How to Practice Beyond Codecademy
About this Guide
I’m a developer and I’ve been tutoring new coders for years. Codecademy is the #1 way to start to code, but there’s more out there to keep learning and keep practicing, so I made this guide with some friends for people to find what those other things are. Wanna know more about these guides (there are others), me, and why we made them? See here.
Overview
Watch this for an overview on learning beyond Codecademy.
Small, Quick, Easy Things
Codecademy mobile app is great. You can get one practice pack every day for free.
Lots of places offer daily / many challenging exercises:
If you’re learning data analysis/science, solve a real-life problem with Kaggle. Just don’t expect to “win,” do it for fun or practice.
Big Things
The best thing to do outside Codecademy is to build your own projects. Codecademy projects are good to get started, but you’ll need to do more someday. Even if you join a bootcamp like me, at some point you’ll need to build your own things, without the safety net of a tutorial. This is what employers are going to want to see from you. Overview on how to build a portfolio here. Set up in your own dev environment on your own computer and get coding. What you make doesn’t matter so much as it being a project that you find interesting.
If you want to become a developer someday or at least know how things work in the real world for most developers, you’ll need to code in a group setting. That’s the number one thing that trips up beginner developers on the job and it’s something that’s really hard to get experience in. Even if you’re going 100% freelance, a gig might involve working on improving an existing site made by someone else so you should know how to read other people’s code and how coding in teams works. I made guides on those topics here and here. More specifically, there’s a practical guide to working in group projects here. In finding teammates, you can post here on the forums, the Codecademy Facebook group, or the Pro community group to find other people to team up on projects with, and you can join an open source project. Even beginners can contribute to open source (see here - you can even contribute things other than code, like documentation), but you should at least know GitHub first.
If you’d like some medium sized ideas to get started, try the following:
- Web Dev 1
- Web Dev 2
- Web Dev 3
- Web Dev 4
- Web Dev 5
- Data Science 1
- Data Science 2
- Data Science 3
- Data Science 4
- Data Science 5
- Computer Science 1
- Computer Science 2
- Computer Science 3
- Computer Science 4
- Computer Science 5
Not The End
Please reply to this thread with your own resources, advice, and feedback! We made this post a wiki so it can be updated and maintained by the community, we’re just starting them off. See our other guides here.