From Coursera to Scrimba

Choosing the right course to develop coding skills is tricky. There are so many companies with tutorials to choose from and no guarantee of landing a job afterwards. Even if you work through the free sections, it's still not clear which ones will be the best fit for you. This is what led me to switch from Coursera to Scrimba.

I started both at the same time. Coursera is trusted by employers and seems like a sure way to land a job. The Coursera development path focuses on teaching the underlying structure of coding. The why of building code. This seemed like a credible choice, so I paid the money for the ride. I also liked the tutorials from Scrimba. I've got HTML and CSS down, but I'm ready to add some action to pages. I started Scrimba's JavaScript course at the same time. Scrimba does have credit for helping new develops gain employment despite college education. They teach by doing. They use interactive software that allows you to code in the video that you are watching. If you pause the video, you can click on index.html, index.css, index.js and change the code. You can also run it and observe the updated website. When you hit play on the video, it goes right back to the lesson. It is literal magic and hopefully the future of education in general. The focus of Scrimba is teaching you how to code by giving you little projects along the way and big projects at the end of each major section.

Here's why I switched to Scrimba. I really, really, really want to build projects. I did some time in college, but I don't feel like I learned to code. College was like Coursera, mostly high-level concepts without much emphasis on individual projects. Scrimba is so much more hands on. It's the way I hoped to learn to code. It involves tinkering with guardrails so there is actually a finished product. Today I started at the beginning again. Wish me luck!