Today another Udemy sale campaign ends, and I didn’t purchase anything (strange enough, it featured courses from €11·99 for existing accounts, and from €14·99 for new students); this reminded me though that I wanted to list here my “investments in education” for 2022, all made during promotional discounts, sometimes even being able to combine two coupons at once. (Yes, I know that many Udemy courses can illegally be found on torrents too.) My purchases:

Udemy

■ Complete Python Developer in 2022: Zero to Mastery, by Andrei Neagoie (Zero to Mastery)
€18.99 instead of €119.99

■ Learn Advanced Level Programming in Python, by Team Python
€11.99 instead of €94.99

■ Object Oriented Programming with Python, by Loek van den Ouweland
€11.99 instead of €24.99

■ Design Patterns in Python, by Dmitri Nesteruk
€19.99 instead of €99.99

■ The Complete Rust Programming Course, by Tyler Weekley (Codestars)
€11.99 instead of €94.99

■ Master Go (Golang) Programming:The Complete Go Bootcamp 2022, by Andrei Dumitrescu (Crystal Mind Academy)
€13.99 instead of €99.99

■ SQL – MySQL for Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, by 365Careers
€13.99 instead of €99.99

■ Voice Training for a Confident and Powerful Voice, by Gabriel Burrafato (GB Voice Academy)
€11.99 instead of €94.99

■ AMERICAN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION: Accent Reduction Made Easy, by Gabriel Burrafato (GB Voice Academy)
€15.99 instead of €99.99

► I’ve purchased these courses on three different occasions, with variable discounts, but the 9 of them sum to €131.91 instead of €829.91, hence a whopping 84.1% off on average!

Domestika

■ Drawing for Beginners Level -1, by Puño, Illustrator and educator
€9.90 -20% instead of €59.90

■ Creative Drawing Techniques for Beginners, by Puño, Illustrator and Educator
€10.90 -20% instead of €59.90

■ Graphic Humor: Give us our Daily Comic Strip, by Liniers, Strip cartoonist
€14.90 -20% instead of €59.90

■ Figure Drawing for Beginners, by ZURSOIF Miguel Bustos Gómez, Illustrator
€10.90 -20% instead of €59.90

■ Basic Principles of Drawing People from Imagination, by Tom Fox, Drawing Instructor and Storyboard Artist
€10.90 -20% instead of €59.90

► These courses cost me €46 (20% off €57.50) instead of €299.50, meaning 84.64% off.

Free stuff on YT, Part 1: IT

YouTube, the social network that hosts billions of videos, and on which anyone and everyone can have its own “TV channel” meant to waste the viewers’ time, doesn’t always contain shit only. Here’s a quick (beginning of a) selection of IT videos that might be something more than totally bollocks:

■ TechWorld with Nana — Nana Janashia: from Tbilisi, Georgia, now in Wien, Austria. Fluent in German, English, Russian. Company: nnSoftware GmbH, Am Tabor 31, 1020 Vienna, Austria. Business purpose : IT Services and Training. Chief Executive: Nicole Hiller, Nana Janashia. Website | LinkedIn | XING.

Unfortunately, not all the relevant new videos are added to the older playlists, so one should check for newer content periodically, or subscribe to the channel. The selections below are just that: selections.

I won’t express my opinion on containers here; also, I won’t express my despise of the modern software infrastructure architectures (oops, I just did!). I won’t praise Nana either, except for what she seems to be: a competent trainer. But in her video, 5 reasons I chose DevOps as a Career, I seem to detect a bit of hypocrisy: no, these were not all the reasons! First, most software developers who don’t want to compete with younger colleagues or with cheaper… uh… Indians, dream of doing something else. (Game developers are excluded, for their brains are already kaput.) Secondly, should she still be a software developer, she wouldn’t have had a services and training company. Note that DevOps-related consultancy pays better, and training in that field is totally different from, say, teaching someone to become a full-stack developer. But no, one cannot have a “passion” for DevOps (a passion for success, yes). As for the passion for JavaScript, let me say that JS is a crime against humanity, pure and simple.

■ Jon Gjengset — for his videos on Rust, including the playlists Crust of Rust (intermediate Rust concepts) and Advanced topics in Rust.

■ David Pedersen — also for Rust.

