I recently completed Free Code Camp’s Front End Development curriculum, over the course of several months! It was a rewarding journey that I think was well worth pursuing, and the fact that the material is all free is pretty awesome.

To get an idea of what you can get out of the program, check out my portfolio. The portfolio itself and all the projects shown on it are requirements of the certification, so that’s the sort of stuff you’ll learn (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).

Things start off pretty tame, and you’re simply expected to follow directions, changing a line of code here or there to demonstrate new ideas. However, there’s a certain point where it actually turns over to self-learning, guided by the projects and algorithm challenges, which was quite challenging for me at times.

I turned the corner of easy to tough at the “Intermediate Front End Development Projects” section. This consists of building the quote machine, weather app, Wikipedia viewer, and the Twitch app. The reason this part was so hard for me was due to having to figure out how to make the API calls - the examples were sparse in the curriculum for it. I think this was for the best, though. By being forced into struggling through it and trying a bunch of different things, it stuck much better in my mind. Once I figured out my first API call, it became something I was comfortable with for the rest of those projects and beyond.

So, it’s not a spoon-feeding situation where you’re going through the motions. This really generates some solid learning results and some great fun. Plus, you can feel confident having gone through it, because you’ll know you learned the material - you produced something useful!

In addition to all of the web development knowledge, there’s also extensive algorithm challenge sections that would apply pretty well to web development as well as outside of it, which is an excellent diversification of the material.

Looking back, I figured this was something I would do since I’m only taking one class for the summer, and, to be honest, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do some of the intermediate and advanced projects or commit enough to finish the program. It was absolutely worth doing, and I’m now very excited to tackle Free Code Camp’s Back End certification!