A few days ago I decided to try one of FreeCodeCamp certification programs to get more “credited experience”, I think It’s good to have something that says you know X technologies or framework.

I choose the API and Micro services certification ,since It’s the one I most identify with and a are I want to gain more experience at, even the topics lectured were already familiar to me, some times you can learn one or two different ways of doing the same thing and then let you decide which one is best for you.

The Certification itself divides into two parts, one is topics excessive and then 5 small projects, the whole thing revolves around Node.js and Mongo DB, so in the fist part they teach you how Node.js works,the NPM and then how to use Express.js to create the endpoint, this part is relatively fast.

It starts to get interesting when Mongo DB and Mongoose are added to the mix, you to set up a DB in Mongo Atlas to store the data, the process to achieve this is simple but they have a full guide explaining It. In this section you'll have to create Schemas ,create Records, finding Records by some fields, remove Records and other other basic API functions.

Next step is to build 5 Projects with all the things you've learned, 4 of them are fairly simple, the one that poses a little bit of challenge It's the Exercise Tracker, It was the one I spent more time doing It.

With all that done you get a sweet certificate that approves your efforts, now you can add it to your Linked In your show it in your preferred social media.

The question remains...

Should I get one ?

If your beginning your career as a Developer and trying to get you first job, your on the right track, this courses gives you the basic concepts and lay the foundation to acquire even more knowledge later on. Keep in mind that having projects already available in a public repository is even better in a Job Interview.

Now for the people with more experience I don't see many benefits of getting this kind of certificate, It would be like doing some side questing 😎.

I hope you enjoyed this post, be sure to sign up for my newsletter to get notified when a new post is released !