The sadly-discontinued Udacity CS 253 (Web Application Engineering) with Steve Huffman. Partly because of the accessibility of the material and Steve’s sometimes puckish delivery (learning sick MongoDB burns in 2012 put me way ahead of the tech curve). Learning how to build and deploy a web app in Python with the super-lightweight webapp2, rolling your own salted-and-hashed account system... so many good tidbits that gave me a good intuition about how web apps are put together.

The timing of the course also couldn’t have been better for me personally. It was released about 2 weeks after I quit my job. I wanted to learn how to build digital products, and after struggling with scattered tutorials, CS 253 was like being thrown a life preserver.

Thanks, Steve.