■ Bryan Cairns (VoidRealms) — for playlists such as:

■ mCoding with James Murphy — quick selections (I don’t necessarily agree with him!):

■ Corey Schafer — for e.g.:

■ freeCodeCamp.org — for various topics. Literally, they pretend to be able to teach you tidbits of everything, but I’m not sure about the quality of their (long!) video courses, and I know I don’t like all of their tutors. Let’s try a random selection:

“Full Course” is certainly an overstatement, and yes, they’re very much into the genocidal JS.

■ Amigoscode — for a few things:

■ NetworkChuck — an extremely annoying guy, but sometimes he provides valuable information for noobs. I won’t link to any particular video, though. Oh well, let’s mention one: Docker networking is CRAZY!! (you NEED to learn it).

■ Academind — unfortunately, very much into JS-related stuff, with playlists about AngularJS, NodeJS, ReactJS, Ionic, Vue.js, AWS, and more.

■ Fireship — short, quick and dirty tutorials, some of them in only 100 seconds! The longer ones take no more than 10-13 minutes, such as 10 Design Patterns Explained in 10 Minutes and Learn Docker in 7 Easy Steps – Full Beginner’s Tutorial. Obviously, you cannot learn a language or a concept in 100 seconds, but it’s amazing how much information can be squeezed, if one wants to do it, in such a short time! Check out Go in 100 seconds, Rust in 100 seconds, Dart in 100 seconds.

On the other hand, this guy sucks when, in Is Web3 all Hype? Top 10 Web 3.0 Questions & Answers, he strongly supports the cryptoshit, deeming it “necessary” and abusing also of the “necessity” of the Smart Contracts. While his video shows a screenshot of Stephen Diehl’s Web3 is Bullshit, which has some serious arguments, he ends up saying (towards the middle of the video) that you shouldn’t worry that cryptocurrencies look like a Ponzi scheme, because … “everything is a Ponzi scheme, with the US dollar being the leader in the space, so no need to worry about ethics and anything”! (As I often say, the most expert cognoscenti in the latest technologies are typically amoral bastards, and extremely harmful at that.)

Free stuff on YT, Part 2: Drawing and painting

Outside Domestika, there are plenty of YT channels dedicated to drawing topics such as: reviews of art supplies; tutorials on drawing techniques in watercolor, gouache, colored pencils, ink, etc. Here’s a quick selection:

■ Teoh Yi Chie:

■ Everyone else in a single list:

■ How about perspective drawing? Quick selection:

► 1-point perspective, using a string:

► 1-point perspective, no string:

► 2-point perspective, no string:

► Miscellanea:

Further channels of interest cam be extracted from the above selection of perspective drawing videos.

► LATE EDIT: Although it has influences from manga/anime, if you like Peijin Yang’s (digital) drawings (ArtStation, Instagram), you might want to try her YouTube channel to learn how it’s done.

Free stuff on YT, Part 3: Languages

Refer to the “bonus” section of my older post Language Learning Apps, Revisited, with additional notes and links in my recent post Language Learning Apps and YT Channels: Season 3.

Domestika—2023 Update

During an “All courses at €9.99 each” campaign, I purchased the following 3 courses. I also applied an 20-EXTRA coupon, making them €8 each, for a total of €24. Funny thing, being in Romania at the time, the “€9.99 each” actually read “Lei35 each” (about €7) or, with the extra 20% off, about €17 for 3 courses. But my account being set to Germany, I had to pay the higher price.

■ Writing a Detective Novel, by Charlie Becerra

■ Writing Crime Stories for Beginners, by Paolo Roversi

■ Novel Writing: Bring Your Book Project to Life, by Grant Faulkner

From the many courses on writing fiction (but not fantasy or Sci-Fi), these were my top 3.

During an “All courses at €7.99 each” (29 lei in Romania, or about €5.87) campaign, I purchased the following 3 courses (-20%, code: 20-EXTRA):

■ Creating an Autobiographical Webcomic, by Sol Díaz Castillo

■ The Comic is Another Story, by Paco Roca

■ Introduction to AI with Python, by Rodrigo Montemayor

Yet another purchase (€12.80 for 2 courses), because… screw Adobe!

■ Introduction to Affinity Designer, by Juan José Ros, Graphic Designer

■ Introduction to Affinity Photo, by Carlos Jimenez Varela, Photographic Composer

YT—2023 Update: Drawing/Coloring

Based on some recommendations:

■ Kirsty Partridge Art:

■ Gemma Chambers Art:

YT—2023 Update: Python/SQL

■ Socratica:

■ ArjanCodes: