Happy New Year! It’s been 7 months since I last wrote on this blog. I think that in an older post, I said that I was going through some significant life changes. Well, some of that is settled now, and maybe I’ll discuss it in the future, but for now I’m going to write about a free course I just completed: Learn JavaScript for free, from Scrimba.

I started the course a month ago but didn’t get to work on it every day. The video runtimes total about 8 hours in length, and if you’ve already learned some JavaScript and want a refresher, it’s a fun one. Basics, like variables, math operators, functions and data types like objects and arrays are covered, but they’re all combined with essential DOM manipulation techniques, like getElementById(), createElement(), modifying HTML elements through innerText, textContent and innerHTML and the like.

Several short projects are built throughout the course, which make use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with the focus being the latter. Three projects are the focus of guided tutorials and make use of concepts covered in videos. Three others are solo projects which are presented via Figma designs and brief specifications. These include:

• A passenger counter app (guided tutorial)
• A basketball scoreboard (solo project)
• A blackjack game (guided tutorial)
• A password generator (solo project)
• A Chrome extension (guided tutorial)
• A metric/standard unit converter (solo project)

There are three 20-30 minute practice sections with 9 or 10 lessons in each that can be completed after each of the guided tutorial sections. They allow students to practice concepts that were learned in the aforementioned tutorial sections for some extra reps.

It’s been a while since I practiced vanilla JavaScript, and I’ve never felt that my JavaScript skills are especially strong. The majority of the projects I’ve built in the past 18 months used React or Next.js and were largely websites, not applications. This Scrimba course is one step I’ve taken towards strengthening my core JavaScript skills. I’m happy with the results. It’s an incremental set of lessons that drills fundamentals and basic DOM manipulation, which I think are foundational skills for web development.

Just this week, I also joined Scrimba’s Discord server. There are accountability channels in it (#today-i-will and #today-i-did), achievement channels (#i-got-hired and #i-built-this) and help channels dedicated to JavaScript, design, HTML & CSS, React and “other”, among other channels. At any given time, there are hundreds of students logged in.

I really like the platform. I like that the lessons take place in an interactive editor. I also like that concepts are presented in bite-sized chunks and are project-based. I was able to practice more by building my own small projects along the way, based on concepts that we reviewed in each section. One of these was a small project that uses random numbers to display characters in a Street Fighter II splash screen matchup, mainly to entertain my kids. It was based on a random emoji fighter project from the course. Another was an AD&D 2nd Edition character stat roller that also used random numbers for stat generation.

I’m likely going to go through the other free courses on Scrimba and then consider paying for their Frontend Developer Career Path course, which is 75 hours long and includes the lessons from Learn JavaScript for free in its Module 3: Making websites interactive lesson.