upcase-thoughtbot Upcase Developer Learning Platform is Now Free design tips

Upcase, a subscription learning platform for developers, is now free and open to the public. The content, which includes workshops, videos, flash cards, and coding exercises, was built by thoughtbot, a design and development consultancy.

“We’ve loved building Upcase, both as a business and as a way to share what we’ve learned with the community,” thoughtbot development director Chris Toomey said. “But while we’d love to keep investing in Upcase and producing tons of new content, we’ve been moving in a different direction—back to our roots, in fact, as we focus on our core consulting business.”

Thoughtbot employees work four days a week and Friday is devoted to learning new skills, working on open source, blogging, and other projects. The company found there was a lack of quality learning resources for intermediate and advanced topics, so they built Upcase with the content they wished had existed. Topics and courses include Git, intro to React, React Native, Unit Testing JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, workflow and developer tooling, and techniques and patterns for building maintainable large scale applications.

Upcase creators said they have seen thousands of customers improve their skills and gain new levels in their careers since launching the site in 2012. The consultancy has created hundreds of hours of videos and screencasts based on their collective expertise. To start on any of the Upcase learning “trails” you can sign in with your GitHub credentials for free access.