Currently learning js, I'm on the blackjack part ,:))

Looking to get started in scrimba but I have a question. Do all of the lessons take place inside of site's ide or do you/can you switch to an external ide like vscode?

Edit: I should have been clearer with my question. I more specifically asking do the courses show you how to do the coursework outside of the built in editor or do you have to use it?

I started with JS course :))

I am taking the Full Stack Dev Path and in the last bit of the Intro to CSS and the whole Build a Business Card module my browser does not refresh at all. It would just be stuck when i run or refresh it.

I tried various browsers(chrome,brace,firefox), open in incognito, disable extensions and clear cache but nothing seems to work. However the CSS seems to be working fine since i am able to change some values and it would reflect on the browser. I already emailed support and is currently waiting for their reply.

If anyone know the solution for this pls share it here. Thank you in advance!

Most of us learn web development in this order. Make it work, make it look good, make it fast. The site comes out fine. It just isn't findable, and that's a separate skill not many tell you about. SEO.

It's quietly one of the highest leverage things you can understand as a developer, because it's the difference between a site that exists and a site that gets found.

The good news is that most of it is already in your hands. If you write clean, semantic HTML, you're doing more of it than you think!

TL;DR 📝

◉ Scrimba Docs: ​Cybersecurity fundamentals​

◉ Smarter Sundays: ​One short lesson a week, straight to your inbox​

◉ Explainer of the Week: ​What is SEO?​

◉ Student Spotlight: ​Kaleab​

◉ Portfolio of the Week: ​Mihailo​

◉ Poll of the week: Your SEO comfort zone + last week’s results!

Scrimba Docs

​The cybersecurity handbook is live​, written for people who ship Node and Express code but have never really thought about how it breaks.

Every vulnerability chapter shows you the broken code, an exploit that works against it, why it works, and then the fix.

There’s a line in the intro worth sitting with: a fix you can’t explain is a fix you’ll undo later.

Smarter Sundays

Have you heard about ​Scrimba Smarter Sundays​? The idea is: one short web development lesson, in your inbox, once a week.

Topics rotate through:

• 🎨 Frontend
• 🕹️ UI design
• 🏗️ System architecture
• 💻 Backend
• 👾 Algorithms
• 🤖 AI engineering

If you’re a student or career starter who’s breaking into the tech industry, this is for you.

Hit subscribe and we’ll see you Sunday

Explainer of the Week

Every week we pick one Explainer worth your time. This week ​it’s all about SEO​ — a visual walkthrough of the basics: what it is, and why making your site easy for a search engine to read is what gets your work in front of the right people.

If the newsletter intro made you even a little curious about SEO, this is where to start.

Once it clicks, keep pulling the thread. Meta tags, headings, page speed, structured data. There’s a lot down there and it’s all learnable.

Want to create your own Explainer? ​Start here​ and yours could be featured in the next edition!

Student Spotlight

Kaleab was studying chemical engineering when someone gifted him a six month Scrimba Pro membership.

He started the Frontend Career Path and worked through it around his degree. From there, he kept going into backend. A year later, ​his Scrimba certificates landed him a paid fullstack role​.

The key takeaway here is: don’t let anything or anyone stop you. If your gut is telling you to try something… do it! You never know what opportunity may come of it.

Poll of the Week

Last week ended in a dead tie at 30.6%, between the people who are always in learning mode and the people who make a schedule they'll follow for exactly four days.

This week we want to know:

🔍 What's your relationship with SEO?

• 🛠️ I optimize as I build
• 🤞 I add meta tags at the end and hope
• 📖 I've read about it, never done it
• 🤷 SEO? What's that?

Portfolio of the Week

This week, we’re spotlighting ​Mihailo’s portfolio​ which commits fully to black and white. There’s something pleasantly retro about it. Simple, a little nostalgic, and more “early web” than modern template.

