073 - Discoveries! Chingu & uMatrix

This week I’m sharing 2 more awesome resources for learning to code.

Chingu

Chingu is a learning community that gets you working on a dev team no matter what skill level you’re at. How it works:

Apply to join a team. Skill levels range from HTML/CSS beginners to building full stack apps. Your teammates can be from anywhere in the world.
Once you’re accepted, get together with your team and decide what to build during the 8-week commitment.
Build it!
Feel accomplished with your finished product, new portfolio addition, and all the soft & hard skills you have gained.

I’m excited to participate in Chingu because I learned so much during a similar group project last year. Of course your success depends entirely on the work you put into it and a bit of luck in getting committed teammates, but in my opinion the benefits far outweigh the risks, so I think it’s worth going for!

To learn more about what it’s like to go through Chingu, check out their Medium publication or YouTube channel.

uMatrix

uMatrix is a browser extension (available on Chrome, Firefox, and Opera) that can add privacy to your browser and teach you about the modern web at the same time. Its purpose is to give you control about what you want to allow/block—things like cookies, 3rd party tracking, 3rd party anything, iframes, external scripts, etc.

For a thorough description and to see uMatrix in action, check out this YouTube walk-through video. You can also take a look at some examples of uMatrix rulesets: