Courses for developers

A free, project-based course that takes you through a whole modern data stack: Docker, Terraform, orchestration, BigQuery, dbt, Spark and Kafka, ending in a pipeline you design yourself. The best free end-to-end introduction to the job, as long as you do the homework and the final project rather than only watching.

• Programming
• Databases
• DevOps
• Cloud

A short, text-based course on writing prompts for everyday engineering work: how language models behave, the anatomy of an effective prompt, and using prompts to understand code, write code, refine answers, learn new topics and automate routine tasks. It suits developers and students who already use ChatGPT or a similar assistant and want clearer, more consistent answers after an evening or two of focused reading.

• AI

Free self-study courses from Google on writing for engineers. Technical Writing One covers clear sentences, word choice, active voice, lists and paragraphs; Technical Writing Two moves on to organising larger documents and illustrations; shorter courses cover accessibility and error messages. A few hours here improves every design doc, pull request description and incident report you write afterwards.

• Career

Harvard's free CS50 course on databases, taught by Carter Zenke and David J. Malan. Seven lectures move from querying to relating, designing, writing, viewing, optimising and scaling databases, starting with SQLite and ending with PostgreSQL and MySQL, with problem sets and a final project. It suits beginners and working developers who can write basic SELECT queries but do not yet know how to design a schema or make queries fast.

• Web
• Databases
• Backend

A beginner JavaScript course that starts at hello world and needs no prior programming. Across 10 chapters and 41 text lessons it covers variables, operators, conditionals, objects, functions, strings, arrays, every loop form, and Maps and Sets, with 114 in-browser playgrounds and 39 quiz questions. It suits someone who wants a structured first language for web development and prefers reading and running code to watching videos.

• Web
• Programming
• Frontend

A beginner Python course that assumes no programming experience and puts runnable, editable code in every lesson, so you write code from the first hour without installing anything. It covers variables and operators, conditionals, loops, strings, lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, functions and modules across about 12 hours. It suits students and career changers who learn better by doing than by watching videos.

• Programming

A free course from Hugging Face that teaches what an AI agent is, then how to build one with tools, memory and a reasoning loop, using three frameworks: smolagents, LangGraph and LlamaIndex. It ends with a graded final assignment and a free certificate. It suits Python developers who have called an LLM API but have never built something that plans and takes several steps on its own.

• AI
• Machine learning
• AI agents

A practical course on negotiating compensation in tech, from preparing and building a strategy to specific tactics, the full package beyond base salary, handling multiple offers and asking for a raise. It has tailored sections for fresh graduates and experienced engineers. It suits anyone with an offer coming, and anyone who has ever accepted the first number out of discomfort.

• Career
• Job search

A course on the full engineering manager interview loop, from recruiter screen to on-site, covering behavioural, people leadership, situational and project retrospective questions with 27 complete example answers. It explains what the role involves and how to structure responses. It suits engineers stepping into management, managers interviewing elsewhere, and tech leads deciding whether the role is for them.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

A text-based course for senior engineering leadership interviews, aimed at directors, VPs and senior managers. It covers organisational scenarios, technical leadership decisions, business leadership, handling exceptional situations, leadership styles, emotional intelligence, decision making and inclusion. It suits leaders whose interviews focus on organisations and outcomes rather than on running a single team.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

The Odin Project is a free, open source full stack web development curriculum. After a Foundations course, you choose a Full Stack JavaScript path (HTML and CSS, JavaScript, React, databases and Node.js with Express) or a Full Stack Ruby on Rails path. You set up your own environment, read real documentation and build specified projects rather than coding in a sandbox. It suits self-taught beginners and career changers who want a complete path and are prepared to work hard.

• Web
• Frontend
• Programming
• Backend

Full Stack Open is the University of Helsinki's free online course in modern web development. Through a long sequence of exercises it covers React, Node.js with Express, MongoDB, testing, state management, GraphQL, TypeScript, React Native, CI/CD, containers and relational databases. A certificate and even official university credits are available free. It suits developers who can already program and want a rigorous, current full stack curriculum.

• Web
• Frontend
• Backend
• Programming

Next.js Learn is Vercel's free official course platform. Its main course builds a full-stack financial dashboard in 16 chapters, covering styling, fonts and images, layouts, navigation, a Postgres database, data fetching, static and dynamic rendering, streaming, search and pagination, mutations with server actions, error handling, accessibility, authentication and metadata. It suits React developers moving to Next.js and anyone confused about where server code ends and client code begins.

