Best of freeCodeCamp — March 2026

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·8w

   Learn how to fine-tune LLMs in 12 hours

   A 12-hour freeCodeCamp course covering LLM fine-tuning from foundations to enterprise applications. The curriculum spans four major areas: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with LoRA and QLoRA for consumer hardware, advanced alignment techniques including RLHF and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), high-performance tooling like Unsloth, Axolotl, and Llama Factory, and enterprise/multimodal AI covering Vision Transformers, multimodal architectures, and APIs from OpenAI and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

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2. 2
   Article

   freeCodeCamp·8w

   CI/CD in Production with Jenkins

   A 17-hour Jenkins course covering CI/CD from fundamentals to production-grade DevSecOps has been released on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. Topics include modern SDLC, CI/CD concepts, branching strategies, Jenkins basics and installation, freestyle jobs, pipelines, multibranch pipelines, Maven for DevOps, DevSecOps, and Jenkins shared libraries. A hands-on project builds and deploys a Dockerized Flask app.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·7w

   Build 19 Web Dev Projects using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript

   A 12-hour freeCodeCamp YouTube course covering 19 hands-on web development projects built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Projects range from interactive quiz games, Kanban boards, and expense trackers to API integrations (MealDB, GitHub, currency converter), UI components, and utility tools like a password generator and scroll progress indicator.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·9w

   OSS Pull Request Therapy: Learning to Enjoy Code Reviews with npmx

   A developer shares her personal journey from OSS skeptic to contributor on the npmx project, detailing her struggles with code review anxiety and perfectionism. Through her first real PR experience on npmx, she learned to embrace collaboration over perfection and developed a more nuanced view of open source. The post includes practical tips for evaluating OSS projects before contributing and advice for both PR authors and reviewers on building a healthier review culture.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·7w

   How Atomic CSS and Functional Programming Are Related

   Atomic CSS (also historically called Functional CSS) shares conceptual parallels with functional programming. The post explores three core FP principles — pure functions, immutability, and function composition — and maps each to Atomic CSS equivalents. Purity in CSS means element styles depend only on their own classes, not on context or parent selectors. Immutability means utility classes don't override each other, unlike BEM modifiers that mutate base styles. Composition means combining small single-purpose utilities to achieve complex styling, just as FP composes simple functions. Examples use the mlut framework alongside Tailwind CSS references to illustrate each concept.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·9w

   There are 2 kinds of devs. One of them is screwed. Justin Searls interview [Podcast #210]

   Justin Searls, a software engineer who cofounded an agency 15 years ago and retired at 38, discusses how AI agents are reshaping software development. Key themes include the shift from team-based to individual developer work, the importance of verifiability in AI-assisted codebases, and how newer developers can leverage emerging tools to compete with experienced engineers. The podcast also links to community resources including Kubernetes, Notion, Python, and AI agent courses.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·6w

   An Introduction to Database System Design

   A beginner-friendly introduction to database system design covering core concepts and practical implementation. Topics include the components of a database system, types of databases (relational, NoSQL, cloud, etc.), the four stages of database design (requirements analysis, conceptual, logical, physical), and normalization through the first three normal forms. A hands-on section walks through designing a library database using PostgreSQL and pgAdmin 4, with SQL examples for creating tables with primary/foreign keys, inserting data, and querying with SELECT, WHERE, and JOIN.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·9w

   How to Use Docker Compose for Production Workloads — with Profiles, Watch Mode, and GPU Support

   Docker Compose has evolved significantly in 2024-2025 with features that make it viable for complex deployment scenarios beyond local development. Key improvements covered include: profiles for managing multiple environments from a single file, watch mode for instant file syncing without rebuilds, GPU passthrough for ML inference workloads, proper health checks with dependency conditions to eliminate startup race conditions, and Docker Bake integration for production image builds. The guide provides practical configuration examples for each feature, a week-by-week adoption path, and an honest assessment of where Compose still falls short compared to Kubernetes or full orchestration platforms.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·6w

   How to Work With Dapper in .Net

   A hands-on guide to using Dapper, a micro-ORM for .NET, to build a Web API backed by PostgreSQL. Covers installation, database seeding, the repository pattern, CRUD operations (query, insert, update, delete), SQL injection protection via parameterisation, batch deletes, transactions, and multi-mapping for JOIN queries. Compares Dapper to Entity Framework, highlighting trade-offs between development speed and execution performance.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·7w

    How to Build an End-to-End ML Platform Locally: From Experiment Tracking to CI/CD

    A comprehensive hands-on guide to building a local end-to-end ML platform for fraud detection. Starts by exposing the pitfalls of a naive ML approach (no experiment tracking, no model versioning, no data validation, no monitoring, no CI/CD), then incrementally adds MLflow for experiment tracking and model registry, Feast as a feature store, FastAPI for model serving, Great Expectations for data validation, Evidently for drift monitoring, Docker for containerization, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. All code is copy-paste runnable and targets local execution without cloud or Kubernetes.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·8w

    How to Get Started Coding in Golang

    A beginner's guide to Go (Golang) covering installation on WSL/Ubuntu and core language fundamentals. Topics include variable declaration and type inference, string formatting with the fmt package, arrays vs slices, for loops and the range keyword, functions with single and multiple return values, maps and their reference-type behavior, structs as an alternative to maps for mixed-type data, and package scope for organizing multi-file Go projects.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·6w

    The Claude Code Handbook: A Professional Introduction to Building with AI-Assisted Development

    A comprehensive handbook covering Claude Code, Anthropic's AI-powered software development agent. It walks through installation, VS Code setup, subscription tiers, prompt discipline, Plan Mode, feature-by-feature development, token economics, and the internal agent loop mechanics. The guide targets both experienced developers looking to multiply their output and non-technical builders wanting to create software without prior coding experience. Key practices covered include using Plan Mode for 80% of sessions, writing Product Requirements Documents, building incrementally, managing context windows, and understanding how Claude reads codebases selectively via tool calls.

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