What's unfinished in your Udemy?

If you work or study in tech, I always feel a good getting-to-know-you question is “what courses or tutorials did you start, but not finish?”

My Udemy doesn’t look too bad:

The ZTM course was good, but I got stuck on an AI API exercise. I think it’s a common sticking point for students since Andrei includes a little rant about how it definitely does work - but I downloaded his repo with the solution and it was having the same errors I was and I gave up in frustration. I probably should have just skipped that one.

The Linux one was really good - I learned a heap of basic little things (although I struggled with the guy’s accent a little) - things like tab for CLI completion. I guess you would learn this stuff from work colleagues, but if you’re self taught someone else needs to show you. This isn’t the highly recommended Linux basics course I wanted to do (Learn Linux in 5 days ), but it was a lot cheaper.

What else?

So that’s my Udemy, what else haven’t I finished?

100 Days of Swift UI (47/100) - This is the free Paul Hudson course. I so highly recommend it for budding iOS developers I paid to join his super club or whatever that’s called although you don’t really need to. I got up to day 47 before deciding I wanted to work on web dev rather than iOS. I still use these skills occasionally for writing little MacOS apps.

Missing Semester Lectures (6/11) - Some CS lecturers at MIT realised there was some mechanics of day-to-day development missing from their courses (such as source control) so they put these together. They are great. Some of it falls into the ‘didn’t know you needed to know’ so I plan to come back to these and finish one day.

CS193p (4/16) - These iOS development lectures are high quality and enjoyable, but if you run into issues (and are not enrolled in this unit at Stanford) you can get stuck - my best source of assistance was searching on github and finding others who had been through it. I gave up on these to focus on the Paul Hudson ones that were in more digestible chunks, and with some assistance (if you cared to pay for it).

I’ve also completed numerous little free courses and stand-alone videos from YouTube - names that spring to mind are Jay from Learn Linux TV , Web Dev Simplified , Fireship , the Net Ninja , Mosh , Theo , Network Chuck , James Quick , and Apalrd’s Adventures .

Mosh - I’ve paid for a month with the intention of doing his React 18 course in that time. I’m optimistic I will.

What’s better than finishing a course?

In most cases, what’s prevented me from finishing these courses, is that I’ve invested the time into writing code or doing projects that use the skills instead. I don’t feel bad about this, and in fact I’d recommend it. The only benefit of a course over just building projects is that they can teach you the things you didn’t know you needed. I listen to industry podcasts, and follow a lot of webdev people on Masterdon to try and help with that sort of discovery.

For example, I’ve never used Zod, NextJS or Tailwind. But I know what they are, and where they would be useful to me because I’m tuned in to developer chatter about things.