Expert Learning Path
Your Path to Becoming a Lead / Staff Developer!

Learn mind-expanding web development techniques and emerging APIs to solve even the most complex challenges top-level engineers face.

Total time: 55 hours, 27 minutes

Core Coursework

Take these in order
Prerequisite: The Professional Learning Path or senior-level frontend engineering experience
Editor's Note
Lead developers are who get asked the tough questions. Lydia’s course does precisely this. You’ll answer 30 tough questions across topics ranging from CSS & JS to networking & security.

Advanced Web Development Quiz

Lydia Hallie
Lydia Hallie
Lydia Hallie

Challenge your knowledge with a quiz on the advanced parts of web development! Answer 30 questions from JavaScript and CSS to performance, web security, and HTTP protocols.

2 hours, 21 minutes CC

Advanced Web Development Quiz
Editor's Note
Understanding asynchronous and functional programming will increase your programming abilities drastically. Will’s style of building an in-depth mental model helps you understand these complex topics.

The Hard Parts of Asynchronous JavaScript

Will Sentance
Will Sentance
Codesmith

Develop an intuitive understanding of the new features of JavaScript in ES6+: iterators, generators, promises, and async/await!

4 hours, 46 minutes CC

The Hard Parts of Asynchronous JavaScript
Editor's Note
Your core understanding of JavaScript is at a maximum. Now it’s time to learn how to lead a team of engineers by managing large-scale applications, migrating codebases, and enforcing a high level of code quality.

Enterprise UI Development: Testing & Code Quality

Steve Kinney
Steve Kinney
Temporal

Ideal for lead UI developers: learn unit testing, continuous integration, accessibility testing, mocking, and coding standards enforcement. Guide your team toward coding scalability!

8 hours, 25 minutes CC

Enterprise UI Development: Testing & Code Quality
Editor's Note
Make sure your code is fast by diving into how the JavaScript engines and web browsers parse your code.

JavaScript Performance

Steve Kinney
Steve Kinney
Temporal

Write more efficient JavaScript, optimize rendering performance, load assets faster with a CDN, split loading resources with Webpack, and more!

4 hours, 55 minutes CC

JavaScript Performance
Editor's Note
Performance can also be obtained by understanding the browser’s inner workings. Will builds a robust mental model for UI composition and virtual DOM rendering so you can understand and recreate the reactivity of frameworks in the most performant way.

The Hard Parts of UI Development

Will Sentance
Will Sentance
Codesmith

Develop an under-the-hood knowledge of UI development by learning techniques such as data binding, UI composition, templating, virtual DOM and its reconciliation, and hooks, all from scratch! Master UI frameworks such as React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte by seeing exactly what problems they solve.

9 hours, 19 minutes CC

The Hard Parts of UI Development
Editor's Note
There’s a push with new languages that compile to JavaScript, which are born of a functional nature like Elm and PureScript. Learn more about how to apply functional programming principles to JavaScript.

Functional-Light JavaScript, v3

Kyle Simpson
Kyle Simpson
You Don't Know JS

Improve your JavaScript by applying functional programming concepts like function purity, point-free, partial-application, currying, plus even more advanced concepts.

10 hours, 1 minutes CC

Functional-Light JavaScript, v3
Editor's Note
State management is one of the most challenging problems in software engineering. State Machines and State Charts can be fantastic solutions across various environments.

State Machines in JavaScript with XState, v2

David Khourshid
David Khourshid
Microsoft

Learn the fundamentals of state machines and statecharts. You'll build state machines without any libraries in pure JavaScript, then use XState to..click to read more.

4 hours, 8 minutes CC

State Machines in JavaScript with XState, v2
Editor's Note
When a developer (including yourself) messes up git, which inevitably happens, someone on the team needs to know how to get you out of a pinch! Learn git deeply and never lose your work again.

Git In-depth

Nina Zakharenko
Nina Zakharenko
Microsoft

A deep dive into git, this course is for developers who use git and GitHub every day and want to learn the inner workings and use advanced techniques.

3 hours, 27 minutes CC

Git In-depth
Editor's Note
Web Assembly enables web browsers to become the universal compile target to run modules from any language and ship complex programs.

Web Assembly (Wasm)

Jem Young
Jem Young
Netflix

Learn foundational, low-level programming such as binary, hexadecimal, array buffers, memory management, and unsigned integers.

3 hours, 43 minutes CC

Web Assembly (Wasm)
Editor's Note
You might write high-performance code, but how high-performance is your workflow? Learning to set up projects quickly and creating consistency across development machines is a valuable skill for daily productivity.

Developer Productivity

ThePrimeagen
ThePrimeagen
Netflix

Build a pro dev workflow to increase your developer productivity across multiple machines, projects, and technologies. Learn more!

4 hours, 17 minutes CC

Developer Productivity
Editor's Note
Now that you’ve conquered our Expert Learning Path, check out the optional courses below or explore other learning paths to expand your knowledge.

Elective Coursework

Optional, take in any order

Complete Intro to Real-Time

Brian Holt
Brian Holt
Snowflake

Learn to build apps where the client can push messages to the server and talk in real-time. Start today!

3 hours, 25 minutes CC

Complete Intro to Real-Time

Vanilla JS: You Might Not Need a Framework

Maximiliano Firtman
Maximiliano Firtman
Independent Consultant

Explore Vanilla JavaScript, understand core concepts, work with the DOM API, handle events, and build a web application from scratch. Delve into advanced topics like SPA routing, web components, and reactive programming.

5 hours, 52 minutes CC

Vanilla JS: You Might Not Need a Framework

Exploring Service Workers

Kyle Simpson
Kyle Simpson
You Don't Know JS

Service Workers enable websites to have new PWA capabilities like smart offline caching, background sync, and push notifications!

4 hours, 15 minutes CC

Exploring Service Workers

Enterprise Architecture Patterns

Lukas Ruebbelke
Lukas Ruebbelke
Venmo

Build non-trivial enterprise-level web applications through first-principles thinking applied to programming in JavaScript and TypeScript.

5 hours, 39 minutes CC

Enterprise Architecture Patterns

JavaScript and TypeScript Monorepos

Mike North
Mike North
Stripe

Monorepos have taken the JavaScript world by storm, unlocking powerful new patterns around composition, encapsulation, and ease of maintenance.

3 hours, 46 minutes CC

JavaScript and TypeScript Monorepos

A Tour of Web Capabilities

Maximiliano Firtman
Maximiliano Firtman
Independent Consultant

Explore what is possible with new Web APIs! Browsers can do so much now, including speech recognition, geolocation, OS integration, face detection, augmented reality, and reading from sensors, external hardware, and devices!

4 hours, 10 minutes CC

A Tour of Web Capabilities

Bare Metal JavaScript: The JavaScript Virtual Machine

Miško Hevery
Miško Hevery
Qwik Creator (Previously Angular)

Build a mental model of JavaScript's performance characteristics through understanding virtual machines under the hood.

3 hours, 21 minutes CC

Bare Metal JavaScript: The JavaScript Virtual Machine

Building Your Own Programming Language

Steve Kinney
Steve Kinney
Temporal

Learn language building techniques: Lexing, Parsing, Tokenization, Traversing Abstract Syntax Trees, and Transpiling to JavaScript and make your own language now!

3 hours, 9 minutes CC

Building Your Own Programming Language