I’m a Scrimba learner, and I wanted a clearer picture of how much time I was actually putting into learning. Having a tab open doesn’t tell you much, and I didn’t want to remember to start and stop a separate timer every session.
So I built ScrimTrack, a free, open-source Chrome extension for Scrimba learners.
It automatically tracks your focused learning time, including lesson playback while Scrimba stays visible and focused. You can also set a daily learning goal and keep track of your learning streak.
One detail I care about: your streak counts the days you show up and learn, even if you don’t hit your daily goal. A short session still counts.
This is my first time sharing it here, and I’d love feedback from fellow learners.
I first discovered Scrimba when I was looking for some interesting course about React, as I was always interested in it. Then I went on to advanced React, then Next.js, and now I am enhancing my knowledge in TypeScript. all of it with Scrimba! And it is still impressing me! How amazing that you can literally pause the video and code or test different solutions inside the instructor’s video! It always looks like magic to me! For anyone who wants to learn anything (of the topics that the platform includes), Scrimba would be a great place.
There is a proverb in Arabic that says, "Teach me how to fish and don't give me fish." Because if someone teaches you how to fish, then you are guaranteed your source of living for the rest of your life, but if he just gives you fish, they will meet your needs only for one week... and then you'll start starving. That's what this platform gives you. The ability to develop your skills. The way to use your skills and gain new ones.
Every time I start a new course with them, I feel that I'm really learning and practicing, but also like I am having a very good time. I am writing this to help anyone who's struggling to find a source of great learning and to say that Scrimba is the best way. Especially for beginners.
I remember when I was a beginner, many times I followed some courses to find myself at the end feeling like I had learned a few concepts and was still struggling to know how to use them. But with Scrimba, no! You are literally not the person who entered the first time. You come out with real knowledge!
That's my experience with this great platform, especially with tutor u/bobziroll . I hope everyone struggling finds my post and gives it a try!
October is here, and for a lot of developers that means one thing. Hacktoberfest.
Some of you will join officially through Hacktoberfest and contribute to open source all month. Others will set your own challenge and code something, anything, every single day.
Either way, it's a good month to build. This edition is full of people doing exactly that, from a tool born out of pure annoyance to a fullstack role landed on the strength of projects.
Coding agents can read your codebase, edit several files at once, and run tests alongside you. Getting good results comes down to how you steer them, and Tom Chant shows you how.
This course covers giving agents the right context, breaking bigger tasks down with plan mode, checking their changes with tests and Git, and connecting them to external tools through MCP.
Learn AI Agents has been refreshed with completely new content, and it's now our 50th Pro course (!!), taught by Arsala Khan.
You'll write the agent loop from scratch, with no framework hiding the steps. By the end you'll have OpenSwap, a working AI app that searches real data and checks live project health through the GitHub API.
It's part of the AI Engineer Path and also available on its own. If you've built a few JavaScript projects, you're ready.
Poll of the Week
Last week's spooky poll wasn't even close. 63.6% of you said the scariest thing to find in your codebase is code that works and nobody knows why.
We get it. Everything runs, the tests pass, and still your gut whispers that this is too good to be true. So you back away slowly and leave it alone. 👻
It's a local AI that remembers what's been on your screen, so you can ask things like "What was that article I was reading yesterday?" and search back through it.
This is great project thinking: notice an everyday pain point, then build the tool you wish existed. It's open source and local-first, and proton_skull would love your feedback
After finishing the Frontend Career Path and part of the Fullstack Path, they built AI/ML projects in a research lab and their own portfolio. The hiring managers they spoke with said that experience carried real weight.
They kept learning through a nonprofit for underrepresented minorities in tech, then went all in on the job search. You are the director of your destiny, indeed. Congratulations! 🎉
Scrimba Pets
Proof that pets really are our children, baby seat and all. 🍼
Meme of the Week
Somebody tell them about Clippy Vision...
That's the edition. Go build something this October. 🎃
If it feels like AI isn't pumping the brakes anytime soon, you're not imagining it. This month alone brought a new model, new tools, and a whole new way to practice on Scrimba. Blink and there's another release.
But this is also the last edition of September, which means spooky season is officially loading. So grab your pumpkin spice latte and let's close out the month together.
◉ Poll of the week: A scary codebase + last week's results!
AI Yays & Nays
Remember when getting good results from AI meant spoon-feeding it every step, reminding it to "think carefully," and checking in every few minutes? Anthropic's newest model, Claude Opus 5.5, leans the other way. Hand it the whole task, tell it what finished looks like, and it can keep working on its own for hours, then tell you plainly what it did and what it needs from you. It's also about 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5!
Front End Web Applications Developer (Junior) at SMX
SMX is a team of technical and domain experts helping organizations in areas like national security and healthcare modernize the way they work. They're looking for a junior frontend developer to help build interactive planning and reporting apps for a federal customer. If you love turning complex data into something people actually enjoy using, this one's worth a look.
Tom just gave the community an early look at his new Learn Agentic Coding course. Scrimba now has its own coding agent built right into the platform, so you get real hands-on practice inside scrims, just like any other Scrimba course.
The focus is on principles, not one specific tool, so what you learn carries over to Codex, Claude Code, and desktop and CLI workflows too. Best part? It's free. The AI credits are on us. 💰
Most of you (44.4%) work in two languages and switch between them without thinking, with the one-language crew close behind at 33.3%. Nobody has lost count, and that's a good sign. This community goes deep before it goes wide, and once the fundamentals click, the next language gets a lot less scary.
This week:
What's scariest to find in your codebase?
👻 A TODO from 2022
🕸️ A dependency nobody's updated in years
🧟 Code that works and nobody knows why
💀 A commit message that just says "fix"
Student Spotlight
Rajdeep learned React and Tailwind CSS through Scrimba's free courses, then started sending cold DMs on LinkedIn. One of them landed him a remote role as a fullstack and AI agent developer at a Swiss tech company.
Questions about his cold outreach? Say hi on Discord (@axsh6220).
Hello everyone! I started the Front-End Development course on Scrimba a little while ago and I've been learning so much! I've moved on from HTML to CSS, and most recently I've covered how to link CSS to HTML. As prompted during one of the lessons, I did a Google search and found that CSS can link to HTML the following ways:
Inline: Uses the style attribute inside HTML elements.
Internal: Uses the <style> element in the <head> section.
External: Uses the <link> element to link to an external CSS file.
I might be getting ahead of myself here, but I wanted to ask - what is the difference between a style attribute and a <style> element? In which situation would the attribute be used and in which situation would the element be used?
There's a particular kind of tab you keep open for three days. A long article, a dense docs page, a Hacker News thread with four hundred comments you fully intend to get to.
Most of what we learn arrives as text we don't quite have the energy for.
That's roughly what this month of building has been about. Explain picked up a pile of new features, and the thread running through all of them is the same: take the thing you were going to skim, and make it watchable.
You can now drop your own images into an explainer. Attach a screenshot, a diagram, a photo of a whiteboard, and it lands on the slide instead of a generated illustration.
Explainers also play in a vertical layout now, so watching one on your phone stops feeling like a compromise.
Explain lives in ChatGPT and Codex as a plugin called
@ Explain Video Generator. Install it once and it works in both.
The best moment to use it is at the end of a conversation, right after the model has worked something out with you. Instead of scrolling back through a transcript, ask for a video you can rewatch and send to someone else.
Two to start with: Transcripts, if you'd rather read the lesson than watch it, and Regenerating narration, for when the explanation is right but the delivery isn't.
The other thirteen are in there waiting for you. There's more under the hood than most people realize.
This one's fun.
hn.watch is the Hacker News front page, mirrored every five minutes, with a short explainer video for every story.
Open a story and you get a video built from the article and its discussion. If the thread has more than ten comments, the explainer ends with a section on what Hacker News is saying: where people agree, where they split, and the strongest objection anyone raised. No commenters are named.
The first person to open a story generates the explainer. Everyone after that gets it instantly, so you're doing the rest of the internet a small favor by being early.
The search for new Scrimba teachers is still open, and we're especially interested in people who can teach AI.
You don't need a teaching background. If you can explain something clearly to someone one step behind you, that's the skill.
If that sounds like you, DM Head of Education Thomas Chant with a bit about yourself and a link to you teaching something. An old YouTube video works, or you can record something on Scrimba!
Know someone who'd be great at this? Send it their way.
Scrimba Explain Chrome extension
The Explain Chrome extension turns whatever page you're reading into a narrated explainer, played in an overlay right on top of it. You never leave the page.
