Hello Reader, Explain has had a busy week. Here's what's new. 🤖 Explainers from ChatGPT 🖼️ More pictures. Your ratings told us you want more visuals, so explainers made in ChatGPT now lean towards images and infographics. An image created with Explain in ChatGPT. Watch the Explainer here. 🎬 A quick check before cinematic requests. Explain makes narrated, image-based explainers rather than film or 3D animation. If you ask ChatGPT for cinematic footage or a 3D animation, it now checks with you...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader 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. Want to make sure the newsletter lands in your inbox each week? Sign up by clicking the button below:...
6 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader 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. So, how long has...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader 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...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader Last edition of August, which means you've got a few days left to claim the summer was productive before anyone can check. Then September arrives with that back to school feeling, even for those of us who haven't sat in a classroom for a decade or two. It's a decent excuse for a reset. New notebook energy, a course picked back up, a project dusted off. Nothing about the calendar actually makes learning easier, but everyone starting again at once does help. We've been getting a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader Happy weekend! We've been thinking about how much of a dev career runs on other people. Not always in a networking-event, business-card kind of way. More like the person who answered your question in Discord at 11pm. The instructor whose course you didn't expect to still think about months later. The connection that turned into an interview that turned into an actual conversation. This week's edition has a bit of that thread running through it. Some familiar faces, some new ones,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader Happy weekend! Nothing in this edition is finished, and that's kind of the point. A launch that's still collecting votes. Docs meant to get updated as things change. A portfolio built by someone actively asking for feedback on it. Even the roadmap comes with a built in disclaimer: dates are estimates, not promises. Turns out "still in progress" isn't a phase you get through, it's just what building actually looks like. TL;DR ◉ Scrimba Explain: We’ve reached #4 on Product Hunt ◉...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
We're live. Scrimba Explain is on Product Hunt right now. Hello Reader, And we're off! Scrimba Explain has just launched on Product Hunt. You may have seen us mention it over the past few weeks: Type a question, and you get an AI-narrated Explainer video back in seconds, either on its own or right inside a scrim when a lesson stops making sense. It's free during the beta. Today it goes in front of a much bigger audience, and the first few hours shape where we land. If you have a few minutes,...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Building something that runs on your computer is the easy part. Turning it into a product other people can actually use, and keep using as you improve it, is called DevOps (short for "development operations"). Here's what you'll learn, explained: 🐳 Containers and Docker: An app that works on your computer might break on someone else's, because of differences in software versions or settings. Docker solves this by packaging your app with everything it needs into one...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read