• Web
• Frontend
• Programming

A beginner course that gives software engineers and students a clear, practical grounding in modern AI: core concepts, training a simple model, neural networks and deep learning, search algorithms, reinforcement learning, agentic AI, modern tools and prompting, and the ethics and hype around it all. It takes about five hours across 14 chapters with playgrounds and assessments, and needs no prior AI background.

• AI
• Machine learning

A course on AI system design interviews, from classic ML systems such as recommendations, ranking and fraud detection to LLM serving costs, RAG, generative AI products and agentic systems, with a repeatable framework and full case studies. It takes about 20 hours across 9 chapters. It suits engineers who can write code and know what a model, an API and a database are, and are facing design rounds that now include AI.

• AI
• System design
• Job search

A beginner course on using ChatGPT and similar tools deliberately across a job search: writing better prompts, then applying them to portfolio content, CVs, cover letters, freelance proposals, professional emails, LinkedIn, personal branding and interview practice. It takes about eight hours across 14 chapters. It suits students, graduates and working engineers who want to move faster without sending material that reads as generic or automated.

• AI
• Career

fast.ai's free course that teaches deep learning by having you train a working model in the first lesson and explaining the theory afterwards. Part 1 is nine lessons of about 90 minutes covering vision, language, tabular data, recommendation and deployment with PyTorch, fastai and Hugging Face. It suits programmers with about a year of coding who want practical machine learning skills without months of mathematics first.

• AI
• Machine learning
• Programming

Hugging Face's free catalogue of hands-on courses covering large language models, agents, context engineering for code agents, diffusion models, deep reinforcement learning, computer vision, audio and robotics. Each one is taught with the open source libraries much of the field uses, so what you build is directly reusable. It suits developers moving into applied machine learning who learn best by running real models.

• AI
• Machine learning

Google's free, self-paced introduction to machine learning, built around short animated videos, interactive visualisations and Python exercises. It covers regression, classification, working with data, neural networks, embeddings and an introduction to large language models, then how models behave in production. It suits programmers who want the standard foundations and vocabulary in a structured order before moving to a deeper or more hands-on course.

• AI
• Machine learning

A free course by Goku Mohandas on machine learning as software engineering: designing an ML product, data preparation, training and tracking experiments, tuning, evaluation, serving, testing code, data and models, reproducibility, CI/CD and monitoring. It also has a Foundations track on Python, NumPy, pandas, PyTorch and core deep learning. It suits people who can train a model and now need to build and keep a real ML system running.

• AI
• Machine learning
• DevOps

Short, free micro-courses on Python, pandas, data visualisation, SQL, machine learning, feature engineering, deep learning and more, each taking roughly one to seven hours in a browser notebook with nothing to install. Every course pairs brief lessons with graded exercises on real datasets and awards a free certificate. It is the lowest-friction way for beginners to start with data and machine learning.

• AI
• Machine learning
• Programming

The original Grokking system design course, which made the design round learnable. It teaches a repeatable interview approach and the key trade-offs (SQL versus NoSQL, strong versus eventual consistency, REST versus RPC and more), then works through 15 classic designs such as a URL shortener, Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, YouTube, a rate limiter, a web crawler, Uber and Ticketmaster, each with requirements, estimates and trade-off discussion.

• System design
• Job search
• Backend

A beginner-friendly, text-based course on the building blocks every system design is assembled from: scalability and availability, back-of-the-envelope estimation, networking and DNS, proxies, load balancers, API gateways, rate limiting, caching, CDNs, partitioning, replication, CAP and PACELC, SQL and NoSQL databases, indexes and distributed patterns such as quorum and heartbeats. Start here if full design walkthroughs feel like they assume knowledge you do not have.

• System design
• Backend
• CS fundamentals

The second volume of Grokking the System Design Interview, aimed at senior and staff (L5/L6) design rounds. It works through harder case studies such as a payment system, flash sale, notification service, unique ID generator, Gmail, Reddit, Google Calendar and a code judging system, then goes beneath them with patterns like quorum, write-ahead logs and vector clocks and deep dives into Dynamo, Cassandra, Kafka, Chubby, HDFS, GFS and BigTable.

• System design
• Backend
• Job search