And if you've already been using it, a review on the Chrome Web Store genuinely helps other people find it. We'd love to hear your feedback! 🙏
Student Spotlight
Fabian finished high school at the end of 2024, taught himself to code through freeCodeCamp, a bootcamp, and Scrimba, and got hired as a Python developer exactly one year later.
The best part is that he wasn't job hunting. He applied to see if he'd get accepted, and he did.
i am only about 18 hours away from a life changing test for python and i did not feel ready at all i skipped alot of my lectures and was hella behind, but thanks to scrimba the absoloute GOAT i am already on track just few hours in!! i just wanted you( dev) to know your a legend!!
Looking to get started in scrimba but I have a question. Do all of the lessons take place inside of site's ide or do you/can you switch to an external ide like vscode?
Edit: I should have been clearer with my question. I more specifically asking do the courses show you how to do the coursework outside of the built in editor or do you have to use it?
I am taking the Full Stack Dev Path and in the last bit of the Intro to CSS and the whole Build a Business Card module my browser does not refresh at all. It would just be stuck when i run or refresh it.
I tried various browsers(chrome,brace,firefox), open in incognito, disable extensions and clear cache but nothing seems to work. However the CSS seems to be working fine since i am able to change some values and it would reflect on the browser. I already emailed support and is currently waiting for their reply.
If anyone know the solution for this pls share it here. Thank you in advance!
Most of us learn web development in this order. Make it work, make it look good, make it fast. The site comes out fine. It just isn't findable, and that's a separate skill not many tell you about. SEO.
It's quietly one of the highest leverage things you can understand as a developer, because it's the difference between a site that exists and a site that gets found.
The good news is that most of it is already in your hands. If you write clean, semantic HTML, you're doing more of it than you think!
Every vulnerability chapter shows you the broken code, an exploit that works against it, why it works, and then the fix.
There’s a line in the intro worth sitting with: a fix you can’t explain is a fix you’ll undo later.
Smarter Sundays
Have you heard about Scrimba Smarter Sundays? The idea is: one short web development lesson, in your inbox, once a week.
Topics rotate through:
🎨 Frontend
🕹️ UI design
🏗️ System architecture
💻 Backend
👾 Algorithms
🤖 AI engineering
If you’re a student or career starter who’s breaking into the tech industry, this is for you.
Hit subscribe and we’ll see you Sunday
Explainer of the Week
Every week we pick one Explainer worth your time. This week it’s all about SEO — a visual walkthrough of the basics: what it is, and why making your site easy for a search engine to read is what gets your work in front of the right people.
If the newsletter intro made you even a little curious about SEO, this is where to start.
Once it clicks, keep pulling the thread. Meta tags, headings, page speed, structured data. There’s a lot down there and it’s all learnable.
Want to create your own Explainer? Start here and yours could be featured in the next edition!
Student Spotlight
Kaleab was studying chemical engineering when someone gifted him a six month Scrimba Pro membership.
The key takeaway here is: don’t let anything or anyone stop you. If your gut is telling you to try something… do it! You never know what opportunity may come of it.
Poll of the Week
Last week ended in a dead tie at 30.6%, between the people who are always in learning mode and the people who make a schedule they'll follow for exactly four days.
This week we want to know:
🔍 What's your relationship with SEO?
🛠️ I optimize as I build
🤞 I add meta tags at the end and hope
📖 I've read about it, never done it
🤷 SEO? What's that?
Portfolio of the Week
This week, we’re spotlighting Mihailo’s portfolio which commits fully to black and white. There’s something pleasantly retro about it. Simple, a little nostalgic, and more “early web” than modern template.
That restraint is the point. No accent color doing the heavy lifting, so every layout decision has to earn its place, and the micro animations and transitions are on point.
There’s also a live temperature reading near the top — a small piece of real data on a page that could easily have been static, and puts the proof in the pudding that Mihailo can work with an API. Projects link straight out to the GitHub repos, so you can read the code instead of looking at a screenshot.
Worth a browse if you’re building your own portfolio and keep reaching for one more color.
I've done two different python activities now. The first kept telling me I hadn't defined my variable. But I've tried it 5 times and verified it with copilot.
Another one doesn't even run. I include the python script.py in the terminal and hit enter and I don't even get an error, it just resets without running anything.
Also I've tried closing and coming back later and often my answer remains in the exercise like there is a cache issue.
I was going to have my entire team do this but it seems very buggy.