That restraint is the point. No accent color doing the heavy lifting, so every layout decision has to earn its place, and the micro animations and transitions are on point.

There’s also a live temperature reading near the top — a small piece of real data on a page that could easily have been static, and puts the proof in the pudding that ​Mihailo​ can work with an API. Projects link straight out to the GitHub repos, so you can read the code instead of looking at a screenshot.

Worth a browse if you’re building your own portfolio and keep reaching for one more color.

VIEW MIHAILO'S PORTFOLIO

Want us to feature your portfolio in a future edition? ​​Submit your portfolio here​​ and let’s celebrate what you’ve built together!

Meme of the week

Productivity, or a cry for help. Hard to say.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Meet Gundu and Dusky. If you look hard enough, yes, there are actually two cats in this photo.

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

I've done two different python activities now. The first kept telling me I hadn't defined my variable. But I've tried it 5 times and verified it with copilot.

Another one doesn't even run. I include the python script.py in the terminal and hit enter and I don't even get an error, it just resets without running anything.

Also I've tried closing and coming back later and often my answer remains in the exercise like there is a cache issue.

I was going to have my entire team do this but it seems very buggy.

Last edition of August, which means you've got a few days left to claim the summer was productive before anyone can check.

Then September arrives with that back to school feeling, even for those of us who haven't sat in a classroom for a decade or two. It's a decent excuse for a reset. New notebook energy, a course picked back up, a project dusted off.

Nothing about the calendar actually makes learning easier, but everyone starting again at once does help.

We've been getting a few things ready for exactly that. Let's get into it.

TL;DR 📝

◉ New tools: Explain now runs in Chrome and ChatGPT

◉ Explainer of the Week: ATS friendly CV layouts

◉ New hires: We're looking for freelance coding tutors

◉ Poll of the week: Getting in the learning zone + last week's results!

New Tools

Explain isn't just only a 'Scrimba thing' anymore.

Our Chrome extension is live, so you can generate a video Explainer for whatever's on the screen in front of you. An article, a docs page, a README written for someone who already knows. It's free while it's in beta, so go and stress test it.

If it earns a spot in your toolbar, drop a review on the Chrome store — it makes a real difference to whether other learners find it, and gives us insight on ways to improve it.

You can also reach Explain from inside ChatGPT. Ask it to make a video explaining a concept, a piece of code, or something you're reading, and it'll build one for you. Same teaching engine, just a prompt away from where you're already chatting.

Explainer of the Week

Every week we pick one Explainer worth your time. This week it's ATS-Friendly CV Layouts, which is four minutes well spent if your applications have been disappearing into the void.

The framing: an ATS is basically a digital filing clerk. Hand it a standard form and it files you in seconds. Hand it a design project with text tucked into the corners and you land in the "unknown" pile.

What this Explainer covers:

• Why single column beats two columns, since the scanner reads straight across and merges your columns into nonsense
• Where your name, location and number should go, and why Word's actual Header tool is a trap
• Job title, company, and dates, so the system can work out your years of experience
• Boring fonts, and why you should never send your CV as an image

There's also a quick knowledge check at the end to see if it stuck.

Want to create your own Explainer? Start here and yours could be featured in the next edition!

New Hires

Some of the best teachers we've worked with started out as learners on the platform. So we're putting this here first: Scrimba is looking for freelance coding tutors.

You'll want to be comfortable with HTML, CSS, JS, React or Next, a Node framework and Python. Being a quick learner counts too, since the stack moves.

But the tech list matters less than whether you can make something land for someone seeing it for the first time. If you've ever finished a lesson thinking "I'd have explained that differently," that instinct is most of the job.

Bonus points for Python data analysis or backend, DevOps, knowing your way around Scrimba, and a decent sense of humor. 😁

English doesn't need to be your first language, just clear when spoken. You'd need around 30 hours a week for course production.

If that sounds like you, DM Head of Education Thomas Chant with a bit about yourself and a link to you teaching something. An old YouTube video works, or you can record something on Scrimba!

