I have been following FCC for a little while and have made several of the projects. However I have not used CodePen. I have used my own laptop and stored my projects on my Github Act. Can I point people to my Github site (which has my Tribute page up and ‘running’ instead of Codepen.
Thanks
M
From the FAQ:
Do I have to use CodePen for the front end projects?
As long as your code is publicly viewable, and you have a live demo, you can use whatever you want.
You can use GitHub pages or surge.sh as alternatives to CodePen.
Yes and I highly encourage it. Telling potential developers to use Codepen instead of teaching them to properly use git/GitHub is a huge step in the wrong direction in my opinion.
2 Likes
Yeah I thought the same thing re: using CodePen. I wonder what the reason is for using CodePen instead of teaching students how to set up a local development environment, which I think is an important skill to learn, and if there are any intentions to do so (I noticed the Beta still uses CodePen).
1 Like
GitHub is introduced later in the curriculum.
The idea is to give students as little friction as possible if they are learning coding from scratch.
In terms of learning theory, it makes more sense to introduce tools after you have encountered the problems they solve for yourself. Version control becomes a more teachable concept once you’ve felt the pain of not having it!
3 Likes
You’d really be throwing to much at an absolute beginner introducing them to github and local environments versus teaching them how to code in codepen, but as already mentioned in the freecodecamp material it only needs to publicly viewable.
Yes you can, but sometimes you don’t have to! If you just want to do some rapid prototyping or try something out without setting up a whole project, plus Git and everything, CodePen is just perfect! It’s straightforward, one click and you are ready to go.
But as soon as you know, that it’s going to be a bigger thing, i would recommend to use version control with Git where you can go back if needed.
And if you start adding Backend Stuff or messing around with Cross-Origin requests, CodePen will not fit any longer.