picking a database,
• using docker for development and deployment,
• building REST API,
• building web app client for that API with React/webpack/etc,
• unit testing all that,
• and finally — (continuously) deploying it with Docker and Gitlab-CI.

Additionally, per request of the viewers, I have livestreamed the process of development that preceded most of the published videos. I’ve ended up doing 13 livestreams that cover most of the video content I did. Most of them are quite lengthy and are not required to understand the course, but might contain some additional information (along with my poor habits of copy-pasting things)

I’m writing this post for two main reasons:

1. Maybe there are some people who’ll find the course interesting and this post will help them discover it
2. I need your help to decide what to cover next!

Doing this course was quite a lot of fun. I had to learn a ton of things myself and received a lot of very interesting feedback, suggestions and questions from the viewers. So I want to keep doing that.

And now I need your help to figure out what area to talk about in the next series. Here are some of the topics I personally think would be cool to do and talk about:

• General introduction to web technologies (in-depth introduction to web technologies that prepares you for the published course)
• Creating mobile apps using web technologies
• Creating desktop apps using web technologies
• Building real-time apps using WebSockets
• Adding features (e.g. offline, push notifications) using Service Workers
• Applying Machine Learning for fun and profit
• Using WebAssembly (hot off the press, would be fun to play with)

If any of those sound interesting and you want to help me figure out what to do next — please leave a response to my conclusions video.And, of course, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have!

Some links to the related resources:

• Project source code
• Course videos playlist
• Livestream videos playlist
• Course subreddit
• Course Discord chat (I’m always happy to answer questions and help you!)
• Facebook page with updates
• My twitter with updates (and other bonkers)

Cheers,Tim

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