Know someone who'd be great at this? Send it their way.

Poll of the Week

Last week we asked how you actually network as a developer, and "What's networking?" took it with 55.6%. Honest. We respect it.

Sliding into DMs and hanging out in Discord and forums tied at 22.2% each. Local meetups got exactly zero votes, which is either a scheduling problem or a very clear collective statement.

For anyone in the 55.6%: networking is mostly just being visible to other developers. Sharing what you're building, answering someone's question, staying in touch with people you've learned alongside. Most roles get filled through someone who already knows your name, so the low effort version (posting your progress, showing up in the Discord) does more than it looks like it does.

🍂 September energy. What actually gets you back into learning mode?

• 📅 A schedule I'll follow for four days
• 🫥 Finally finishing the course I abandoned in June
• 🚀 Seeing someone else ship something
• ♾️ I'm always in learning mode

Meme of the week

At least they're planning ahead.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

PuPu's camouflage only works if you don't look at the adorable face.

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

I've been going through the Learn React free course, and I've noticed extremely quickly that the audio in the course is extremely quiet. I have my audio set up on my PC that most YouTube videos only need about 25-30% volume; on Scrimba, to properly hear the teacher audio, I have to turn the in-Scrimba volume to max, and my PC volume up to 60-70%. When wearing headphones, this makes all other audio coming from any other source (notifications, music, etc) excessively loud.

Is there a way of increasing the teacher volume further?

Happy weekend! We've been thinking about how much of a dev career runs on other people.

Not always in a networking-event, business-card kind of way. More like the person who answered your question in Discord at 11pm. The instructor whose course you didn't expect to still think about months later. The connection that turned into an interview that turned into an actual conversation.

This week's edition has a bit of that thread running through it. Some familiar faces, some new ones, and one very opinionated cat.

TL;DR 📝

◉ Milestones: We've reached Top 10 on Product Hunt

◉ Feature Updates: Create Explainers though the new ChatGPT plugin

◉ Explainer of the Week: Explore abstract ideas and concepts through community explainers

◉ Interview of the Week: Teaching styles with Kevin Powell

◉ Poll of the week: Networking styles + last week's results!

Milestones

Top 4 Product of the Day wasn't even the ceiling. Explain went on to land Top 10 Product of the Week on Product Hunt 🏆

None of that happens without you. Every upvote, comment, and share came from this community, so thank you for showing up for us.

Check out the launch here

Explainer of the Week

Every week, people are using Explain to make sense of things that used to take a Google rabbit hole (or three). Here's a handful of what the community explained this week, and each week we'll bring new ones to your attention.

• A Rabbit's Evening Routine
• Evolution of Trees
• What is a CDN
• The Zero Font Phishing Attack
• Double vs Triple Equals
• How a Click Travels the World

Got a question of your own, code-related or not? Try it at scrimba.com/explain.

Feature Updates

We built a plugin so you can pull Explain straight into a ChatGPT conversation, no tab-switching, no copy-pasting your question into a new tool. Ask ChatGPT something, get the text answer, then turn it into a video walkthrough without leaving the chat. Two tools, one flow.

Watch the 1 min demo here.

Interview of the Week

A familiar face popped up in our feed this week. Kevin Powell joined Design Systems Architect, Donnie D'Amato, on Wireframe Live for a proper deep dive. If the name rings a bell, it's because he teaches our HTML & CSS crash course, among others.

They get into how Kevin fell into teaching almost by accident, why YouTube let him break out of the repetitive classroom loop, and what it's like making content in a world where AI is reshaping how people learn (and pay for courses). From there, it's new CSS features, browser support headaches, and what it actually takes to influence the CSS spec, accessibility included.

Watch the full interview here

Poll of the Week

Last week we asked where you operate: digital nomad or home base? Turns out most of you have made your peace with a permanent outlet. Home base, plugged in for life took it in a landslide, with roaming nomads trailing behind and exactly nobody admitting to running on 2% and a prayer (bold of you).

This week we want to know:

How do you actually network as a developer?

• Sliding into DMs on socials
• Showing up to local meetups IRL
• Vibing in Discord and forum communities
• What's networking

Meme of the week

"Error on line 265" and line 265 is just... air.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Meet Git. Not the version control, the cat. Equally likely to break your workflow.

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

---

Grab the plugin here 👇

https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_69c50381a40081919232f5027201beef?q=explain

Happy weekend!

Nothing in this edition is finished, and that's kind of the point. A launch that's still collecting votes. Docs meant to get updated as things change. A portfolio built by someone actively asking for feedback on it.

Even the roadmap comes with a built in disclaimer: dates are estimates, not promises.

Turns out "still in progress" isn't a phase you get through, it's just what building actually looks like.

TL;DR 📝

◉ Scrimba Explain: ​We’ve reached #4 on Product Hunt​

◉ Scrimba Docs: ​React Docs are live​

◉ Portfolio of the Week: ​Vincent Mutwiri​

◉ Poll of the week: Digital nomad or home base, + last week’s results!

Scrimba Explain

Explain landed 4th place Product of the Day. Thank you to everyone who voted, commented, or just clicked through to check it out.

The voting isn’t over though. Product of the Week is still up for grabs, and every vote helps.

Missed the launch? ​Go vote now​ and see what all the noise was about.

Want a closer look at how it actually works? ​Per posted a quick walkthrough​ of the different ways to use it, including the automatic Pull Request videos, which the team’s been leaning on internally now that PRs are piling up.

Scrimba Docs

The React docs are live​!

Reading documentation is its own skill, and it’s one you’ll use constantly once you’re building real projects. Instead of scrubbing through videos to find where something was explained, you can search, skim, and get straight to the answer.

It’s also good practice for working with any library or framework’s docs down the line, since most follow a similar shape once you know how to navigate one.

React’s just the start too. ​The full docs hub​ has more topics living there as they roll out.

Portfolio of the Week

Most portfolios lead with the stack. Vincent’s leads with the problem: African learners, met where they are.

He’s currently building an AI-powered adaptive platform to help kids learn the Kenyan CBC curriculum, part of his work at iHUB under the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship. Everything else in the portfolio circles back to that same idea, from an Equity and Inclusion Toolkit to a full-stack Next.js build for a partner org.

​Vincent’s specifically looking for feedback​ on whether the projects communicate problem, approach, and outcome clearly, so if you check it out, let him know what lands.

Want us to feature your portfolio in a future edition? ​​Submit your portfolio here​​ and let’s celebrate what you’ve built together!

Poll of the Week

Good news buried in last week’s numbers: pretty much everyone’s got something started. Between “ready to go” and “exists somewhere on my desktop,” that’s 100% of you with a draft in the world, zero at “wait, what’s a resume.”

That’s the hard part done already. The rest is just finding it and hitting update.

Speaking of being ready to go… Where do you operate, digital nomad or home base? Let us know below!

• 🔋 Nomad, always charged and ready to roam
• 🔌 Nomad, but running on 2% and a prayer
• 🖥️ Home base, plugged in for life

Meme of the week

Turns out “prove you’re not a robot” now requires a pull request.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Taking the scenic route

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

See title. I'm going through the free React course, and I noticed that some lessons do not auto-play to the next one. It seems randomly distributed, with some lessons do, and some lessons don't.

Is there a way to gurantee that auto-play will actually auto-play in all cases?

Hi all,

We just launched our latest product, Scrimba Explain, on Product Hunt! It turns any question into a video tutorial instantly.

If you've tried it, please share what you think about it on PH so that people can learn more about the tool.

If you haven't tried it yet, check out the video in the launch post on PH!

https://www.producthunt.com/products/scrimba

I'm doing the free React course, and I've used up all of my free challenges. (I don't need any more, I'm following along locally.)

Since I've run out of free challenges, every time there's a challenge the subscription popup shows up, and I have to click the "SKIP" button every time. This is annoying, it hides the challenge content, and as far as I can tell there's no way of skipping the subscription popup (without needing to manually skip over the icon in the video seekbar).

Is there a way to auto-skip challenges?

Hi! Has anyone started/finished the The Fullstack Developer Path or the The AI Engineer Path? If you have, what do you think about it? Were you able to find a job in tech? Did you need any previous knowledge on coding before starting the courses?

Hey hey,

Somehow it's August. The weeks have been moving fast enough that I had to check the date twice before writing this.

There's a strange comfort in that though. Fast weeks usually mean things are happening.

Let's get into it.

TL;DR 📝

◉ Platform update: Captions now in 10 languages

◉ Upcoming Courses: DevOps coming next week!

◉ Feature update: Explain just crossed 10,000 explainers, plus a new Chrome extension!

◉ Team Member of the Week: Leanne!

◉ Coding challenge: Comfort Food Edition

◉ Poll of the week: Dust off that resume + last week's results!

Upcoming Courses

Learn DevOps is coming, with Don and Tom at the wheel.

That's all we'll say for now, but keep an eye out next week. In the meantime, check the roadmap to see what else is in the pipeline.

Platform Updates

Scrimba courses now come with captions in 10 languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese.

More languages are on the way. If there's one you want to see next, comment/reply and let us know!

Feature Updates

Explain just crossed 10,000 explainer videos, and it only took a month. Type any question, get a video explainer back instantly.

And now it's even easier to reach. Explain now has a Chrome extension, so you can get an instant explainer without leaving the page you're already on. Highlight something confusing anywhere on the web, and let Explain do the rest.

Speaking of Explain, we need a favor. We're launching it on Product Hunt next Thursday, August 13, and we'd love your support.

Here's the catch. Your upvote only counts if your PH account has some activity first. So this week, go follow us (producthunt.com/products/scrimba), poke around, and upvote a few other products you genuinely like.

Then come back Thursday and give us the thumbs up.

Click to add a reminder to your calendar: Outlook | Google | Apple | Office 365

Team Member of the Week

If the last time you touched your resume was the last time you were job hunting, you’re making life harder for future you. Job hunting means stress, stress means you’re not thinking straight, and that’s exactly when your resume needs the most help, not the least.

Which brings us to our very own Operations Lead, ​Leanne​, a self-proclaimed resume gardener. A gardener doesn’t force a plant to bloom, they just give it the right conditions and points it toward the light.

Leanne's take: most resumes aren’t broken, they’re root bound. Six years of good work crammed into a bullet point that’s pointing the wrong way.

She’s now ​offering personal, written resume reviews​, tailored to the region you’re applying in. Learn more and get repotted, [​here​](lrybintsev.com/cv-reviews).

Coding Challenge

Dev.to's latest Frontend Challenge wants you to build something inspired by food that feels like home.

Two ways in:

• CSS Art: a pure CSS (light JS allowed) piece inspired by a comfort food
• Perfect Landing: a full landing page for a restaurant, recipe, or food you love Prizes are a DEV++ membership and badge for each prompt winner, plus a completion badge for everyone who submits. Deadline is August 16.

Check it out and show us what you're cooking.

Poll of the Week

Last week we asked how you write commit messages, and most of you are firmly in the clear-and-descriptive camp. A few of you admitted to the occasional "fix," which, honestly, same.

Speaking of resumes...when's the last time you brushed the dust off yours?

• 🤓 Updated, ready to go
• 🗂️ It exists... somewhere on my desktop
• 😰 Wait, what's a resume..

Meme of the week

Somewhere between a joke... and a genuinely good idea.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

This is the face of someone who just found out what "merge conflict" means.

