Linux Foundation Node.js certificate (Part 1)

As a dutiful employee of Kesko: Finland's leading producer of stores that will sell you things, I have volunteered to experiment with a new method of increasing core competencies and developer skill set expansion. Taking a Linux Foundation course on Node.js Application Development and documenting my thoughts throughout the process. This article covers my experiences with the first half of the course.

First off, the design of the website itself is mostly fine. it comes with its own forum for asking questions and interacting with other students taking the course. The course itself is on a time limit of one year (which strikes me as generous enough, unless you get hit with amnesia)

It makes a point of recommending NVM to install Node.js versions, which is an immediate green flag that the person who designed the course knows what they are talking about. The money spent does certainly go towards something compared to something one might find on YouTube: detailed descriptions of debugging with DevTools, option flags that I had neither heard of or enountered in my entire professional life and detailed rundowns of the more peculiar features of the JavaScript language. At least half or more developers taking this will come away learning something new.

One particular complaint is that the project requries you to download code examples and modify/test them. Or I should say: you CAN download them, but nothing is stopping you from skipping them entirely. not having an integrated editor on the site seems like a lost opportunity. FreeCodeCamp has an integrated code editor on every exercise they give you, which I feel does help reinforce the things you learn there.

At the end of every section the course includes a quiz that usually runs from 2 to 4 questions. You can still move to the next section even if you fail them and you can re-take them as much as you like. Most of the time the questions are the kind that you could only fail if you were not paying any attention at all.

On the whole, the course does not seem to be focused so much on writing code as it is with understanding it. coding knowledge is mostly assumed.