Over the last few years, Scrimba has grown into a community of nearly two million learners focused on mastering frontend development. But there’s one question we've heard again and again:
"When will you offer backend courses?".
This makes a lot of sense, as you need both backend and frontend in order to build fully functional apps. It also drastically improves your hireability if you understand the entire stack, as the job market has moved towards fullstack roles.
So today, we’re happy to share that you can finally learn fullstack development on our platform, with six free courses ready straight out of the gate. These cover subjects like Node.js, Express.js, Next.js, SQL, the command line, and more.
Click here to see all of them.
These fullstack courses run entirely in the browser, meaning you don’t have to set up your dev environment locally, nor pay for credits on a remote container that runs the project for you.
You'll be able to jump seamlessly between the video and the IDE, as they have been fused into a unified learning experience.
Click here to watch a scrim that explains how it works in more detail.
How the fullstack support works under the hood
To offer truly interactive fullstack learning experiences, we considered multiple approaches. Most in-browser code editors spin up remote server containers for backend code execution, but these can quickly become expensive, leading to limits on usage. In addition, network latency can be a drag on performance.
Another possibility we explored was using building our own solution using WebAssembly, which lets you run a range of programming languages within the browser. However, this would be huge undertaking for our development team, who have plenty of other important tasks to focus on.
Luckily though, StackBlitz has done much of this heavylifting already, and launched it as a product called WebContainer. This allows complete Node.js environments to run directly in your browser, providing instant setup without installations, local configurations, or performance compromises. WebContainers is now fully integrated it into our scrims.
How we make the “videos” interactive
Speaking of which, developers often ask how we’ve built the scrim format. So let’s have a look at that as well.
The easiest way to describe it is that is a mix between the IDE and a video.
The main thing to understand about the scrim format is that is is event-based, as opposed videos, which are pixel-based.
So whereas a 24 FPS (frames per second) video contains 24 images stacked on top of each other, a scrim instead records the underlying events, which could be “edit code”, “move cursor”, “open file”, or so forth.
Here is a screenshot that visualizes the difference.
When you watch a scrim, we simply re-create these events in the IDE, while layering the audio from the teacher on top. Much of the complexity in Scrimba arises from having to apply these events in the correct order in the IDE, and thus creating a timeline that reliably can be scrubbed back and forth.
These events are optimized like crazy, meaning they require little bandwidth to be streamed to your computer. Actually, a scrim usually weights 100 times less than its equivalent video.
Which courses are available?
Our teachers have been working around the clock the last few months to ensure you can learn a range of full-stack technologies from the start, learning essential skills like building APIs, working with databases, controlling the terminal, and more. Here are the courses you can enroll into for free right away:
- Learn Node.js
- Learn Express.js
- Learn Next.js
- Intro to SQL
- Command Line Basics
- Intro to Vite
- Intro to Supabase
Several of the courses above have been created in collaboration with the library maintainers, giving us feedback on best-practices and common hurdles beginners feel when learning their stack.
And in well-known Scrimba style, they all take full advance of the interactivity, giving you coding challenges around every corner. By the time you’d taken either of these courses, you’ll have written a lot of code in the given technology.
And this is just the start. Over the coming months, we’ll release additional courses including:
- Intro to Nest.js
- Intro to Nuxt
- Intro to Vitest
- Learn Vue
- RAG & AI agents
If you have suggestions for a course you’d like us to create, or if you’re an open-source maintainer who’d like to see a course about your technology on Scrimba, please email me at [email protected].
Can I record my own scrims?
Yes, you can! It’s quite simple, as everything is done in the browser, so you don't even have to download an app. Once a scrim has been recorded, it will be listed on your profile, or can be shared via a link.
Most likely, you’ll have to edit your scrim a bit to cut away pauses, mistakes, and so forth. So we’ve create a simple editing interface as well.
If you’re a teacher or developer looking to record content with
Scrimba, please reach out!
Can I embed scrims into my website?
Yes, you can do that! Several partners of ours are doing this, like MDN, Coursera, and freeCodeCamp.
It'll enable your users to get an unique and differentiated learning experience.
When are actively looking for partnerships these days, and have an affiliate program where you’ll get a generous share of the revenue from any traffic your send us. This program has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue since we started ramping it up in the second half of 2024.
Happy coding!