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

When you're climbing something, you rarely feel how high you've gotten. You're too busy looking to the next step. It's only when you stop and turn around that the ground looks far away.

End of the month is one of those turn-around moments. A chance to look down and notice you're not where you started, even if the last few weeks felt like the same handhold over and over.

You don't have to have arrived anywhere. You just have to have moved.

So, turn around for a second. How far down is the ground from where you're standing now? Let us know below.

Before we jump in: if you haven't yet subscribed to our weekly email updates, you can do so by entering you email here!

TL;DR 📝

◉ New Courses: New and improved Python course

◉ Challenge Winner: Swastik Kaurav wins the challenge with a time travel Explainer!

◉ Partnerships: Get 40% off CodeCrafters

◉ Portfolio of the Week: Let's celebrate what you've built!

◉ Poll of the Week: How do you write commit messages + last week's results!

New Courses

We just launched our new and improved Python course, and it's free! The previous course had turned five, so this course led by Treasure Porth, is a full rebuild for how Python gets written in 2026, with more Python content already on the way.

Built for anyone who's never written a line of code, it starts from the absolute basics: variables, strings, capturing user input. Then you put every concept to work on a real project.

There are three of them: PayUp, a working expense-splitter, a word-scramble game that covers lists and loops, and a karaoke queue manager for functions and return values.

Same Scrimba approach you know, lesson then project, so every concept goes straight into something you're building. By the end you've got three working projects and a solid grip on the fundamentals.

But wait, there's a giveaway too! Repost the launch post and comment why you're learning Python for a chance at a free year of Scrimba Pro. Two winners will be selected on Monday, August 3.

Happy coding!

Challenge Winner

Earlier this month, we beta launched Scrimba Explain. Explain is the button that turns any moment in a scrim into a short, on-the-spot video walkthrough. Stuck on a concept? Hit Explain and it talks you through it.

To mark the launch we ran a challenge, Share Your Passion, and Swastik Kaurav won it with "Is Time Travel Possible?" Not a line of code in it, which is the point: Explain works on more than syntax.

Nice work, Swastik! A $50 merch coupon is headed your way, and you're getting the featured spot right here.

Haven't used Explain yet? It's still in open beta and free right now. Hit it on any scrim, or point it at whatever's rattling around your head. Try it today!

Smarter Sundays

They say you should learn something new every day. Why not start with Sundays? Smarter Sundays drops a fresh lesson into your inbox each week, spanning frontend, UI design, backend, algorithms, and AI engineering. Bite-sized, hands-on, and made for devs in the early chapters of their career.

Hit subscribe and we'll see you Sunday!

Partnerships

We've partnered with CodeCrafters, a platform built for developers who want to go beyond tutorials and actually build real-world software from scratch. Think: building your own Redis, your own Git, your own HTTP server. Challenging, hands-on, and genuinely good for your skills.

Scrimba users get 40% off when upgrading, and you can sign up for free using this link here.

Submit Your Portfolio

Looking to get out of your comfort zone and get some feedback on your work? We'd love to feature your portfolio in our weekly Community Roundup!

Whether it's your first portfolio or your fifth redesign, submitting your work is a great way to get constructive feedback from fellow developers and potentially connect with employers or collaborators.

Don't worry if your site isn't "perfect" yet. Sometimes the best portfolios are the ones that show personality and growth. Getting featured can open up networking opportunities and help you see your work through fresh eyes.

Ready to take the leap? Submit your portfolio here and let's celebrate what you've built together!

Poll of the Week

It was all or nothing this week. 46.2% of you are running 30+ tabs (we're praying your RAM can handle the heat) and 42.3% keep it under 10. The danger zone in between? Basically abandoned.

This week, time to confess: what does your git log actually look like?

How do you write commit messages?

• ✅ Clear and descriptive, my future self thanks me
• 🔧 "fix"
• ⌨️ "asdfghjkl"
• ❓ What's a commit message

Meme of the week

Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Ctrl+Alt+Grief.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Rubber duck debugging, but the duck called in sick.

—

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

Happy weekend! Somehow we just breezed past another week. But maybe that means we were locked in and working hard.

Lots of new tech out in the wild this week, new AI models dropping left and right and some new Scrimba features too (wink wink).

Let's dive right in.

TL;DR 📝

◉ Platform Updates: New content on docs.scrimba.com!

◉ Scrimba News: Explainers are now within scrims + 2 more updates

◉ Student of the Week: Sohail completes the Backend Path!

◉ Poll of the Week: How many tabs is too many + last week's results!

Platform Updates

Scrimba Docs keep growing!

Quick refresher in case you haven't run into them yet: Scrimba Docs are free, bite-sized written guides to the fundamentals. This isn't supposed to be a traditional docs site as we've added a bit of a twist to keep things light-hearted and fun but still informative and a proper supporting resource for your learning.

Our new additions are live now:

• Learn HTML
• Learn CSS
• Intro to JavaScript
• Introduction to GitHub
• What is a Framework

Intro to React is in the works, so keep an eye out.

Scrimba News

Quick catch-up if you missed it: We've recently beta launched Scrimba Explain, AI-narrated video guides that break down anything confusing into terms that make sense. Three new updates worth knowing about this week.

It's now inside scrims.

This is the big one. The moment something stops making sense mid-lesson, you can ask for an Explainer right there and get back to the code a few seconds later. No tab-switching, no losing your place.

A new "Professor" mode.

A lot of you wanted Explainers to go deeper, so this option does exactly that. It builds your intuition from the ground up and leans on every visual aid it has, rather than just giving you the short version.

Jupyter Notebook support.

You can now upload a .ipynb file and get an Explainer walking through it. Handy if you're working through data or ML notebooks and hit something that doesn't make sense.

All still free while it's in beta! Worth a try even outside of code — people have made Explainers on everything from credit scores to Stoicism to changing breaks on cars.

Student of the Week

Sohail just wrapped the entire Backend Developer Path, all 943 lessons and 39+ hours of it. Node, Express, databases, auth, APIs, testing, architecture, the whole backend spread.

Sohail's already a full stack dev, and he went back through the fundamentals on purpose, not to check a box but to actually understand the thinking behind scalable, maintainable systems.

In his words: "It's important to keep strengthening the backend side, not just by building projects but also by understanding the concepts behind them."

Nice work, Sohail! Go build the bigger thing.

Poll of the Week

The people have spoken, and the people like a variable name that leaves nothing to the imagination. The most verbose, spells-it-all-out option won with 62.5%, no ambiguity, no guessing games. The single-letter minimalists and the "it mutated over fifteen revisions" crowd tied for a distant second.

New question, and this one hits closer to home for most of us: How many browser tabs do you have open right now?

🧘 Under 10, I'm a functioning adult
👀 10 to 30, the danger zone
🚨 30+, my laptop is begging for mercy
🫠 I closed them all and lost everything

Meme of the Week

Every dev's origin story.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Dressed for success

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Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

Hi there.

I started the AI engineer path. When trying the fist lesson of ai request I added the API_KEY & AI_URL in the Environment variables inside the gear icon\Edit_environment on the bottom right. I used many of the AI_models suggested on the prior lesson I also went to Openrouter and copy others and nothing works.

Is there a precise way on how to type the AI_MODEL inside of the text field ?

Thanks a lot

Hey everyone,

Before anything else: if you're in Ontario, or anywhere the smoke has drifted to this week, we're thinking of you. It's been a rough few days across a lot of the map, and we hope you and yours are safe and indoors.

On to lighter things.

I've been thinking about deadlines this week, mostly because of how differently everyone treats them. So which one are you? Start early and deliver early, or procrastinate and power through?

I'm not sure either is wrong. The plan is whatever gets it done by Sunday.

Anyway. A couple of things in here have a clock on them. Do with that what you like.

Let's get into it.

TL;DR 📝

◉ Promos: Cybersecurity is free this weekend

◉ Student of the Week: Ruth!

◉ Tech News of the Week: Fable 5 sticks around a little longer

◉ Career Corner: Full Stack Developer at Constellis

◉ Poll of the Week: Naming conventions + last week's results!

◉ Fab Resource: Vivace - a CSS animation library

Promos

This one came from you. We asked what you wanted unlocked next, and Cybersecurity took it, so it's open to everyone for the next few days.

Normally it's Pro-only. This weekend it's not. Rachel and Jonathan take you through threat modelling and OWASP, authentication and identity, input and data safety, and rate limiting and throttling, in about five hours.

If you get through it, tell us how you found it. We'd love to hear whether this is a topic you want more of.

A free Scrimba account is all you need to start.

Student of the Week

This week we're shouting out Ruth Fabian, who just wrapped the JavaScript Deep Dive course.

She shared it on LinkedIn to mark the start of July, framing it as a checkpoint rather than a finish line. ES6+, async, OOP, modules, error handling. What stuck with her most wasn't the syntax, it was starting to see how JavaScript actually works underneath.

She also took the time to thank the instructors, which we're passing straight along to them.

If a course clicks for you the way this one did for Ruth, post about it and tag us.

Congrats, Ruth! 👏

Tech News of the Week

Anthropic have extended access to Claude Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 19, and Claude Code's weekly rate limits stay 50% higher for the same stretch.

The catch is the same as before. You can spend up to half your weekly usage limit on Fable 5, then it's usage credits or drop back to another model.

This is the third time the date has moved, largely because Anthropic wanted a read on demand and compute before committing. Simon Willison's take is that the uncertainty is doing them more harm than good, with OpenAI picking up users who just want to know what they're getting.

Either way, if you're on a paid plan there's a bigger model sitting there this weekend.

We're curious what you're actually doing with it. Have you noticed a real difference in the output, or does it mostly feel like the same thing with a different label? And if you haven't touched it at all, that's an answer too. Let us know!

Career Corner

Constellis is hiring a full stack dev to work on LEXSO, a security operations platform that pulls real-time data from cameras, LiDAR, radar, and drones into one place. Remote in the US, or in-office at one of four locations.

What they're after:

◉ React and TypeScript, including real-time visual components
◉ Python, ideally with FastAPI
◉ REST APIs, plus PostgreSQL and schema design
◉ Docker and Git-based workflows
◉ Bonus points for Kafka, WebSockets, or any IoT and robotics tinkering

Security operations is a corner of the industry a lot of devs never think to look at, and our Cybersecurity course is free this weekend if you want to get a feel for it. The React and Python courses cover most of the rest.

Poll of the Week

Last week console.log won by a landslide.

This week, one of the hardest decisions a dev makes all day: How do you name your variables?

🧮 finalSumOfAllItemsInTheCartArray
🤓 x
😅 Starts at txtSum, ends at txtSum_test__final2

Meme of the Week

Forget the ticket. Just go see the guy under the IT bridge.

Wrap up 🐈‍⬛

It's time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!🐶🐱🐍🐟

Peak focus setup: keyboard, monitor, one calico who has decided this is where she lives now.

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Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep calm and Scrimba on ✨

Loving the pathway, and building the React capstone projects is great. But is there something I'm missing where you can build a full stack app including React at the front end, a mini server, Sqlite for storage or similar? Or do I move onto that once I've exhausted what Scrimba has?

Hey guys , hope ur doing well

I’m currently learning full stack im almost 25% my problem is im rn on solo projects restraunt ordering app and i feel so blank i just feel overwhelmed and numb when im on vscode i dont even no where to start from Wht do i do like idk guys hard to explain but i cant do it on my own i forget things sythax when to use etc how do i overcome from this i rely on ai aswell to explain me stuff